I think this quote is doing the rounds on the Net, but it's worth putting it here anyway: 

Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.... So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years.

Chris Rock

"In Conversation" in Vulture

Stats of a different kind

In his book, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Colm Tóibín has a chapter on the writer, James Baldwin. On page 314, in relation to Baldwin's concerns about the experiences of black people in America, and the ongoing racial blindness between white and black, he notes the following statistics (which are a little date, but have doubtless worsened rather than improved):


At the end of 2005, there were close 2.2 million prisoners in federal, state or local jails in the United States.  Three thousand one hundred and forty-five black men out of every 100,000 lived as sentenced prisoners, compared to 471 white male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 white males; this compares to an estimated 3,000 out of every 100,000 members of the population of Russia who were in jail during Stalin's reign. 


As of 2006, seven million people in the United States were behind bars, on probation or on parole.  The United States has 5 per cent of the world's population and 25 per cent of its prisoners.  737 per 100,000 compared to 100 n Australia and 50 in Norway and 37 in Japan and 29 in Iceland and India. England and Wales, with roughly the same crime rate as the United States, have 149 per 100,000 in prison.  


A report from the Justice Department estimated that 12 per cent of American black men in their twenties and early thirties are in jail now, compared to 1.6 per cent of white males of the same age group.  The general prison numbers in the United States have double since 1990. 


Incidentally, Tóibín's book is primarily about writers and their families, not about crime and black people.  

The Help

I began to read The Help in a bookshop the other day and put it on my list of books to catch up on at some point.  In the meantime my wife and I went to the film version last night; that's probably spoilt some of the surprises of the book, but no doubt still leaves the pleasures of the writing for the future.

The movie deals with the bunch of incidents and stories effectively, as well as with the wide range of characters.  There are strong performances from the black members of the cast, and some slightly over-the-top ones from the white actresses (actresses being the operative word: men hardly make any impact in this movie).  This is, I suspect, intentional: one of the many contrasts in the movie.

The story, as probably everyone knows by now, is about the black women who act as maids, housekeepers, grocery shoppers, cooks, cleaners and general dogsbodies to the white community in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 60s - at a time just on the cusp of the huge changes that would come between blacks and whites in the US.  Emma Stone plays a white woman who's been brought up by the family's black maid - a very common approach to child-rearing, apparently: one of the other major characters, Aibileen (the narrator in the book and played here by Viola Davis) is in the process of doing the same thing for her white family during most of the movie.   This curious bit of interracial leniency in these families is in stark contrast to the insistence by most of them that the black maids don't use the same toilets, or plates, or sit at the same tables - nor do a host of other things while working in the house.  (Toilets play quite a big part in this movie, incidentally.)

Stone's character Skeeter is an aspiring and compassionate would-be journalist, and latches onto the real stories of the black maids, and how they feel about the whole process of being degraded by the whites.   The revelations are both grim and hilarious, and Stone  publishes a book on the topic - it's also called The Help.   (The real author of The Help, Kathryn Stockett, struggled to get her book published: she received some sixty rejections in all before it took off.)

As a movie, The Help is consistently entertaining, sometimes troubling (we know that many of these issues have been overcome, but no doubt there are also many lingering ones), beautifully filmed, with a cast of excellent actresses.  (As I said, the men barely get a look in - only Skeeter's boyfriend has much screentime, and even he proves to be much less than she demands of him).  That wonderful actress Alison Janney makes frequent appearances as Skeeter's mother - wearing an appalling set of wigs.  I don't know whether this has something to do with the fact that she is supposed to have some form of cancer, but only once does Janney look anything like her gorgeous self: mostly she has dreadful black things stuck on her head.   Viola Davis also appears to be wearing a wig, and it seems a little less than suitable as well.   Both actresses overcome this minor issue with aplomb.   Bryce Dallas Howard plays the nastier of the white women with extreme venom, and may or may not be redeemed in the end.   Sissy Spacek appears as her alcoholic mother, but doesn't have quite enough of a role to really get to grips with. Cicely Tyson plays the old maid who brought up Skeeter; she isn't in the movie much, but brings great depth of emotion to her two big scenes.  However, like most of the black actresses she is difficult to hear at times.  I don't know whether it was the particular screening we saw of this movie, but the black women seemed to be mumbling their lines in some scenes in such a way that it was hard to understand them; as well, there was a lack of sharpness to the focus of many scenes.  Perhaps both of these were faults of the cinema rather than the moviemaking.   And it wasn't just my ears: my wife had the same trouble understanding some of the lines as well.

This is an excellent ensemble piece, and well worth viewing.   I'll still read the book, I think!

PS I should have mentioned Octavia Spencer, who as Minny, has the other major black role, and steals several scenes.   She is superb.   And also that the movie has a satisfactory ending which suddenly unwinds in the last scene.  Which is probably appropriate. 

