October 31, 2014

"There is Critical Race Theory scholarship connecting a preference for formality to race," I said in a post speculating about why Clarence Thomas might have said "I like formality."

I was expressing skepticism about the cue in the NYT (from Adam Liptak) to interpret Justice Thomas's statement to mean that "he was content with the way things are." (This was in reference to the way the Supreme Court Justices communicate by paper memo, and not by email or in face-to-face discussions.)

I said:
I could think of some other ways to interpret those 3 words and don't like being told to think of Justice Thomas as complacent and stiff. A person might like formality without being content with the way things are. A preference for formality can arise out of discomfort and mistrust. What kind of person shies away from free-wheeling banter and wants things put in writing?
I dropped a rare footnote: "There is Critical Race Theory scholarship connecting a preference for formality to race. Citation to come." That was 3 days ago, and at least one commenter has signaled he's still waiting. Did I think he'd forget?

I'd known all along what I wanted to cite, the Patricia J. Williams book from 20 years ago called "Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor." Unfortunately, that's not on Kindle, so needing to find my hard copy slowed me down.

In Chapter 8, "The Pain of Word Bondage," Williams describes the willingness of her colleague Peter Gabel to rent an apartment with no written agreement, to hand over a $900 cash deposit to strangers without even getting the keys. She, a black, female law professor, could not share his warm feeling for informality:
… I was raised to be acutely conscious of the likelihood that no matter what degree of professional I am, people will greet and dismiss my black femaleness as unreliable, untrustworthy, hostile, angry, powerless, irrational, and probably destitute. Futility and despair are very real parts of my response. So it helps me to clarify boundary; to show that I can speak the language of lease is my way of enhancing trust in me in my business affairs. As black, I have been given by this society a strong sense of myself as already too familiar, personal, subordinate to white people. I am still evolving from being treated as three-fifths of a human, a subpart of the white estate. I grew up in a neighborhood where landlords would not sign leases with their poor black tenants, and demanded that the rent be paid in cash; although superficially resembling Peter's transactions, such informality in most white-on-black situations signals distrust, not trust. Unlike Peter, I am still engaged in the struggle to set up transactions at arm's length, as legitimately commercial, and to portray myself as a bargainer of separate worth, distinct power, sufficient rights to manipulate commerce.

Peter, I speculate, would say that a lease or any other formal mechanism would introduce distrust into his relationships and he would suffer alienation, leading to the commodification of his being and the degradation of his person to property. For me, in contrast, the lack of formal relation to the other would leave me estranged. It would risk figurative isolation from that creative commerce by which I may be recognized as whole, by which I may feed and clothe and shelter myself, by which I may be seen as equal — even if I am a stranger. For me, stranger-stranger relations are better than stranger-chattel.
Now, take that observation and test out whether it could be similar to what Clarence Thomas was thinking when he said "I like formality."

49 comments:

Larry J said...

"Critical Race Theory scholarship" is an oxymoron. The first three words never belong with the fourth.

chickelit said...

… I was raised to be acutely conscious of the likelihood that no matter what degree of professional I am, people will greet and dismiss my black femaleness as unreliable, untrustworthy, hostile, angry, powerless, irrational, and probably destitute.

The passive voice alerts the reader that racism is taught and not experienced as such.

Mark said...

"Good fences make good neighbors." If there's one public intellectual in America who should most mistrust the good intentions of those interpreting his or her words it would be Clarence Thomas.

Carl Pham said...

Now, take that observation and test out whether it could be similar to what Clarence Thomas was thinking when he said "I like formality."

No. That observation is typical woman-chatter, full of sound and fury. Thomas strikes me as a plain man, and I can't imagine such a load of navel-gazing philosophizing on the ineffable and theoretical boiling through his cerebrum when he contemplates his simple taste for the formal.

I take him at his word, as men will. Some people like "please" and "thank you" and to be referred to by the children of their friends as "Mr. Thomas" and not "Clarence," regardless of years of acquaintance. Some people couldn't care less. Some people like ales, some stout, some like bourbon, some don't. I see no need for any greater explanation than de gustibus non est disputandam.

SomeoneHasToSayIt said...


formality = show of good faith

Horrible.

Also, leaving fewer electronic records = good thing.

Bob R said...

Your interpretation makes sense regarding written vs. face-to-face communication, but it doesn't take care of written vs. email. Litpak's explanation makes more sense there. However, note that SCOTUS is a pretty cushy gig. Having a bunch of interns at your beck and call certainly devalues the "ease" of email.

lemondog said...

