Stanford University Press Blog

Making Race Visible

What can blind people tell us about race?

by OSAGIE K. OBASOGIE

CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

For several years now, a quiet revolution has been underway in consumer electronics. Gadgets that are a part of our everyday lives have learned to see. Relying on optical devices and software that can detect faces and track body motions, cameras, gaming systems, phones, and other tools have gained access to the mechanisms of visions and recognition that were once considered the unique province of sentient beings.

But some of these technologies have a problem: they have a hard time seeing people of color.

Race is made visible by social practices—a claim that is confirmed, ironically, by the experiences of the blind.

In December 2009 Wanda Zamen and Desi Cryer, two employees at a camping supply store in Waller, Texas, noticed something peculiar about an HP computer at the shop. The computer featured a digital camera that detected and tracked human faces. The system had no problem identifying and following Wanda, who is white, but it could not do the same for Desi, who is black. He demonstrates the glitch in a YouTube video that has been viewed almost 3 million times. “As you can see, the camera is panning to show Wanda’s face. It’s following her around. But as soon as my blackness enters the frame, . . . [the camera] stops,” he says.

A Call for More-than-Human Legalities

On law and societies in the “Anthropocene.”

by IRUS BRAVERMAN

Common until the 1950s, in 2004 the Wyoming toad (Bufo baxteri syn. Anaxyrus baxteri) was listed by IUCN’s Red List as Extinct in the Wild. According to IUCN’s “Amphibian Ark,”1,895 of 6,285 amphibian species assessed by the Red List are threatened with extinction, and 3,900 species are in trouble. 165 amphibian species are believed to have already gone extinct, including 39 Extinct in the Wild species that still survive in captivity. Source: Bufo baxteri by USFWS.

While the earth’s homo sapiens populations grow exponentially by the day, scientists have been documenting an opposite trend with many nonhuman species. A 2014 Science article estimates that present rates of extinction “are about 1,000 times the likely background rate of extinction”—that is, 1,000 times greater than rates of extinction we might expect to see resulting from so-called natural causes. Indeed, the global Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and many parallel national lists have been documenting the disappearance of numerous species at astonishing rates. Accordingly, some have named the age we’re living in the “Anthropocene”—the age of Man—to indicate not only the enormous threat that humans currently impose on Earth’s nonhuman populations and ecosystems, but also our responsibility toward these other forms of life and matter.

Source: Scott, J.M. 2008. Threats to Biological Diversity: Global, Continental, Local. U.S. Geological Survey, Idaho Cooperative Fish and Wildlife, Research Unit, University Of Idaho.

LSA Confidential

On the joys of publishing law and society books—plus a few editorial secrets.

by MICHELLE LIPINSKI

It’s that time of year again—time for editors to emerge from their cluttered, manuscript- and proposal-laden cubicles, as law and society scholars simultaneously emerge from their even more cluttered offices. Both groups will have to reorient to the dim lights of conference rooms as they attend the year’s grand soirée in sociolegal research, the Law and Society Association meeting. This year, downtown Seattle will be inundated with some of the best and brightest minds committed to social scientific, interpretive, and historical analyses of law across multiple social contexts. Given the conference’s theme—“Law’s Promise and Law's Pathos in the Global North and Global South”—it’s fitting that the conference will be held in Seattle, home of the 1999 WTO Protests.

As a law and society editor, I don’t want to just publish books. I want to help start a conversation.

It would be easy to claim that Law and Society, and the research currently being produced in the field, is more relevant than ever. I could point to a number of recent events that sorely need (and in some cases have received and been enriched by) the attention of this sector of the academy: police brutality, immigration/migrant issues, marriage equality, workers’ rights, etc. But that would be a false claim: Law and Society has always been vital, even before it had a formal name and an annual conference.

The Meritocratic Dilemma

We need a new way of thinking about the interplay of individualism and community.

by PHILIP GORSKI

 

The American Dilemma is an old dilemma. It predates Obama; Addams, too. In fact, it is as old as the American Project, itself. The Puritans felt it. So did the Founders. Today, some of us feel it more acutely than they did; others hardly feel it at all. Why?

