Finally, somebody I know is famous for good works: my old high school classmate Alan Walter is a superstar bartender in New Orleans. The new Southern Living has a big feature on him. I’m basically a gibbering fanboy, and had to take a photo of the spread to show you. If you happen by the Loa bar at the International House Hotel, you’ve got to go see Alan. Last month I saw him at a dinner party, and he mixed a fantastic concoction involving rosemary, infused syrup, and fresh-squeezed blood orange juice. Too bad the magazine feature isn’t online yet; reading it, and learning about the art and craftsmanship Alan puts into his work, will make you want to get over to the bar straightaway. If you go, tell Alan you want him to make you a Stan Powell Special, and make him tell you the story about the practical joke he played on his high school administration with the RPF forms.

Reniqua Allen, in the Washington Post:

A few weeks ago, I was standing outside a posh bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with my friends of almost two decades. I made an offhanded comment about the ratio of blonde-haired-blue-eyed chicks to brown girls like me. It seemed like a zillion to one.

My pals, who are white, didn’t get why I was bringing this up. “No one cares about race except you,” one said.

I tried to explain my frustration with having to always choose between an all-black experience or being the “only one,” whether at work, in grad school or even out for a night in New York. I waited for a nod of sympathy; instead, my best friend threw her hands up and said: “How can we all be racist? Look at who is president!”

I didn’t have a response.

Right now the nation has embarked on a massive conversation about race surrounding the tragic death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. On Friday, President Obama weighed in. “I think all of us have to do some soul searching to figure out: How does something like this happen?” he said.

It’s an important conversation to have — but I fear it won’t lead anywhere. After all, we’ve seen plenty of these debates in recent years, invariably prompted by some tragedy or controversy. Think Troy Davis. Or Shirley Sherrod. Or Jeremiah Wright. Or Henry Louis Gates Jr. Or even Rodney King. We have big debates over racial prejudice and disparities in this country, and then nothing happens.

I thought things would be different by now. The Trayvon Martin story flared up exactly four years after Obama’s famous campaign speech on race in Philadelphia, a speech that made so many of us believe that Obama would launch a serious, enduring dialogue. But the election of the first black president hasn’t made it easier to talk about race in America. It’s made it harder.

Read the whole thing.

Why harder? Because, according to the writer, whites believe that having a black president means that America has been to the mountaintop, and we don’t have to worry so much about race.

That may be it for some white people. I think that the reason few white people want to have this “important conversation” about race is because they know, or at least they fear, this conversation can only go one way: minorities telling white people how racist they are, and white people nodding in agreement. My guess is that very few white people would be willing to say what they really thought in such an Important Conversation, because they are afraid of being labeled a racist, and — if the Important Conversation — happened in a workplace setting, being tarred with the scarlet letter of R for Racist, and suffering professionally for it.

In my experience, it’s not that white people don’t think about race. It’s that they don’t think out loud around people who don’t already agree with them, or who at least won’t put them in the uncomfortable position of being denounced as a racist over something they’ve said. And so maybe they really do have racist beliefs that could be overcome through such an Important Conversation, but these conversations never happen because there is far too much riding on it to take that risk. Besides, they are not fools to believe that this would almost certainly be not a conversation, but a monologue, in which they are invited to consider all the ways they are racist, but their black interlocutors are not expected to show the same degree of introspection about the complexities of race in America.

I don’t know what the solution is. What would such an Important Conversation about Trayvon Martin’s murder look like? (And by the way, let me repeat again that I can’t believe George Zimmerman wasn’t arrested for what he did, because based on what we know, it looks to me like he’s guilty of murder in some degree.) Such an Important Conversation would have to include a discussion about the fear and suspicion whites and others have of young black males, a suspicion that leads them to expect the worst — and, in this case, to misjudge Trayvon Martin in a way that led to his killing. We would have to talk about the reality of what it’s like to raise a black son in America today, knowing that he will likely be feared in this way, and open himself up to extra scrutiny and suspicion, just because he is black and male.

