Roy Æ Hodges
Department of Sociology, Washington State University
WGSS-300: Intersections of Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality
Lindsey Carman Williams, PhD
May 29, 2023
Rothstein’s (2015) article is one of the most compellingly constructed articles to springboard a redress of grievances for Blacks in its balanced use of intellectual and emotional appeals. It offers exhaustive evidence enumerating legacy of historic causes de jure (i.e., “of law”) conditioning of de facto (e.g., “of deeds/acts”) behaviors conditioned. This article had pushed against US Supreme Court opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007) asserting that present constitutional forbiddance of segregation had not excused present results of historical support for segregation (Rothstein, 2015), Assembled is a “legion” of social facts that had evidenced short- to long-term material harms because of historic state sanctioned prejudice and discrimination. This legion is argued to be unfixable by singular point solutions (e.g., school reform; p. 21).
Rothstein offered multipart solution to state sponsored segregation between districts rather than just using point solutions within districts (e.g., adjusting attendance zones, establishing magnet schools, more parent-student choice; p. 27). In addition, housing desegregation had been deemed a “constitutional necessity” (e.g., voiding exclusionary zoning, mixing low- and moderate-income housing, prohibiting landlord discrimination against voucher holders, ending federal subsidies for organizations failing to reverse racial exclusion; p. 28). One could consider these suggestions as addressing theories underlying conflict and functional perspectives of sociology.
Considering an interactionist perspective, Rothstein further asserted that conveying the story of state sanctioned prejudice will allow youth, young, and emerging adults to “support more integration-friendly policies in the future” (p. 28). While academic dryness of an intellectual appeal satisfies those with less strains and stresses, those time boxed, time bound, and beholden what Crow Dog (1990) termed “White man’s time” requires an appeal to emotion. Rothstein (2015) enumerated an academic moral disengagement in youth texts (p. 28). In this enumeration, one can sense an acculturating force of dominant cultures through token/minority narrative abstention. Minimized, euphemized, and ignored social facts historically du jour continues to support de facto prejudice and discrimination today—racism at arm’s length, with a generous helping of plausible deniability. The final appeal is radical and had called for “aggressive policies to desegregate metropolitan areas” as a constitutional obligation (p. 28).
In reflection, that de jure and de facto is separated in the eyes of a court ignores their causal relation. This conflicts with a court’s own authority. A court’s acts themselves are caused and excused by laws empowering those adorned by the robes of state to attribute acts to causes in ascertaining innocence, guilt, and if guilty sentencing, and/or regulation of cases to facilitation the determination of these in matters of juries of peers. Yet where a court willingly, prejudicially, and discriminatively picks and chooses where to acknowledge causality leaves justice’s recognition of cause and effect arbitrarily assigned in covert decisions prior to overt opinions in majority or dissent. This arbitrary rule is in and of itself is an essential aspect core to tyrannical rule, where applied to arbitrary linking of causes and effects for individual to group (e.g., party) gains is termed: causal tyranny.
Yet, in continuance of a sociological imagination, to say it is the court, which is a socially constructed institution would stop short at assigning cause to a group and assert a de facto idea that the court itself is tyrannical—this is just as prejudiced and misguided in excusing and justifying appointee behavior. How it reminds one of the social burdens of white-collar crime. The reality is, the court is socially constructed, and beholden to biological, psychological, and sociological forces of those appointed to serve, and their own excuses and justifications anticipating conflicts to neutralize where personal motivations (or internalized ones of party) are at play. The individual justices on said court, and their own developmental realities had left a plurality of united humanity left lopsided.
It is as if the vehicle of Homo sapiens is careening down a mountain during the Holocene Extinction Event with the drivers’ side running on new tires, well-appointed interiors, with the highest levels of service while the passengers’ side is left with a Lincoln’s head distance from tire treads about to burst, on bad shocks, and a rat dead in the glove compartment, where the driver yells at the passenger that it’s their responsibility. Of course, this neglects the reality that the driver owns the gas station, the automobile manufacturer, the tire company, the car, and representation all while leasing the passenger side to the passengers at market rates set forth by drivers competing against drivers, while paying the passengers less than inflationary protected levels of income in service the drivers’ personal needs (e.g., meals, dry cleaning, sales, child care, house cleaning) which allows for the status-quo control of drivers side of vehicles on the road and the acquisition of the right side of the car during a long life of unaffordable maintenance leading to default and repossession, whereupon the right side is leased again and again to the same individuals at market rates the drivers set through their own competition. For what exactly?1
Now why would the drivers want to be seen as the drivers and keep passengers from driving? What marketing amidst globalization does this serve for potential global trading partners and their drivers’ markets observing foreign drivers and their passengers? Suddenly sociological imagination offers up a new world of possibilities for exploration best left currently [redacted]. In this redaction, however, is a suspected solution and the author is reasonably convinced by Turing’s own proofs of computational limitation that it won’t come from data science or artificial intelligence reliant on reducible-to-binary Turing machines. What is the Turing-tape passenger to do? Perhaps Rothstein’s (2015) “aggressive desegregation” wherein aggression implies intent to harm is excessively revolutionary and bloody, yet is there an alternate way beyond “more stuff”? I hope so, because if H. sapiens continues this trajectory, there won’t be an ecology left to study sociologically. Perhaps the car needs to stop, clearly the drivers are too tired to think clearly; it is time for the passengers to drive—oh suddenly there is more equality.
Notes
1 It’s for fahrvergnügen—just as there is relative deprivation, there is relative fahrvergnügen, that is, the pursuit of flow relative to group flow.
References
Crow Dog, M., & Erdoes, R. (1990). Lakota women. Harper Perennial.
Rothstein, R. (2015). The racial achievement gap, segregates schools, and segregated neighborhoods: A constitutional insult. Race and Social Problems, 7, 21-30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-014-9134-1