A blog by Jay Livingston -- what I've been thinking, reading, seeing, or doing. Although I am an emeritus member of the Montclair State University department of sociology, this blog has no official connection to Montclair State University. “Montclair State University does not endorse the views or opinions expressed therein. The content provided is that of the author and does not express the view of Montclair State University.”
Some years ago, a colleague of my brother offered this example of mistaking generational differences for age differences. If you took a cross-section of the Miami population, you would conclude that when Miamians are young, they speak Spanish; as they get older, they switch to English. And when they get very old, they speak Yiddish.
I was thinking about this recently – not just because I’ve been in Florida for the past few days, but because of two articles in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. The first was about Southern schools that hold segregated proms even though the student body is integrated.
“Most of the students do want to have a prom together,” says Terra Fountain, a white 18-year-old who graduated from Montgomery County High School last year and is now living with her black boyfriend. “But it’s the white parents who say no. … They’re like, if you’re going with the black people, I’m not going to pay for it.”
The other was Matt Bai’s column on a similar difference in attitudes towards homosexuality.
The gist of the disagreement now isn’t partisan or theological as much as it is generational. Unlike their parents, younger Americans and those now transitioning into middle age have had openly gay friends and colleagues all their lives . . . . They’re less inclined to restrict the personal decisions of gay Americans.
At first, I thought the articles offered two parallel branches of the same trend – a generational shift towards liberalism on social issues. But when you have differences between young and old, there are two possible explanations – generation and age. If the difference is generational, then the kids of today will retain their liberal attitudes in the same way that they will probably retain their musical preferences. My guess is that Bai is correct and that today’s teens and twentysomethings will continue to support gay marriage.
But what about those segregated proms? It’s possible that the differences are a matter of aging, not of generation. If so, when today’s kids are older and have teenagers of their own, they may come to adopt their parents’ views. The separate black and white proms may continue even though nobody can justify them in terms of rationality or values. As one teenager quoted in the article says, “It’s how it’s always been. It’s just a tradition.”
Lee Sigelman at The Monkey Cage posted this video of an older woman waiting to cross the street and then showing her displeasure at the guy in the Mercedes who impatiently honks his horn.
More specifically, she whacks his bumper hard enough to trigger the air bag.
Sigelman posts it as a test: Your guess as to what the driver will do reveals your philosophy of human nature.
But for us ancients, it more likely brings to mind Gladys Ormphby, the handbag-wielding Laugh-in character played by Ruth Buzzi.
The opening sequence in Lawrence Kasdan’s1983 film The Big Chill shows a now dispersed group of college friends packing their bags as they prepare to come together for a funeral. No dialogue, just “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” on the soundtrack.
As the film cuts from one suitcase to another, there’s a visual joke: into the bag of each person, man or woman, goes a hair dryer, each a different color. At the time, this single iconic object located these former SDS types in social space. Kasdan could have simply had a sign flashing YUPPIE in bright letters with an arrow pointing to the person’s head. The hair dryer thing was marginally more subtle.*
That was then. Now, it would be chargers.
We packed for a short trip this week, and there they were – chargers for cell phones, laptops, cameras, and iPods. There were a couple of others I wasn’t sure about, but we took them along just in case.
*The hair dryer also figured symbolically in the 1975 film Shampoo, whose central idea is to play against the effeminate-hairdresser stereotype. Warren Beatty as George the hair stylist zips around on his motorcycle to do the hair of (and simply do) beautiful women all over LA. He carries his hair dryer tucked in his belt like a gangster’s Magnum.
President Obama took a lot of flak from conservatives when he mentioned “empathy” as one quality, among several others, that he would look for in a Supreme Court justice.
We need somebody who has the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, African American, gay, disabled and old.
For conservatives, empathy is irrelevant. They take an absolutist position: the facts are the facts, and the Constitution says what it says. The court should not bend that Constitution in order to accommodate the interests of teenage moms, African Americans, or anybody else.
But empathy is not just about the interpreting the Constitution.. It’s also about the facts. And, as Obama seems to recognize, a set of facts – what you see – depends on where you are looking from.
Here’s a video that has nothing to do with gays or blacks or teenage moms. It’s a high-speed chase, shot from inside a police cruiser, It isn’t from Cops. It’s from a 2007 Supreme Court case (Scott v. Harris, 127 S. Ct. 1769) .
Watch the video, then answer the two questions. (Warning: this ain’t Mario Kart. It ends with the Officer Scott using his police car to deliberately ram Harris’s Cadillac, which crashes at high speed into a light pole. Harris suffered a broken neck and was left a quadriplegic.)*
On a six-point scale, from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree:
During the pursuit, Harris drove in a manner that put members of the public at great risk of death.
During the pursuit, Harris drove in a manner that put the police at serious risk of death.
Harris’s lawsuit depended on the answers to these factual questions. For the Supreme Court justices, the video said it all. Justice Alito: “I looked at the videotape on this. It seemed to me that [Harris] created a tremendous risk [to] drivers on that road.” (Scalia got a laugh her by adding., “He created the scariest chase I ever saw since ‘The French Connection.’”
Justice Breyer says the tape flat out turned him around. “I was with you when I read . . . the opinion of the court below,” Justice Breyer related. “Then I look at that tape, and I have to say that when I looked at the tape, my reaction was somewhat similar to Justice Alito’s.”
But would everyone see it the same facts in this video? Well, yes and no, at least according to a Harvard Law Review article, “Whose Eyes Are You Going to Believe.” The authors, three law professors,** asked a sample of 1350 people – not Supreme Court justices – to view the tape. The overwhelming majority of people said that the chase put the public and police at risk. Three-fourths thought that the use of deadly force was justified, but only a slight majority felt that it was worth the risk.
(Click on the chart for a larger view.)
But the percentages varied among groups. Using mostly demographic variables, the authors created four types of juror – types they identify as Ron, Pat, Bernie, and Linda – who had vastly different responses to the questions. Only 36% of the Linda group felt that the use of deadly force was justified, compared with 87% of the Rons. As to who was at fault, 94% of the Rons but only 29% of the Lindas assigned the fault to Harris.
The paper has several other comparisons as well as correlation tables on specific demographic variables. It’s also the only law review article I’ve ever read that made me laugh out loud (well, chuckle), thanks to the way the authors present their typology (not that I spend much time searching for yocks in law journals). It’s also eminently readable and non-legalistic. Download it here.
The authors’ point is that people may watch the same tape, but they see different things,
* Respondents were also provided the following set of facts:
The police clocked Harris driving 73 miles per hour on a highway in a 55 mile-per-hour zone at around 11 pm.
The police decided to pursue Harris when Harris ignored the police car’s flashing lights and kept driving rather than pulling over.
The chase lasted around seven minutes and covered eight to nine miles.
The police determined from the license plate number that the vehicle had not been reported stolen.
Officer Scott joined the chase after it started. He did not know why the other officers had originally tried to stop Harris.
Scott knew that other police officers had blocked intersections leading to the highway but did not know if all of the intersections were blocked.
Officer Scott deliberately used his police cruiser’s front bumper to hit the rear of Harris’s car[,] hoping to cause Harris’s car to spin out and come to a stop.
Officer Scott knew there was a high risk that ramming the car in this manner could seriously injure or kill Harris.
Harris lost control, crashed, and suffered severe injuries, including permanent paralysis from the neck down.
