White Weddings, The incredible staying power of the laws against interracial marriage

Their first reaction was always hostile. They always said, go away you horrible Americans, who the hell do you think you are telling us what to do? But it ultimately led, after the emotions died down, to most of these countries opening up historical commissions. They looked again at their own war record and many of them were shocked at what they found. That was certainly true in France's and Switzerland's cases.

The reactions of a lot of these executives -- who are not war criminals themselves -- may have been at best insensitive and at worst a coverup, but many of them thought that they were acting out of good intentions. When they found out what had happened, when they discovered the real record, they were shocked to find that their own bank had spent victims' money and knowingly, in some cases, traded the bank account cash on the stock market. It was a shock to many of these countries and it was ultimately really healthy -- the process of confronting the past. They didn't like it, they didn't want to do it, they had to be dragged kicking and screaming, but what they discovered is a real eye-opener to successive generations. In France, there are a lot of records that were still out there that people never looked at.

In the case of France, some of the French Jewish leaders felt that the Americans were debasing the Holocaust by going after reparations this way. That issue has come up, and maybe most famously with Norman Finkelstein.

It was both. The French Jewish community is very substantial, and it's also very French. Very proud and independent and all the rest of it. However, they also were both horrified and inspired by what people like Israel Singer were doing. They were inspired in the sense that it made them more confident, more ready to stand up and be vocal. And they were also horrified because they thought they were caught in the middle between anti-Semitism at home and anti-Americanism and that they would be associated with the Americans ... which is almost worse than being associated with Jewish people. Anti-Americanism is a very strong trait in French politics.

Having said that, they were very, very smart. They played a good cop, bad cop routine: "You better work with us or we will unleash our American cousins on you." And to the American side, they were saying, "Hold on, we're the ones that are going to suffer anti-Semitism, we're the ones caught in the middle here, you back off." So they just about held it together. They played it very cleverly. I have a lot of admiration for those people and as you know from recent news reports, anti-Semitism is alive and well in France and the French government's reaction to it isn't always reassuring for the French Jewish community.

Do you think that this whole issue revived anti-Semitism in Europe? You do say in the book that anti-Semitic cartoons popped up in Switzerland.

I'm European and I'm Jewish as well, and I have to say, if you say "Jew" to many people in Europe ... "Jew" is used as a term of abuse, to mean someone who is miserly and obsessed with money. I had that growing up. So the idea that Jews would go out campaigning for money does reinforce the very worst stereotypes and racial insults.

However, the American Jewish community is right in many ways: By being confident and being brash, if you will, you actually flush the ugly sentiments out into the open. It's only when they're in the open that you can really confront them. And that's the civil rights message that Israel Singer brought: Anti-Semites cause anti-Semitism. It's not Jews that cause anti-Semitism. You only know you're confronting an anti-Semite when you go out there in public and you hear this stuff. There's a lot of political correctness in Europe where people know that it's wrong or they speak in code or speak amongst themselves about their anti-Semitic feelings. This whole campaign certainly did flush out some of the worst of it. I don't think it ever could get rid of it. But at least people know what they were up against.

Having said that, the Jewish communities in Europe are by and large much smaller and don't have the same political power [that American Jews do]. The pressure to assimilate is much greater. I don't think it's possible to do what the American Jews have done, which is to become very vocal, very public. The role models aren't there. The public Jewish figures are very few and far between. In American life, they're everywhere. But ultimately it was a very healthy process and it has made a lot of the European Jewish community much more self-confident.

One of the problems with African-American slavery reparations is that there are no living plaintiffs. That's a legal problem as well as a practical problem. But as I understand it, many of the lawyers in the reparations cases are broadening it way beyond slavery to include segregation-era claims and even internationally, now, to include apartheid in South Africa, to make it a melting pot of racial claims. That's useful because they have some living plaintiffs there and it increases the pressure on some of these corporations and the pool of corporations that are likely to pay.

I know from speaking to some of the African-American lawyers involved that they really are deeply encouraged by what they saw in the Holocaust cases. It's all part of this modern idea of the necessity of compensation. We're seeing that with Pan Am 103, the Lockerbie bombing, where compensation figures are huge. They're seen as being central in terms of bringing some kind of closure to the legal process and the suffering that these victims' families have endured.