Verbosity

In a review written for the American magazine, The Academy, dated 1 October 1881 of E W White's Cameos from the Silver-land; or the Experiences of a Young Naturalist in the Argentine Republic, a classic work of economic geography and natural history, the reviewer complained, "The author is terribly fond of long words. To him plants become bosquetish, plains are sabulous, cattle are meat-bearing beeves, dead men are cadavers, parrots are psittacs. The Republic is 'a vast cerealic and frugiferous as well as a lanigerous and pelliferous region'."

Noted by Michael Quinion in his latest World Wide Words newsletter.

Shuffling Stats to Suit

You don't have to wonder why people don't take global warming and climate change issues seriously when you read the following sort of stuff:
At his Victoria University of Wellington seminar in March, Bob [White] was armed with some startling facts:
combined searches on Google (through power usage) contribute to global warming as much as all plane travel;
cows contribute 18% of global warming, more than all the world's transport;
43% of New Zealand's greenhouse gases come from cattle and sheep;
the best thing that New Zealanders can do to reduce global warming is eat less meat.
Taking just the first item alone, it seems amazing that someone who claims to be a scientist should come out with such an unthought-through statement. In the (British) Sunday Times there was a similar recent comparison: with the Google search and the boiling of a kettle. Google's response is rather more measured: Others have used much higher estimates, claiming that a typical search uses "half the energy as boiling a kettle of water" and produces 7 grams of CO2. We thought it would be helpful to explain why this number is many times too high. Google is fast — a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.
On that basis we shouldn't we worrying about planes at all, but the people who travel in them!
David Galbraith deals with the issue of Google searches and planes:
“A recent study estimated the global IT sector generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines put together.”
This is a largely meaningless assertion since without the global IT sector people would have to use planes more. In addition, ‘global IT sector’ includes all of the computers required to design, build and operate aircraft, all of the computers used to search for and book trips, all of the computers used for in flight entertainment systems and all of the computers used by air traffic control.
In terms of moving people around to exchange information, if you wanted to make plane travel several million times more efficient, an Internet enabled computer is a viable alternative.
If you dare to search Google, after White's warning, you'll find all the media took up the cry of the cows (and sheep and other domestic animals) being the cause of more woes than cars. This 'sky is falling' piece of doomsdayism is based on a "400-page report by the Food and Agricultural Organisation, entitled Livestock's Long Shadow, which also surveys the damage done by sheep, chickens, pigs and goats. But in almost every case, the world's 1.5 billion cattle are most to blame. Livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together."
But when you look at the way in which this theory is worked out, you find that cattle are supposedly responsible for a vast number of negative aspects of the industry, including the transporting of them. Now hang on: shouldn't the transporting go under the vehicle pollution box rather than the cattle box? Just reading the rest of the article (in the link under 400-page report) you start to scratch your head. It takes 990 litres of water to produce one litre of milk? HUH? Certainly the average cow isn't consuming that amount of water, so once again, the stats are being used to load onto the cow, when they're already loaded on elsewhere - or should be.
I'm not going to look at the other two items on White's list. In part they're already covered by point 2, and again, when you start to look at them in any depth, you find inconsistencies in the stats.
If scientists would stick to what they know - geophysics in White's case - they might come up with some better solutions for the real problems.

The lack of style

Check out almost any book on 'how to write' and you'll find absurd advice about not using adjectives and adverbs, avoiding split infinitives, making sure you rarely use the passive voice. For a while I used to think this advice had some value behind it, but I became convinced in the end that most of it was valueless: it lessened the ways in which you could write with style, and was usually at odds with the way real writers actually write.
It seems as though much of the blame may be put at the feet of the venerable Strunk and White book, The Elements of Style. In an article entitled, 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice, Geoffrey Pullum certainly believes the blame should be. He lists a number of downright errors in the book, and shows how even the two authors inadvertently ignored their own advice - within their own pages.
As Pullum notes, William Strunk was a professor of English at Cornell about a hundred years ago and E.B. White, later the much-admired author of Charlotte's Web, took English with him in 1919. (White was also the author of Stuart Little.)
Nowadays, if I read a book on writing, I tend to ignore the stuff about passives and so on. A darn good passive in the right place is an apt thing. A split infinitive handled well is beautiful. And as for dislodging adjectives and adverbs, it seems plain that Strunk and White must either have used a simplified version of English in their everyday speech, or else wrote the book as something of a hoax!

Dorothy White

Little Black Sambo is an adventure, not a nightmare. In an adventure the principal character goes forth from security to insecurity and back to port; a nightmare is an adventure without a port.

[The Whites were] solemn as parents are inclined to be over a firstborn. [Ibid]

Minds, like elastic, don’t thrive on eternal stretching. [Ibid]

Three quotes from Books Before Five, by Dorothy White (all quoted in an article in the Otago Daily Times, page 29, 21st May, 1985).

Dorothy Neal White was internationally known for her work on developing reading with children as early as possible, and a major library in New Zealand is named after her.