The American Dilemma is an old dilemma. In fact, it is as old as the American Project, itself.

As Jim Sleeper explains (in a forthcoming issue of Democracy Journal), the Puritans felt it because their covenanted communities welded together public and private purpose and maintained a balance between individual freedom and social obligation. 

To the Puritans’ language of covenanted community, the Founders added the language of civic republicanism. It provided another means of joining individual and collective wellbeing. Consider the republican idea of freedom. In the classical liberal vision, freedom is the absence of constraint and protection from interference. In plain language: doing what you want and asserting your rights, so long as you cause no physical injury to others.

Republican freedom is more demanding. It involves “civic virtue”: active participation in self-government and self-sacrifice for the common good. For the Founders, then, freedom was not autonomy; it was not “riding off into the sunset” or “hitting the open road.” It was skillful action that aims at the common good.

The Tangible Effects of Connecting with your Neighbors

What’s lost when we lose a sense of community?

by DANA R. FISHER

A Green Party canvasser in Vancouver. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Obama Foundation recently announced that the Obama Presidential Library will be built in Chicago, where the President developed his skills as a community organizer in the 1990s. By choosing the city where he forged his identity as an activist and politician, the President is literally situating his legacy in the community that made him who he is today. 

Erik Schneiderhan calls this “the politics of helping others.” And he notes the competing interests pulling at all of us who are looking to better our communities:

How do Americans act in the face of competing social pressures when trying to help others in their communities? … The conflicting social demands of individualism and community assistance comprise a challenge that many face—it’s the American’s Dilemma. Well-meaning people are torn, akin to Goethe’s Faust who bemoaned having two souls beating in one breast. Whether the president of the United States, a registered nurse, or a university student, at some point most Americans wonder how to help others while still working toward the American Dream, how to lend a helping hand and still be a bootstrapping success.

Obama and Me

The most sweeping change can begin with the simplest connections. 

by ERIK SCHNEIDERHAN

Public Domain via Pixabay.

On my bedside table sits This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. Unfortunately, nothing seems to be changing at all—the book has been sitting there for 6 months unread. I feel quite guilty about it. Add it to the list of things I feel I need to do. I should spend more time with my children. I’m out of shape and should exercise more. I need to catch up with my friends. And since I started writing my book The Size of Others’ Burdens, I have done almost nothing to help others in my community. This is embarrassing. I’ve written a book that shows how we might move past our dilemmas and make a difference in our own neighborhoods and I’m stuck either in my house or the Ivory Tower. But I am caught up on Game of Thrones.

The kind of social growth that John Dewey and Robert Putnam wrote about is only possible through making reciprocal relations.

What is wrong with me? I (sadly) prove my own point made in The Size of Others’ Burdens. Many of us are stuck, not sure how to move forward in the face of so many demands made on us by society. We have good intentions but can’t turn them into action. Well, I’ve resolved that with the publication of my book, I need to make some sort of effort. What will I do? How might I take a series of somewhat general conclusions and imperatives from my book like “Don’t get comfortable!” and turn them into real action?

Sometimes you have to start small. Awhile back I created a book club at my local pub. Through word of mouth the club has grown to more than a dozen members, with most people coming from within a few blocks. By connecting with my neighbors I’m learning about my community. It feels good, with the club acting as a source of social sustenance.

When Jane Addams Met Tolstoy

How the social reformer's encounter with the canonical Russian author influenced her activism.

by ERIK SCHNEIDERHAN

Jane Addams—American social reformer, and Russian author, Leo Tolstoy.

Jane Addams—philanthropist, activist, and community organizer—perhaps best remembered for co-founding Chicago’s Hull-House, led a busy and storied life. In addition to running one of the United States’ first settlement houses—which served simultaneously as daycare, school, Laundromat, employment office, cafeteria, and community center for some of Chicago’s poorest residents—she also arose as a leading voice in the women’s suffrage and the anti-imperialist movements. Her stance against World War I eventually earned her a Nobel Peace Prize, while her work at Hull-House gave her a voice of authority in shaping the profession of social work. 