But if this were a true conversation, we would also have to talk about why so many non-black people are so scared of young black males. According to FBI statistics, in 2010, 28 percent of those arrested were black — almost three times the black population. Of all those arrested (white, black, etc.),  three out of four were male. Of all those arrested, 42 percent were 25 or under. (The FBI does not keep statistics on convictions, only arrests). While I don’t have the time to crunch the numbers to see which exact portion of those arrested are young black males, the general perception that young black males are disproportionately involved in crime is an accurate one. (That, for example, 9 out of 10 murders of black people are committed by other black people doesn’t negate this.) Moreover, young black men are  identified with a hip-hop culture that valorizes thuggery and antisocial behavior. These facts, and the conclusions non-blacks draw from them — fair or not — ought to be part of an honest Important Conversation.

But they won’t be. That’s just the way it is. In the early 1990s, I lived in Washington, DC, which was undergoing an epidemic of murders and violent crime. A friend of mine, Kevin, a white guy who lived in my neighborhood, and his girlfriend were held down at gunpoint in his driveway and robbed by young black men. They moved out of the city the next week. No matter what your race, if you were going to be the victim of violent crime in DC, your assailant was all but guaranteed to be a young black man. If you didn’t realize that, and take common-sense, street-smart precautions at night, you were a fool who might lose his life. Did this require you to be suspicious of young black men dressed like thugs? You bet. Did that put you in the position of making a race-based judgment? Absolutely. Was this unfair to young black men who dressed a certain way, and who meant nobody harm? Sure it was. But there was way too much at stake simply walking home from the metro at night to think otherwise. Kevin and his girlfriend were not shot to death in a robbery that night, but they easily could have been. Nobody would have written stories about dead Kevin, just another victim of predatory black males in Washington, DC, no doubt because Kevin was probably not targeted because of his race, any more than black victims of predatory black males were targeted for their race. But for people who knew Kevin and what happened to him, it was impossible not to conclude that a good way to improve your chances of that happening to you was, when you saw young black men dressed like thugs coming down the street, to get the hell away from them. Better to be prejudiced than dead.

None of this, to my mind, justifies the way George Zimmerman reacted to Trayvon Martin. The problem is, if we’re going to have a broader Important Conversation about this stuff, it’s going to have to involve a discussion of social and cultural contexts in which people make these judgments about young black men, and race, more generally. Trayvon Martin was almost certainly a victim of irrational prejudice — and he paid for it with his life. If what appears to be the case turns out to be so, then I hope and expect Zimmerman to go to jail, and I would hope and expect the local police department, if they did a sloppy, racially prejudiced investigation, to pay some price too.

That said, we don’t see in our media discussions of victims of crimes committed disproportionately by young black males, nor do we hear much about the valorization of thuggery in hip-hop culture, and how these things affect perceptions of young black men in the non-black community. How can we know which prejudices are rational (that is, based on sound judgment of the facts) and which ones are irrational? Why does it matter, if it matters? These things are important to explore, but also pretty much impossible to.

I think it’s unfair to blame the president’s election for making it more difficult to have an Important Conversation about race in America. That conversation is not going to happen no matter who’s president. There’s nothing in it for white people. Don’t misunderstand me: I think a genuine conversation, in which both sides (all sides?) aired their grievances and their fears, in an atmosphere of mutual acceptance and even reconciliation, would be hugely important and beneficial. Black-Hispanic tension and prejudice is a big deal too, though one that doesn’t often get discussed in the media. I doubt there’s a single soul — white, black, brown or whatever — who doesn’t have some prejudice that he or she could stand to confront and dispel. But like I said at the beginning, non-liberal white people accurately sense that the Important Conversation is almost always going to involve them being told how racist they are, and being expected to agree and promise to do better. You can have these Conversations if you want, but they won’t be Important, because they’re not going to be honest. Think about it: a culture in which many media outlets won’t give the race of at-large violent crime suspects — this, even as they report sex, height, clothing description — because they don’t want to encourage stereotyping, is not a culture that is prepared to speak forthrightly about race and crime.