It's an essential part of modern life in a way that I don't think it was 20 to 30 years ago. That's one reason why many of the Holocaust victims didn't want to accept money when it was offered by Germany the first time around. They thought that it would be absolving them of their guilt, they thought it was blood money, they didn't want anything to do with it. Now the consensus among people who've suffered this kind of thing is you have to pay money. Without the money there's no sincere apology.

Politics. For a start, the African-American political groups are not as well organized and they don't have the same kind of access to Washington that Jewish groups have. They've come to this issue later, and obviously the history is just much more complicated. They definitely don't have access to this White House in the same way that Jewish groups had access to the Clinton White House. In fact, I don't think the Jewish groups have the same kind of access to the Bush Oval Office as they did to the Clinton Oval Office. The politics is really important.

Having said all that, state and local officials can play a big role here. Some of the changes in local and state legislation that were brought about for Holocaust survivors have equal application to the slavery cases. For instance, in California they've changed insurance legislation to allow claims including slavery and it was prompted by the Holocaust issue. But it adds to the power of insurance regulators in the state to review the historical record and say, unless insurers have dealt with their past and with these human rights claims, they may not have the license to trade in their state. That's a huge club to hold over these companies' heads. Although the African-American groups don't have the same power in Washington, I can see them exerting more important power at the local levels.

Since you've published the book, have there been any significant developments in the Holocaust cases?

Not significant, but there have been some interesting ones. The U.S. judge in the Swiss case fired the panel of people who were dealing with claims in the Swiss case. They won a quarter billion settlement in August 1998 and only something like $16 million has been paid out. The insurance case is still going slowly, Lawrence Eagleburger is still spending lots of money.

I don't just blame him. They've lost sight of what they wanted to do, which was to help the victims' families quickly. They've gotten bogged down in their own politics, their own bureaucratic mess, their own personal rivalries. They used to fly first class and stay in luxury hotels, and fly dozens of delegates around the world. His basic attitude was -- it's the companies' money, not the victims'. Well, up to a point, that's true, but if the companies don't spend it on administration costs then they're going to spend on the victims.

Also, he wasn't muscular enough in terms of knocking heads together. The companies on the other side are just stonewalling. Basically it's only this Italian company, Generali, that has really stepped up to the plate. The others are dragging their heels. And on the victims' side, there hasn't been a political leadership as there was with Israel Singer. They've ended up bickering between the Israelis and the Americans and the Europeans. I just think they've all lost sight of what they wanted to do -- which was to look after the survivors and the families and get this settled quickly.

Does the amount of money that these companies and banks have to pay affect their bottom lines at all?

Minimally, it does. Generally, these companies don't have budgets for this kind of thing so it does affect their bottom line, but it actually affects them more in terms of their public image and the management time they have to spend dealing with it. People just don't know anything about many of these companies, and suddenly they hear them in the context of the Holocaust and they think of them as war criminals. And I think you're going to see something very similar with slavery reparations. Who knew of Aetna? I suspect that many of Aetna's customers don't even know that they're insured by Aetna.

Let me put it like this. Allianz, which is this big German insurer, is one of the highest-profile companies involved with both the insurance case and the German settlement. Now, is it a coincidence that Allianz advertises enormously on American TV, not using its American brands but using its German corporate name, Allianz? There's awareness at corporate headquarters that the name Allianz has been dragged through the mud and, particularly among Americans, they need to rehabilitate themselves. And Allianz isn't going to rehabilitate itself by explicitly saying, look, we paid lots of money for the war. So that has had an impact and that's obviously costly for them. In that sense, they've suffered.

Another point of suffering -- even though the stock market just isn't the same anymore -- is that mergers and acquisitions were the big problem that European companies faced through the '90s. For example, they would try to buy an American company and their deals were being held up by state and local regulators because of the Holocaust issue.