Addams’ exceptional spirit of activism arose out of a deep-seated need to connect with others.

Often, Addams is referred to as the discipline’s founder or “mother.” British MP John Burns went so far as to call her “America’s only saint.” Beyond her legacy of deeds, she left behind more than one hundred articles and ten books, including her autobiography—which is still required reading at any school of social work today. Perhaps her defining contribution to the field was the understanding that meaningful change began not with charity, but with direct community engagement on the “thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another and at least see the size of one another’s burdens.”

The American’s Dilemma

On navigating the tension between individualism and fellow feeling.

Jane Addams and Barack Obama—two of America's most celebrated community organizers.

Erik Schneiderhan’s The Size of Others’ Burdens begins with an ill-fated anecdote about one of Chicago’s most celebrated community organizers—a story that ends in a tragic death precipitated by the misguided help of the community organizer at the story’s center. This book is, in part, about the community organizer in this story—one of America’s greatest figures—whose list of accomplishments should sound familiar: Chicago activist, University of Chicago lecturer, gifted orator, politician and elected official, crusader against discrimination, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and author of one of the most-read autobiographies in America today.

We’re talking, of course, about Jane Addams.

If your mind had trailed to a certain current president, you might be excused for the assumption, for the résumés of the famous Hull-House founder and President Barack Obama are startlingly similar. Both Addams and Obama countenanced devastating poverty and injustice in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. Both sought to eradicate these inequalities, first through direct community intervention and social work, and eventually by way of inserting themselves into the broader political machinery. For each, this struggle raised difficult questions: how do we navigate the tensions arising from statuses of privilege while helping the less fortunate; how do we remain engaged with local communities even while being pulled into increasingly high-stakes political roles?

A Fraught Commemoration

A brief history of the observance and politics of Nakba day.

by TAMIR SOREK

A girl in a protest on Nakba Day 2010, Hebron, West Bank. Photo by Shy Halatzi, CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the subsequent mass expulsions that lasted until October 1950, approximately 85 percent of the Arab Palestinians who had lived in the areas of Mandatory Palestine that ultimately were subjected to Israeli sovereignty were driven outside the borders of the newly established state of Israel. In the process, hundreds of Palestinian villages were completely destroyed, and the larger towns and cities lost most, if not all, of their Arab populations.

Differing existential conditions among Palestinian communities have led to a growing discrepancy in the collective self–image of both groups.

Between 700,000 and 800,000 Palestinian refugees took shelter in the remaining parts of Palestine still under Arab control (the Gaza Strip and the West Bank), as well as in the neighboring Arab countries of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, as well as elsewhere. These events are known in the Palestinian vocabulary as the Nakba (meaning ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic), and they constitute the key episode in Palestinian national history.

Those 156,000 Palestinians who remained under Israeli rule could not escape the dramatic consequences of the Nakba: about one-sixth of them came from nearby villages that were destroyed and depopulated. Subsequently they became internal refugees; many other lost their lands to Israeli state expropriations even though they remained in their villages; and families were torn apart never again to be reunited.

Climbing the Culinary Ladder

Being a chef is hard work—why do they do it? Love of the sport.

by VANINA LESCHZINER

A culinary student. Photo by Dulcinea Navarrete, CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Full of bravado, arrogant, inaccessible. This was the image I had of elite chefs before beginning my research project in restaurants in New York City and San Francisco. I expected chefs at the country’s top restaurants to boast about their creativity and innovation, about the complexity and artistry of their dishes. But I heard little of this. Few chefs emphasized their creativity, most did not mention it, and many rejected any notion that their food should be considered innovative or creative. What they did emphasize was simplicity.

Chefs understand their food from a different perspective.

