Base Attacks

And so it goes: Conservatives who've been slamming Joe Biden for his "in chains" gag are minimizing Mitt Romney's birther gag. Whether intentional or instinctual, both were signals to elements of the parties' bases: Respectively, African-Americans and fantasists.

The "Patriarchal Bargain"

When it comes to women's rights in Arab and Muslim societies, Max Fisher argues that Mona Eltahawy paints with too broad a brush:

If that misogyny is so innately Arab, why is there such wide variance between Arab societies? Why did Egypt's hateful "they" elect only 2 percent women to its post-revolutionary legislature, while Tunisia's hateful "they" elected 27 percent, far short of half but still significantly more than America's 17 percent? Why are so many misogynist Arab practices as or more common in the non-Arab societies of sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia? After all, nearly every society in history has struggled with sexism, and maybe still is. Just in the U.S., for example, women could not vote until 1920; even today, their access to basic reproductive health care is backsliding. We don't think about this as an issue of American men, white men, or Christian men innately and irreducibly hating women. Why, then, should we be so ready to believe it about Arab Muslims?

And this:

Some of the most important architects of institutionalized Arab misogyny weren't actually Arab. They were Turkish -- or, as they called themselves at the time, Ottoman -- British, and French. These foreigners ruled Arabs for centuries, twisting the cultures to accommodate their dominance. One of their favorite tricks was to buy the submission of men by offering them absolute power over women. The foreign overlords ruled the public sphere, local men ruled the private sphere, and women got nothing; academic Deniz Kandiyoti called this the "patriarchal bargain." Colonial powers employed it in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and in South Asia, promoting misogynist ideas and misogynist men who might have otherwise stayed on the margins, slowly but surely ingraining these ideas into the societies.

And finally:

The fact that feminism is broadly (and wrongly) considered a Western idea has made it tougher for proponents. After centuries of Western colonialism, bombings, invasions, and occupation, Arab men can dismiss the calls for gender equality as just another form of imposition, insisting that Arab culture does it differently. The louder our calls for gender equality get, the easier they are to wave away. 

So Arab men, like men everywhere, prefer being in charge. They justify their behavior by means of the literal dictates of medieval Islam and the traditions they learned from colonial oppressors. If western critics are too aggressive about pointing out that it is wrong to keep women down, the men will complain that an imperialistic foreigner is trying to dictate to them, giving them further warrant to dictate to women.

The problem with this kind of cultural and historical argument is that an oppressive class often comes to power for complex reasons and then offers equally elaborate justifications for maintaining the status quo. When the outside world begins to raise the issue and the ante, the oppressor can get away with playing the victim of the foreign interloper for a while, but not forever. No arguments such as Fisher's are considered acceptable anymore when it comes to justifying or defending, for instance, slavery in the American south or South Africa apartheid.

Fisher also objects to the use of the word "hate" to describe centuries of misogyny. Did white South Africans and U.S. southerners hate blacks? What do you call generations of relentless abuse? "Hate" came naturally enough to those opposing California's Prop. 8, which banned gay marriage. But when it comes to the oppression of women, Fisher claims, we still have to walk on eggshells. He's right that misogyny is part of being human. Like its near relation, homophobia, it seems to come from a darker recess of our nature than racism does. But eventually, even Arab women -- women everywhere -- will say, "No more."

War And African-American Equality

In a new book, historian David Goldfield asks whether the sin of slavery in the U.S. could have been erased by some means short of the savagery of the Civil War. Reviewer and Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco thinks not, though he does see a correlation between U.S. Grant's bloody times and today's take-no-prisoners, unconditional- surrender politics:

Throughout Goldfield’s book, one sees the present peeping through the past. In his allergy to the infusion of religion into politics, and his regret over the failure of government to achieve compromise, he sometimes seems to be writing as much about our own time as about time past. Yet even looking through his eyes, one finds it hard to imagine that the post-Civil War constitutional amendments by which black citizenship rights were advanced could ever have been ratified if the slave states had remained in the Union. The “secession war,” as Walt Whitman called it, would seem to have been a necessary prelude to the process of securing black equality — a process still unfinished ­today.

This Official's Waffling, But He's Not Chicken

At the LA Times, Sandy Banks and a thoughtful university official speak up for the well-meaning Filipino chef at UC Irvine who was harshly criticized by angry students for serving chickens and waffles on Dr. King's day:

The culprit in this culinary blunder wasn't some "white chef who is a redneck from Mississippi or somewhere," said Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Thomas Parham, who happens to be black.

He's a Filipino chef, who took his cue from black students "when he wanted to do something sensitive culturally" for the King holiday menu. Chicken was the meat of the day.

He asked black students for advice, and they suggested the chicken and waffles combo.

"This is a guy who takes great pride in creating 'comfort food' for the students," Parham said. "Somebody who was really trying to do something nice, that was perceived differently by a small group of people.

"No racist intent, nothing hostile about it. ... But people who jumped to faulty conclusions without considering the context and intentions."

We're All Nutty About Something

Ross Douthat somewhat reduces my concern about 18% of the American people thinking the president is a Muslim:

There’s the 32 percent of Democrats who blame “the Jews” for the financial crisis. There’s the 25 percent of African-Americans who believe the AIDS virus was created in a government lab. There’s support for state secession, which may have been higher among liberals in the Bush era than among Republicans in the age of Obama. And there’s the theory that the Bush White House knew about 9/11 in advance, which a third of Democrats endorsed as recently as 2007.