I missed making these so much!
Category Archives: videos
New Video! How Liberals Laundered The “Cancel Culture” Moral Panic Into The Mainstream
Comments Off on New Video! How Liberals Laundered The “Cancel Culture” Moral Panic Into The Mainstream
Filed under videos
Stuff we got wrong in the ’90s: Ebonics
One thing that has always baffled me, as a journalist and as a person, is how America decides what to freak out about.
It’s a big country: Weird and wild and ridiculous things happen all the time. But every year we choose 10 or 15 of them, we put them on our front pages and we lose our minds debating them. Sometimes it’s a dead gorilla, sometimes it’s missing white ladies, sometimes it’s a dress code on airplanes. By the time we circle back to the facts behind them, we’re surprised to find that they no longer match the opinions we’ve formed.
The first of these flare-ups I can remember is the “Ebonics” controversy of 1996. I was 14 at the time, just starting to notice things like late-night monologues and the op-ed page of my local paper. Suddenly both of them were filled with the story of this school district that had decided to teach African-American Vernacular English—”Ebonics” is what the linguists called it; “black slang” is what the columnists called it—as a foreign language. Teachers in Oakland, heads in little boxes on CNN told me, would be teaching “we be happy” as a perfectly acceptable alternative to “we are happy.”
The Oakland School Board’s decision was almost perfectly designed to transcend its circumstances and become a metaphor for How We Race Now. Within days, editorial boards across the country denounced the decision. Within weeks it was condemned by the Clinton administration. Within months it was investigated by Congress.
As usual, the first thing to disappear underneath all the outrage was the event that precipitated it. Nearly everything we heard about the Oakland School Board’s decision in 1996 was wrong. And even worse than how we talked about it then is how we remember it now.
Here, finally, is what really happened:
Filed under videos
What we talk about when we talk about sexual harassment
One of the most pernicious ideas in American life is that sexual harassment lawsuits are an example of political correctness gone mad.
For the last few months I’ve been working on a video series for Highline, a re-examination of all the things we got wrong in the 1990s. The first episode is about the sexual harassment freakouts that cropped up in the wake of the Anita Hill hearing and what was really behind them.
Here’s a sequence that didn’t make it into the final cut, four women testifying at a 1992 Congressional hearing:
This is why we have sexual harassment laws.
Before 1986, none of these stories would have been illegal. Until Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, the only workplace discrimination that fell under the law was quid pro quo harassment, the kind where your boss explicitly tells you that if you want this promotion, you’ll have to sleep with him. Skeezy comments about your looks, getting groped at the water cooler, being told you had to meet a higher standard because of your gender, all that was just the cost of being a woman at work.
The most incredible thing about these cases, though, isn’t just the shittiness of the people perpetrating them. It’s the narrow-mindedness of the people in charge of punishing them.
Reading old sexual harassment cases, what you see over and over again is judges who simply couldn’t accept that women were blameless in their own abuse. One victim testified that she been assaulted by her boss for three straight years, that he touched her under the table during work meetings, that he bought her dinner her first week on the job and invited her to a motel afterward. The judges were skeptical. What was she wearing? Why did she go to dinner in the first place? Didn’t she eventually give in and have sex with him? Surely his advances weren’t that unwelcome.
This is how members of Congress treated Anita Hill too. If Clarence Thomas had been such a terrible boss, they asked her in 50 different ways, why did she later ask him for a reference? Despite all the alleged harassment, Arlen Specter pointed out, she never once complained to Thomas’s superiors. She even—gasp—picked him up at the airport once, years after they stopped working together.
It’s fascinating to me all the ways in which societal power is invisible to the people wielding it. For old, white, affluent judges, it simply didn’t make sense that a woman would have sex with her manager unless she really wanted to. Congress members couldn’t comprehend why a woman would maintain a relationship with her dickhead former boss, why she would wait years before publicly complaining about his behavior, why she would read aggression into his flirting and his backrubs and his ribald anecdotes.
I don’t think every judge and every Senator back then was a big old sleazebag. What I do think is that they suffered from a specific form of blindness, one that is human and understandable and utterly pernicious. We are all, in ways major and minor, incapable of seeing the world through anything but our own example. If you have never feared unemployment, the moral compromises others make to avoid it seem foreign. If you have never been hurt by jokes about your gender or your race or your sexuality, those who complain about them seem oversensitive.
Somehow, in the 25 years since the Anita Hill hearing (and, as I argue in the video, the passage of the 1991 Civil Rights Act), sexual harassment has become a synonym for a country that can no longer take a joke. Colleagues can’t even ask each other out for a drink nowadays. Managers can’t pat their employees on the shoulder.
But in fact, sexual harassment cases have been dwindling for years, and the mechanisms behind them have been steadily eroded. Since 1991, punitive damages have been capped at $500,000. Those eight-digit settlements you’re always reading about? Companies only have to pay a fraction of them. A study in 2002 found that more than half of large punitive damages awards got overturned on appeal. And that’s for the cases that make it to court. The vast majority of them don’t.
The real problem, in other words, is not that we have all become oversensitive. It is that we are not sensitive enough.
I am sure that, in this big and crowded country, someone somewhere has filed a frivolous lawsuit claiming to be sexual harassed when they weren’t. But becoming the country where that happens is not what we should fear. It is becoming the country that we used to be—one where no one is allowed to file them at all.
Should Britain Leave the EU?
No!
Here’s a video I made explaining why.
Filed under London, United Kingdom, videos
You must be logged in to post a comment.