Next time around, they might face the same thing again. It might make them reluctant to come into America. They believed that this was a global economy and corporations were free to what the hell they liked. That's quite a positive thing. The global economy has allowed people to look at the human rights issues and say, you have to have a clean house wherever you trade in the world.

As it happens, though, Smitherman's words have nothing to do with the Oakland school board's action. They were written two decades ago, when the vernacular used by many blacks in America's inner cities and the rural South was receiving its first round of national attention, partly as a result of influential works of scholarship such as J.L. Dillard's Black English (1973). A few years later, in a widely publicized ruling, a Michigan court ordered local school districts to take account of Black English. The most remarkable element of this story, in other words, is how unchanging it is. The central pedagogical problems (low achievement by large numbers of black students, and how to reach these students), the scholarly arguments (how should Black English be characterized?), the flashes of racial feeling, the sober (and dyspeptic) public commentary--one could transplant it all from one era to another, without risk of anachronism.

Needless to say, the confrontational language of the Oakland resolution, and the ill-advised statement that ebonics is "genetically based," did nothing to stifle criticism. (Click here to read the full text of the resolution.) The educational politics of this issue will no doubt play themselves out in the usual messy American way--and, with luck, they will do so beyond the glare of publicity (that being where experimental educational programs that involve the inner-city vernacular but avoid the manifestos are already taking place).

First, the word "ebonics," which dates back to the early 1970s and has been used even in some public-school settings without controversy for years, may seem to be putting on airs, but what many linguists prefer to call "Black English Vernacular" or "African-American Vernacular English" is a major linguistic stream that has been flowing within recognizable channels for centuries. (Benjamin Franklin and, before him, Cotton Mather left simulations in their writings of the speech of some American blacks that anticipate vernacular renderings today.) There is, of course, no single "Black English"--there are various black Englishes in Africa and the Caribbean, for instance--and Black English Vernacular is not considered a separate language by most language specialists or, for that matter, ordinary people. (As one commentator has recently noted, the complaint about rap lyrics is not that they can't be understood.) But the black American speech at issue in Oakland--however one categorizes it as a language or a dialect--not only is pervasive but also displays features that one finds nationwide, owing to its roots in the black migration from a common region, the South. There are telltale characteristics, widely if not universally present: the replacement of an initial "th" with a "d" sound ("dis," "dem") and of a medial or final "th" by an "f" or other consonant sound ("with" becomes "wif," "brother" becomes "bruvah"); a reduction of consonant clusters in general (so that "first" becomes "firs" and "hand" becomes "han"); the replacement of a final "r" sound with a vowel sound ("summah" for "summer" and "mo" for "more"); the prevalence of so-called plosive consonants (making a word such as "bill" sound more like "beel"); the placement of stress on a first, rather than a second, syllable ("DEE-troit"); the disappearance of the final "s" from third-person singular verbs ("what go 'round, come 'round"); the dropping of the copula ("I here," "the coffee cold") and of certain tense inflections altogether. The ancestry of vernacular elements such as these is diverse and includes antique forms of English and slave-trade-era maritime lingua franca, but an African origin for many of them has been persuasively argued for. West African languages, to give just one example, also tend not to make use of a "th" sound.

William Labov, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of an early study, The Social Stratification of English in New York (1966), has been arguing for years that, whatever its original sources, the language of poor, urban blacks is becoming ever more divergent from that of other Americans, as de facto racial segregation and social isolation become the permanent lot of a vast subgroup of African Americans. The widespread use of the so-called invariant "be" to indicate continuous or habitual action ("he be late"), for instance, is not a historical legacy but a development of the last 50 years.

"Ebonics" may not merit the status of a distinct language now, his research seems to imply--but just give it time.

http://slate.msn.com/id/3169

With a showdown looming, Miami's "Eliánistas" have vowed a "civil disobedience" campaign to prevent the return of 6-year-old Elián González  to Cuba. By invoking the sacralized language of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement to describe their impending face-off with the government, the Eliánistas imply they're acting from a sense of conscience and in a noble tradition. To their critics, though, the civil disobedience call is just a cynical ploy.

When is "civil disobedience" honorable, and when is it a cover for self-serving lawlessness?