We have big debates over racial prejudice and disparities in this country, and then nothing happens.

So says Reniqua Allen, and she’s right. But she’s naive to expect otherwise. She should ask herself who, exactly, is having this “big debate,” and what it is they’re really debating.

I interviewed a Congressman today, who told me that one thing that we need to change in this country is the idea that if you’ve complained to your Congressman about something, you’ve done your part. He said people don’t take enough responsibility for their own local issues. He said he tells people, “I’ll do what I can for you on my end, but what are you doing for yourself on your end?”

Tonight I was at this social event, and got to talking to this guy who turned out to be a retired National Guardsman. We were talking about politics, and I mentioned what the Congressman had said to me. The Guardsman said he had served in New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina. He said it was really difficult to deal with what he saw from so many black residents of New Orleans in the hurricane’s aftermath. Many, but not all, wouldn’t do anything for themselves. He said they would tell the Guardsmen to pick up the trash in the street.

“Why don’t you do it?” the Guardsmen would say.

“That’s why you’re here,” the locals said.

The Guardsman told me that it was so frustrating to see the learned helplessness of the poor black people of New Orleans. He is a white man from the country, and couldn’t understand what that was about.

Then Hurricane Rita hit southwestern Louisiana, and his unit was transferred to that part of the state to work. That’s where Cajuns live. He told me that in most places they went, the local Cajuns told the Guardsmen, “Thanks for coming, but we’ve got this.” And it was true. Before the Guard could get there, those people had organized themselves and started clearing the debris, and getting things back in order.

Unavoidably, race is a factor. But it’s really about culture. Assuming this Guardsman saw things as they really were, why did the urban black people of New Orleans, at least the ones observed by this Guardsman, lack the social capital, or even the wherewithal, to help themselves even as they were being helped by the government, but the rural Cajuns of southwest Louisiana were on the job even before the government help arrived? What makes the cultural difference?

I should say that the Guardsman told this story not in a sense of ethnic superiority — he is neither black nor Cajun — but more in a spirit of genuine sociological curiosity.

Ideas?

George Packer, who has covered America’s wars, on Sgt. Bales’s murders:

Just as it should be possible to stare at this nightmare without medicalizing or psychologizing it away with a few biographical details, it should also be possible to see its singularity and its context: a decade of war with no clear, measurable goals and no end in sight, fought by the tiny number of Americans who belong to our all-volunteer military. President Obama has recently been eloquent on the subject of war, its seriousness, its costs. But it has been in the interest of neither his Administration nor his predecessor’s for the electorate to think too much about the fighting on the other side of the planet. Politically, both Presidents have downplayed it—Bush by creating a false image of a clear moral cause demanding relatively little sacrifice, Obama by talking about it as little as possible.

So the fighting goes on and on without a national discussion, or a national investment. It’s easy for most Americans to go days without giving the war a thought. That’s a quieter, longer source of shame. It’s wrong to put the whole burden of a protracted war on so few people while the rest of us get a pass, though that didn’t make the massacre in Panjwai either inevitable or understandable.

Packer says we need an honest, thorough accounting of what went wrong in Afghanistan, one that spares no one, and takes into account the options facing US policymakers right after 9/11. It’s easy now to say we shouldn’t have tried to nation-build there. It was harder then. Remember, nearly everybody supported invading Afghanistan. That’s where Osama was. The Taliban government had given him refuge and support. There are so many difficult questions to be asked, and answered.

But to be honest, what I expect in the next few years is the willful amnesia that always comes with the end of unsuccessful wars. We will have a lot to forget, starting with Robert Bales.

Read the whole thing.

I swore I wouldn’t do it, but I’m going to watch the Sunday night premiere of the new “Mad Men” season, to see if it bores me. Steve Sailer has some interesting insights. Excerpt:

The one thing I would add about Mad Men is that it’s becoming more apparent, year by year, that 21st Century women of the educated castes who watch Mad Men find themselves increasingly sexually bored by all the pathetic, politically correct weenies of their own class. That’s Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s big conceptual breakthrough: that women these days are aroused by men masterful enough to violate today’s thought crime taboos, if the ladies can simultaneously maintain plausible deniability that they are actually shocked, shocked by all the old “racism … cigarettes, sexism, anti-Semitism, alcoholism, homophobia.” Mad Men is not actually a satirical put-down of the past; instead, it’s designed to be a titillating turn-on for the present.