The freewheeling Peter is a lawyer?

This not solely a race issue. The conditions and experiences one had while growing will influence degree of trust/distrust.

I’m with Patricia J. Williams.

Business is business.

chickelit said...

The Pain of Word Bondage...


...Fifty Shades of Grayscale

Henry said...

lemondog wrote: This not solely a race issue. The conditions and experiences one had while growing will influence degree of trust/distrust.

I’m with Patricia J. Williams.

Business is business.


My wife did some work for a guy who talked like Peter Gabel is speculated to talk. Trust, trust, trust. Then Mr. Trust refused to pay her. She's taking him to small claims court.

LYNNDH said...

I am a white/68 yr old/middle class/Libertarian Republican Tea Party type. I LIKE formality. I would never give money for an apt or anything else without a written contract.

damikesc said...

If stuff is written, it's hard to have arguments over what was said. Writing stuff makes way more sense.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Without at least one black person to participate all these race posts are kind of pointless.

Bob Ellison said...

Halloween is a strange day.

kcom said...

I moved into my apartment before I met the landlord. He took my downstairs neighbours' (and friends) word that I would be a good tenant. They'd been living here a month. Many years later, it's still working out.

kcom said...

The only thing I've ever signed is a rent check.

Michael said...

ARM

Why would you say that? Is it pointless for a black person to muse about Bach, to ponder whites as oppressors, to consider the arch of caucasian history?

It is not pointless. It is necessary.

William said...

The King of Dahomey had two thousand wives. One of his wives felt that her emotional and sexual needs were not being attended to. This is a problem women with two thousand co-wives sometimes face. This woman tried to solve her dilemma by having an affair with one of the young princes of the kingdom. The King found out about the affair. The King sold the two young lovers into slavery......That part actually happened. The plight of these lovers was dramatized and put on the London stage in 1651. This was the first anti slavery play in history. Back in the 16th century, slavery was an acceptable fate for members of the lower classes, but it was considered tragic for aristocrats such as the Dahomey couple to be sold into slavery......There were several versions of the play. In one, a kindly slave owner takes pity on the couple, frees them, and everyone lives happily ever after. That probably didn't happen. But, in any case, back then, the villain of the story was the King with his two thousand wives and willingness to sell them into
slavery. Nowadays, of course, the villain of the piece would be the white man who bought these two storm tossed lovers. Probably cheated the King out of a fair price to boot......The moral calculus changes with time and distance, but most cultures minimize their own participation in the world's evil and maximize the involvement of them---we all know who them is.

Michael K said...

" If there's one public intellectual in America who should most mistrust the good intentions of those interpreting his or her words it would be Clarence Thomas."

Truer words were never posted. I have asked my children to read his book about his life.

ARM, you display the same sense of superiority to blacks that you display toward everyone who disagrees with you. That's not healthy. There are a bunch of people here and in other conservative sites who disagree with me on evolution. Does that mean that nothing else they believe is worthwhile ?

William said...

What I'm driving at here is that this woman has probably been mistreated more often by her boyfriends than by her landlords. And whatever frustration and anger she feels for her boyfriend are projected onto her landlord.

PatHMV said...

A man who has had a major dispute with a female colleague over what he said and how he said it prefers to have more formal, written communication with work colleagues? You don't say!

Contrary to some of my fellow conservatives in this thread, I understand and agree with Patricia Williams on this point. We need to remember that, in real actual fact, most white people treated most black people in this country as having vastly lesser worth than "real" people, and subjected them to contempt, disdain, and humiliation in many environments. This was in the south, in the north, and most everywhere in between.

This is not ancient history. It happened in our lifetime, and most certainly in the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents. It has improved considerably since the 1950s and 60s, yes, but that's still a very recent time period, the change has not reached all areas and all peoples, and where it has reached, it has reached at different times.

Prof. Williams insistence on written contracts (both to protect her interests and to assert her personhood) is the same impulse underlying Sydney Poitier's line in "In the Heat of the Night": "They call me MR. Tibbs."

From this one passage and his brief Wikipedia article, Gabel sounds like a truly clueless utopian wannabe.

Matt said...

ARM,

Why do you assume everyone who posts here not named Crack are not black? Not all black people think and write like Crack does.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Matt said...
Why do you assume everyone who posts here not named Crack are not black? Not all black people think and write like Crack does.


If I am wrong please speak up. I don't normally participate in any of Althouse's endless stream of race posts so maybe there have been other voices that I haven't heard. For me, a another parade of the dominant cultures views on race is not particularly informative. YMMV.