Arguments for civil disobedience date at least to Socrates, who disobeyed an unjust Athenian decree against teaching his ideas and was condemned to death. More recently, the doctrine was articulated (and acted upon) by Henry David Thoreau, who in the 1850s urged Massachusetts residents to withhold taxes so as not to support slavery or the Mexican war. In the 1920s and '30s, Mohandas Gandhi began his nonviolent protests of British rule in India. But it was King who put the phrase into the American vernacular and the practice into American history books.

To justify disobedience to the law, King wrote, the law itself has to be unjust. Unjust laws include those that degrade people's humanity and those inflicted on a minority that had no say in enacting them. Alabama's Jim Crow statutes clearly fit both categories.

Taking his cues from King, John Rawls, the pre-eminent postwar liberal philosopher, distilled the principles of civil disobedience in his famous work A Theory of Justice. (This summary is a little unfair to Rawls. Click here for an explanation.) An act of civil disobedience, he noted, is motivated by conscience. Yet it is also political in character. The protester appeals to political—as opposed to, say, religious—principles in order to redress a basic and thoroughgoing injustice in the political system.

Further, a civilly disobedient act is nonviolent. This shows that the violator, despite his disobedience, is operating, as Rawls put it, "within the limits of fidelity to law." For similar reasons, a civilly disobedient protester accepts the penalty for his action, as did Socrates and King. Finally, the act occurs publicly. It is a good-faith effort to submit to one's fellow citizens a considered opinion that the law is unjust. While philosophers have quibbled with Rawls' definition, it can serve as a sensible, moderate way to judge whether a violation of law—such as the Miamians have promised—amounts to civil disobedience.

So how do Elián's Miami boosters stack up? Let's assume they genuinely believe that returning the boy to Cuba would be morally wrong. This meets one requirement of civil disobedience—its conscientiousness. They also meet the requirement of acting publicly. They aren't spiriting the boy away in the night.

On two other counts—nonviolence and willingness to accept punishment—the Eliánistas don't seem to be honoring the tradition of King, although to be fair they haven't been put to the test. Certainly some of their rhetoric—such as Miami-Dade County Mayor Alex Penelas' suggestion (since retracted) that his police won't enforce the law—has been menacing, apparently meant to scare the federal government into backing off (a game of chicken) rather than to win sympathy by passive surrender in the face of injustice (à la King). It's hard to imagine that if faced with G-men, the Miamians would crumple to the pavement in the fetal position, let alone be willing to endure the savage beatings visited on the civil rights protesters.

On the final consideration—the purpose of their disobedience—the Miamians come up woefully short. Unlike the soldiers of the civil rights movement, they aren't trying to redress a systemic problem. They aren't arguing that the country's immigration policies are fundamentally unfair. They just object that the laws must apply to Elián as they do to everyone else. They're arguing for an exemption from the law, not an improvement of it in accordance with principles of justice. And this makes their appropriation of the term civil disobedience seem cynical.

A better parallel to

the Miamians than King might be the white Southerners who engaged in "massive resistance" to federal laws in order to thwart integration. During the civil rights years, Southern defenders of Jim Crow vowed they would not comply with Supreme Court rulings or federal executive orders. Govs. Orval Faubus of Arkansas and George Wallace of Alabama won followings by threatening to defy federal law enforcement officials to protect white supremacy—a tradition in which Mayor Penelas seemed to be inadvertently placing himself before retracting his fighting words. In the end, the Dixie governors knuckled under to the feds, but their shows of resistance stoked Southern pride.

The Jim Crow defenders never claimed to be the heirs of Thoreau and Gandhi. But their lawlessness gave ammunition to those who impugned King's actions, allowing liberal fence-sitters to disparage both camps of "extremists." Their actions made it harder for King to justify his own lawbreaking to the moderates whose support he needed.

But if Mayor Penelas and Miami's Cuban-Americans belong more to the tradition of King's adversaries than to that of King, they aren't going out of their way to say so. In that respect, their language, if not their actions, amounts to an ironic testament to King's stature. 

http://www.slate.com/id/79524