You wouldn’t think so by the number of topics I blog about, but most of the time, if it’s not related to Ruthie Leming, I don’t pay much attention to it these days. I’m up to my ears in book-writing. And I rarely see the local news, because I’m, well, writing. So it was a surprise to me yesterday to run into a couple of teacher friends  yesterday, and hear them talk about the latest in public school reform at the Louisiana legislature.

Gov. Bobby Jindal has been pushing a school reform package that would introduce vouchers, so lower-income kids from schools judged to be failing or near-failing (grades of “D” or “F” from the state — a number that includes 44 percent of all Louisiana public schools), as well as those from mediocre schools (“C”),  can use state money to go to a private or parochial school. The GOP-controlled Louisiana House passed the bill last night.  From the BR Advocate:

The House adopted an amendment that would require state education officials to devise an accountability system for students who attend private and parochial schools with state aid.

Critics said the addition failed to go far enough, and that specific rules and consequences needed to be spelled out if the students fail to show gains.

Under the bill, subsidized students would take the same standardized tests as public school students, with some differences.

For instance, fourth and eighth-graders in public schools have to pass LEAP, which measures math and English skills, to move to the fifth and ninth grade. Voucher students would not face any such rule.

In addition, private schools that accept the students would not face annual letter grades from the state, which public schools do.

An amendment that would have generally aligned testing rules for subsidized students with those in public schools, including high-stakes tests and letter grades for schools, was rejected by the House 34-61.

The Times-Picayune has more detail on the reforms, which include a radical curtailment of teacher tenure.  The Republican-run state Senate takes up the bill next.

Yesterday my teacher friends were really upset by all this. They thought the tenure reform was fair and necessary to get rid of deadheads, but the rest of it struck them as deeply unjust. In particular, they were ticked off that private and parochial schools won’t face the same kind of letter-grade evaluation as the public schools, nor would voucher students be held to the same state testing standard as public school students. To be clear, I have not followed this debate and do not have an informed opinion, but these objections seem completely fair to me. Why stack the deck against public schools like this? I’m not opposed in theory to vouchers, but if you’re going to have them, then they ought to be applied fairly, with the same standard to every school.

Here’s another problem with this: private and parochial schools can kick out kids who misbehave, or who are failing. Public schools don’t have that option — and that affects the student testing, and the grades from the state. How can that be fair?

The thing that upsets my teacher friends the most is how their job security would be tied to teacher performance, as measured by student testing. I have long complained in my blogs about the unfairness of tying teacher accountability to student test scores. Yes, there are bad teachers; I suffered through several of them growing up here, and they were protected by tenure. But student test scores are an unreliable indicator of teacher quality. I’ve said here time and time again that my late sister, who won several awards for teaching, struggled greatly to teach kids who came from poor families that gave their kids little or no support in their studies — not even a stable home life. That my parish has one of the best public school systems in the state, despite having high rates of poverty and family dysfunction, is an incredible achievement. But teachers are having to carry a disproportionate amount of the weight with many students. One of my friends said yesterday, “I wish these legislators could see the number of homework folders we send home that get returned unopened.” Her point is that for many of these kids, there’s nobody at home to help them, or even checking to see that they do their homework. If these kids score low on state testing, how is that the fault of their teacher? Yet their teacher could lose her job, and the school could lose a number of students (and therefore funding) based on these scores. How is that fair?