I don't disagree with your second statement.

Matt said...

There is a disinclination to self-identify as black here. Why? Because, ARM, you will want to get the opinion of a black person on racial topics as though they speak for all black people. After all, we will only need "at least one black person", right?

Personally, what interested me about the comments on this blog was the range of opinions expressed. It was my hope that the side I tend to disagree with (liberal) would present their ideas and engage in an exchange in a fair manner. Unfortunately, even the self-identified "reasonable" folks who are liberal consistently fail to do so...

Tyrone Slothrop said...

Speaking as a lay person with no legal education, it seems to me the law can't exist without formality. If we can't count on consistency in the process, then there is no law. Thomas's remark has absolutely nothing to do with blind acceptance of the status quo, and everything to do with an expectation of consistency in the process.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Matt said...
There is a disinclination to self-identify as black here. Why? Because, ARM, you will want to get the opinion of a black person on racial topics as though they speak for all black people.


This is nonsense. Why would I suddenly demand something from this hypothetical black person that I have never expected from Crack?

I do like hearing Crack's point of view. It is, otherwise almost completely absent from the dominant and not so dominant media. I don't think he speaks for all black people. Just as the dominant voices here do not speak for all white people.

Anonymous said...

Crack's opinion is absent because it's idiotic, racist, and ridiculous (reparations lol.)

He could make a story about climate change about race. Hackery on that scale completely destroys credibility.

Balfegor said...

Williams in that excerpt is injecting a lot of baggage into the question of documenting vs. not-documenting. The trust problem is, I think, a lot simpler than that. If you've got two people from different cultural backgrounds trying to reach an accord, they have to specify a lot more detail explicitly, than would two people who can rely on shared cultural assumptions about the content of an agreement. I think this is changing today, but a few years ago, my impression was that contracts in Japan (which is largely monocultural) were typically a lot shorter than contracts in the US. In the US there's a much weaker base of shared understanding, so people have to document a lot more. This is more or less what you'd expect given that diversity increases distrust.

You can lard a lot of meaning onto that outcome. There are certainly some instances where not documenting something is a means of ensuring that the other party is deprived of a legal document ensuring his rights (although at least today, my impression is that tenancy laws today make that riskier for the landlord than for the tenant). And you can talk a lot about alienation and commodification and so on. This isn't to say that those feelings aren't real. I just think they're epiphenomena on top of the real dynamic here which is that in a diverse environment there's a strong, practical incentive to nail everything down in writing -- you can't each trust that the other party to a handshake agreement shares your assumptions and understandings.

Anonymous said...

"I am still evolving from being treated as three-fifths of a human"

Whenever I see that kind of 3/5s garbage from someone, I immediately discount everything the person has to say, because he or she has demonstrated complete ignorance of history with that whine.

The three fifths compromise weakened the political power of slave-holding states. For a black person to object to that is for them to say that they wish the slave owners had had MORE political power.

Anyone who can't comprehend that is too stupid to listen to.

Anyone who doesn't know the context, but whines about it anyway, is too ignorant, too willingly ignorant, to listen to. Ever.

Anyone who understands it, but wishes that the slave owners could have taken more advantage of their slaves, is either evil, or so pathetically ruled by their emotions that they obviously have nothing of value to offer.

Anyone who doesn't realize that this applied ONLY to slaves, and that free blacks got just the same representations as free whites, again is too ignorant to listen to.

Balfegor said...

And more broadly on the subject of formality, formality is a huge aid to those of us who are cultural "outsiders" in some sense -- it gives us clear signposts to guide our conduct. In a casual or informal environment, we're left trying to read subtle signals and cues that might as well be Linear A.

n.n said...

Critical race theory is the basis for a degenerate religion that was popular among Nazis, Democrats, and other left-wing ideologues. It gave rise to popular ideas including "master race", "diversity", eugenics (e.g. planned parenthood), and mass murder and enslavement by left-wing atheist regimes (e.g. Marxist, communist, socialist, and fascist). It is still popular among black Africans who engage in racial cleansing periodically. It was not until the introduction of the Jewish religion, and especially Christianity, that individual and intrinsic dignity was recognized independent of race and arbitrary standards of viability.

n.n said...

gregq:

Leftists are still seething that their slaves were not fully included in census counts to determine representation. Today, they have discovered other ways of disenfranchising Americans, black, white, brown, etc.

Michael K said...

" free blacks got just the same representations as free whites, again is too ignorant to listen to."

Including those who owned slaves.

Drago said...

