Social Cohesion

On July 7th Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, co-authors of Red Families vs Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, Patrick F. Fagan, a Senior Director and Fellow of the Center for Research on Marriage and Religion, and Eyal Press, a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Absolute Convictions met to discuss why family structures vary across the United States and how politics impacts upon family structure. David Gray, the director of the Workforce and Family Program at the New America Foundation, hosted the panel discussion.

The Texas State Board of Education, the most astringently reactionary body since the Spartan Ephorate, has decreed that textbooks for the schoolchildren of Texas are to include Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address along with the first inaugural of Abraham Lincoln.

Human settlements are always shaped by whatever is the state of the art transportation device of the time. Shoe-leather and donkeys enabled the Jerusalem known by Jesus. Sixteen centuries later, when critical transportation has become horse-drawn wagons and ocean-going sail, you get places like Boston. Railroads yield Chicago – both the area around the “L” (intraurban rail) and the area that processed wealth from the hinterlands (the stockyards). The automobile results in places with multiple urban cores like Los Angeles.

It's easy to assume that Arizona has become the epicenter in the battle against illegal immigration primarily because it has one of the highest percentages of undocumented migrants of any state in the union. But that's just half the story behind the fear many white Arizonans evidently feel.

The recent spike in violent political rhetoric coupled with last week's arrest of two men who threatened the lives of two Democratic House members has a lot of commentators worried about a surge in domestic political terrorism.

Those fears are misplaced. Not because there won't be violence, but because politically inspired violence won't necessarily be aimed at politicians.

My friend Art Mitz, who died Wednesday morning, was the only neighbor I've ever had who complained to me about the excesses of Jacksonian democracy.

Seriously. How refreshing is that? He never asked to borrow sugar. He didn't complain about loud music. But on our very first encounter, he walked across the dirt road that separated our houses in the desert, leaned on my green wooden fence and started to worry out loud about the dangers of populism.

When Michelle Obama told Mike Huckabee a few weeks ago in an interview on Fox News Channel that her home was a "news-free zone," she wasn't just reflecting a desire to filter and ignore news we don't want to hear. Her statement, to my ear, also represented the culmination of the suburbanization of the American mind. And that's bad news for our future.

(Note: This is a guest post provided by Judy Lubin and also cross posted at OpenSalon) 

From 1790 to 1952, only "white people" were eligible to become naturalized U.S. citizens. That fact alone explains why for most of our history, immigrants and their descendants fought to be considered white.

It wasn't a pretty process. Nor did the coveted category of "whiteness" have any clear definition. Oh, sure, some dimwitted people really thought it was a rigidly scientific category. But for the most part, the evolving definitions and elastic boundaries of whiteness were subject to cultural bias and, let's face it, whim and subjectivity.