Like I said, I haven’t been following this debate closely enough to have an informed opinion. As a general matter, I support school reform, but some of the details here strike me as objectionable. I can’t do any research on it this morning because I’m busy working on a story for the magazine. I have a pretty well informed readership, though, so I want to throw open the issue here for discussion. You can’t blame the governor for wanting to fix Louisiana’s public schools. A system in which nearly half the schools tested receive Ds and Fs is not a system that’s working. On the other hand, this could be a problem in which if the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails. That is, the legislature has no power to punish families that are failing to do their part in educating their children, but it can punish teachers. Therefore, it’s going to punish teachers for what is in many cases the fault of failing families. I have a problem with this. As my sister said to me one time, “I’m a teacher, but I’m also expected to be a social worker.”

One more thing: how do private and parochial school parents feel about this? Do they welcome the prospect of kids from failing public schools coming to their schools? Are they worried that these kids are going to bring down the level of instruction at their schools? I have a friend who went to a Christian school, who said she didn’t realize until years later that she received a substandard education there; the point of the school, she concluded, was to keep Christian kids out of the godless public schools, not to educate them well. If low-income Louisiana public school students take their voucher money and go to schools like hers, which aren’t going to be held accountable to the same evaluation system that public schools are, how will parents, as well as taxpayers, know that their money is being well-spent?

Thoughts? Again, let me stress: I’m not taking sides in this particular debate, at least not yet. I’ve been inexcusably ignorant of it, and am trying to get up to speed. Help me out here.

UPDATE: More random thoughts.

1) I bet the kind of lower-income parents who would take advantage of the vouchers to send their kids to private or parochial schools are the kinds of parents who take more than a passing interest in their kids’ education. That’s just a guess, but I doubt it will lead to an exodus from public schools, because most people, in my estimation, really don’t care enough to go through the hassle of dealing with private and parochial schooling.

2) Even if the private or parochial school the parent chooses is no better academically, it’s not hard to see how being in a more disciplined environment, especially one with religious values informing the school’s culture, could be a huge step up for some kids over what they have to live with now.

UPDATE.2: From the combox thread:

And let me say, as a professor in Baton Rouge, that whatever they are doing for public education in this state isn’t working. I hardly see how vouchers could make it much worse than it is. My students who come from the local Catholic schools are much better prepared than those who come from the local public schools. They aren’t necessarily smarter in the sense of native ability, but what abilities they have are better trained.
The school system here is deeply segregated by class and race. Middle class kids, both white and black, all go to the private schools. The poor, mostly black, kids go to the public schools. If there is a chance that even 10% of those kids can get a better education, then I say it is worth the risk. We waste a lot of human capital — there are some very bright kids who are completely intellectually neglected.

You gotta see conservative ambush artist Jason Mattera jumping Bono to ask about the singer’s allegedly hypocritical tax dodges. Why is this such compelling video? Because the guy Mattera attacks is not actually Bono, only a man who vaguely looks like him (he looks more like George Michael than Bono, actually). Conservative commentator Mark Judge rolls his eyes. Excerpt:

Jason Mattera got fooled by a bad Bono impersonator.

And in doing so, he set back the cause of us conservatives who love popular culture and are attempting to write and speak about it with some intelligence. To mistake the doofus who was pretending to be Bono with the real one is like thinking Pat Robertson is Jesus. And frankly, I am sick and tired of conservative antipathy towards and ignorance of popular culture. Who wants to be part of a movement that neither knows nor cares about art?

In Louisiana, this was inevitable:

A reader in Mississippi sends this one along from his part of the world. The joke writes itself:

Bill Maher has an idea whose time has come:

Let’s have an amnesty — from the left and the right — on every made-up, fake, totally insincere, playacted hurt, insult, slight and affront. Let’s make this Sunday the National Day of No Outrage. One day a year when you will not find some tiny thing someone did or said and pretend you can barely continue functioning until they apologize.

More:

I don’t want to live in a country where no one ever says anything that offends anyone. That’s why we have Canada. That’s not us. If we sand down our rough edges and drain all the color, emotion and spontaneity out of our discourse, we’ll end up with political candidates who never say anything but the safest, blandest, emptiest, most unctuous focus-grouped platitudes and cant. In other words, we’ll get Mitt Romney.

I’m on board! You?