AReasonableMeltdown: "If I am wrong please speak up."

LOL

Yes, all you "blacky's" (garages term) self-identify!

Then we will know how much weight to assign to your musings!

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

In classic white liberal fashion, ARM asks Black folks to support his world view. Because, to white liberals, this is what Black folks are for.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

The Cracker Emcee said...
In classic white liberal fashion, ARM asks Black folks to support his world view. Because, to white liberals, this is what Black folks are for.


Point to where I do this, or retract this.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Drago said...
Then we will know how much weight to assign to your musings!


When are you going to grow some balls? Ball-less troll.

Drago said...

AReasonableMeltdown: "When are you going to grow some balls? Ball-less troll."

Uh oh.

This sort of comment from ARMeltdown usually indicates we are but a few chemical steps away from a real meltdown by ARMeltdown.

Time will tell.

Drago said...

By the way, have all you "blacky's" (garages term) self-identified yet (per ARMeltdown's instructions)?

I wouldn't want ARMeltdown to feel as though no one was listening to him.

That path can lead to blog-comment disaster.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

"In classic white liberal fashion, ARM asks Black folks to support his world view. Because, to white liberals, this is what Black folks are for.

Point to where I do this, or retract this"

Please, Cracker. A post about Clarence Thomas, who you no doubt dislike, and, rather than render your own opinion, you question the validity of the opinions of others because they don't self-identify as Black? Truly, there is no one more deeply, patronizingly, irretrievably racist than a white, middle-class liberal. You let the mask slip and seriously tripped over your dick this time, son.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

The Cracker Emcee said...
Please, Cracker. A post about Clarence Thomas, who you no doubt dislike, and, rather than render your own opinion, you question the validity of the opinions of others because they don't self-identify as Black? Truly, there is no one more deeply, patronizingly, irretrievably racist than a white, middle-class liberal. You let the mask slip and seriously tripped over your dick this time, son.


This is entirely a projection of your imagination. You are unhinged from reality.

You are obviously very angry man with deeply held beliefs. Unfortunately, the vehemence of your views does not make them any more closely aligned to reality.



The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

I can't fix you, ARM. And, given your spectacular nervous breakdown on this blog a while back, I doubt anyone can.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

The Cracker Emcee said...
I can't fix you, ARM. And, given your spectacular nervous breakdown on this blog a while back, I doubt anyone can.


Again you have failed to provide any evidence. Mocking Drago is not a breakdown. It is shooting fish in a barrel. Cruelty to dumb animals is the only charge that might stick.

Drago said...

The Cracker Emcee: "I can't fix you, ARM. And, given your spectacular nervous breakdown on this blog a while back, I doubt anyone can."

It was amazing to watch.

And it wasn't just once.

ARMeltdown has had to spend significant amounts of time deleting the evidence of his non-reasonableness.

Which is why his chosen handle is hilariously ironic.

As the Brits would say, it's a bit too "on the nose".

Drago said...

ARMeltdown: "Mocking Drago is not a breakdown."

LOL

Your subsequent actions (post meltdowns) contradict your current assertion.

Not. Surprising.

And not convincing.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Drago said...
ARMeltdown has had to spend significant amounts of time deleting the evidence of his non-reasonableness.


I felt sorry for someone so completely intellectually defenseless. As I do now.


Drago said...

ARMeltdown: "I felt sorry for someone so completely intellectually defenseless. As I do now."

LOL

Embarrassment is a much more likely rationale for your pathetic attempts to run away from your own comments.

LOL

Zach said...

Williams has an interesting point here. In my own experiences renting apartments, I've often found that handshake deals work as well or better than formal leases -- provided, of course, that a handshake is a real moral commitment on both sides.

When I was in grad school, the best place I ever rented was the former nanny quarters in a mixed race household (father white, mother black, divorced). Very nice kids -- I kind of viewed the lack of a lease as an option for the father to kick out any tenant he didn't want around his kids.

Operating in a high trust environment has a lot of advantages. But it doesn't work if you don't have a lot of social trust. I would never operate without a lease in my current city.

Jupiter said...

Trust. But verify.

mikee said...

Landlord here. The required formality of a lease signed by all adult tenants, seccurity deposits and receipts for rent payments is lost on about half of my tenants, who would rather be able to move out at will without any responsibility for damages they leave behind.

Good fences make good neighbors, or at least keep the bad ones on their side. But a good lease defines the rules of the game, allowing both parties to proceed without misunderstanding.

Formality is wonderful, casual is horrble, at least regarding rental property.