To explain these chefs’ responses, I had to understand the values that truly matter in professional cooking. Professional restaurant critics (as well as food writers, bloggers, or yelpers) often highlight creativity and innovation. Through content analysis of New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle restaurant reviews, I found that a critic who perceives a restaurant to be innovative is likely to give a more positive review (all other things being equal). However, chefs understand their food from a different perspective, that of the practitioner, and place a high value on what is really at the core of their craft—not “wowing” customers and critics with innovative flourishes, but making good food with good flavor.

Mark Twain, the Chinese Boxer

On the iconic American writer’s avowed anti-imperialism.

by SELINA LAI-HENDERSON

Mark Twain in 1907. Public Domain.

After residing for almost a decade in Europe, Mark Twain sailed back to the United States in October 1900. He had not only combated financial losses from his untimely investment in the Paige typesetter, but he had also made a name for himself on both sides of the Atlantic. The sixty-four-year-old writer had become a national hero and a celebrity figure, one whose homecoming was a much-anticipated event across the country. Newspapers lauded his success in overcoming bankruptcy and achieving fame and popularity in Europe, hailing him as “the bravest author in literature.” Harper’s Weekly heralded him as the “the most advertised man in the world.”

While in the United States, Twain is largely viewed as a humorist, in China his principal reputation is that of an anti-imperial polemicist and a cherished advocate.

While writers and reporters were expecting the humorist to delight the American audience with funny stories or the wonders of his travels, Twain took them by surprise with a decidedly pointed political declaration almost immediately after he landed; he remarked to a New York Herald reporter on October 16: “I am an anti-imperialist, I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

Twain would follow up on his unequivocal verdict a month later, speaking up against the foreign occupation in Manchuria and in support of the anti-imperialist uprising in China known as the Boxer Rebellion. “I am a Boxer, too” he announced to a standing room at the Berkeley Lyceum in New York City. The following year, Twain assumed the vice presidency of the American Anti-Imperialist League, an organization which he helped found and included such prominent members as Jane Addams, Ambrose Bierce, and Andrew Carnegie; Twain served in this post until the end of his life.

6 Tips For Uncovering Your Signature Strengths

Words of advice for new graduates—and anyone else, for that matter.

by BILL BARNETT

"Graduation Day" by Saad Andalib. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

Confucius once said, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Some millennia later Amy Wrzesniewski from Yale developed a framework for understanding how people approach their work lives that underscores this ancient proverb. 

According to her model, people fall roughly into one of three categories: job people, who focus on the material benefits of their work, and little else; career people, for whom satisfaction is derived from advancement and the attendant leaps in pay and status; and calling people who work not primarily for the financial rewards, but for the fulfillment that the work brings them. What both Wrzesniewski and the ancient Chinese philosopher intuited is that following a calling is the gold standard in career strategy. If you find the work you’re meant for you’ll be better at it, your accomplishments will expand, you’ll be happier, and you’ll find personal satisfaction.

In Memory of Benjamin Harshav

Stanford University Press remembers a gifted poet, translator, and literary scholar.

Benjamin Harshav, 1928-2015, via Wikimedia Commons.

Benjamin Harshav, poet, author, teacher, translator, and literary scholar, died last week, leaving behind him a remarkable legacy in the fields of Yiddish and Hebrew literary scholarship. A prolific writer and editor of multiple volumes on poetry, literature, and culture, Harshav published no less than eight titles with Stanford University Press—titles that included translations, edited anthologies, and original essays. His life spanned nearly nine decades and three continents—from Eastern Europe, to Israel, to the United States. During his life he was a champion of comparative literature who took part in a watershed poetic movement and worked indefatigably to bring volumes of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry to wider audiences through translation.

A champion of comparative literature who took part in a watershed poetic movement.

Harshav’s Yiddish roots ran deep—he was born in Vilna, Lithuania in 1928, a town which he described as the “self-styled bastion of Yiddish culture.” But in 1941, the year the Germans wrested the city from Soviet control, Harshav and his family fled to the Urals, where—despite that fact that he would eventually follow a calling in literary scholarship—Harshav attended university to study math and physics.