Blog

A Free Syrian Army soldier walks down a ruined Aleppo street in 2012. Voice of America, via Wikimedia
Blog

Waiting in Antalya


It’s the late morning, and my wife Mardena and I are headed back to our hostel in Antalya, a city on Anatolia’s southwestern coast. We’ve just returned from a trip to the archeological museum, where we saw a stunning display of Roman mosaics set out under clear glass walkways. As we duck out of the 111-degree heat and into the hostel’s lobby, we come upon a young man, probably in his early twenties, standing with his head craned forward and eyes fixed on a TV mounted high on the wall. A Turkish news report is discussing the war raging in neighboring Syria. The camera footage shows smoke, rubble, and bombed-out buildings, but I have no idea what the reporter is saying. I ask the young man what is happening. “Assad is bombing Homs,” he says, his eyes still on the screen.

Continue reading Waiting in Antalya →

Paul Michelson lives and writes in Davis, California.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog / Political Prose

Extremely Exhausting


The Atlantic has published a piece I wrote about living in an extreme meritocracy.

Continue reading Extremely Exhausting →

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Only Poor People Take the Bus

Sylvia Arthur
Illustrations by Emma FitzGerald

Hopewell-Mann is a predominantly Latino neighborhood in the predominantly Latino city of Santa Fe. Close enough to downtown to make it a short commute, yet a world away so that tourism doesn’t quite reach it, it’s a stark reminder of some of the inequalities present in this city. While the stunning adobe architecture downtown looks like it’s been preserved in aspic, Hopewell-Mann’s main drag is lined with big-box stores, fast-food restaurants, and cheap motels offering month-to-month leases. The neighborhood attracts a mix of the transient and the locally displaced, and not surprisingly, people downtown tend to avoid it.

Continue reading Only Poor People Take the Bus →

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Halva with Tea

Bahar Anooshahr

Bahar Anooshahr, her father, and her two brothers in front of a birthday cakeIt’s a small coffee shop, a Shingle-style shack with blue trim, listed by Yelp as one of Laguna Beach’s best. Cookies and biscotti lie in a basket in front of the order window. The barista, an upbeat blonde woman in her late fifties, early sixties, comes over to me. As I’m trying to choose what flavor to put in my coffee, we start talking. She finds out I’m from Phoenix and asks what brought me to Laguna.

“My friend passed away two weeks ago. I’m here to clear my head,” I tell her. Hal, a pastor, was one of the first friends I’d made after moving to Phoenix a year and a half ago with my fiancé. He had helped us through some tough times.

She’s curious about where my accent is from. I tell her I was born in Iran. “But I have lived here longer than I have lived there,” I quickly add.

It’s a cool, sunny November morning. As she’s making my coffee, the woman spots the book I’m carrying in my hand, The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay, by Hooman Majd. She asks me what it’s about. I tell her it was written by an Iranian immigrant who had left Iran when he was eight months old. When he turned fifty, he decided to go looking for his grandmother’s house halfway around the world, hoping to find his roots. He found the area, the familiar scents, the leftover mud walls. But he couldn’t find the actual house.

His story is not much different from mine, I say. Several years ago, I visited the neighborhood where my family used to live in Tehran. For the first time in more than two decades, I walked our old block, looking for the home I had grown up in. But it wasn’t there anymore.

Describing my trip to Iran reminds me of a passage I read in Majd’s book: Maybe it was better that the house and even the street weren’t there. Reality could not possibly rival a childhood memory, and my memory was intact, if rose-colored. Not finding the house also kept me somewhat rootless—now there truly was nothing for me to directly claim as mine.

“My grandparents emigrated from Denmark,” the woman tells me. She starts talking about how her grandparents worked hard, how they worked their way up—until one day they owned their own business.

I expect her to go on about her family, yet she abruptly turns the conversation elsewhere. “I don’t see my culture here anymore,” she says, testily. At first, I think she’s talking about Danish culture. But I’m mistaken. “Have you been to Heisler Park?” she asks me.

“No.” I know from my friends in Laguna that Heisler is the park Iranians go to for their New Year celebrations.

“When I went to Heisler Park, I had to pass all these Asian tents to be able to celebrate my Memorial Day. Before the Asians, it used to be Mexicans.”

There’s an awkward pause. I’m not sure how to respond. “You know what?” I finally say. “It’s too cold to sit outside. I’ll come back later.”

As I turn away, I feel disappointed with myself for not saying what’s really on my mind. I want to tell her that she should have compassion for those who leave their countries to come here. I want to remind her that her ancestors were also immigrants. But I don’t have the courage to speak up.

Instead, I walk away, thinking about what I should have said, feeling like the outsider I still imagine myself to be—twenty-seven years after coming to America.

• • •

I was born in Tehran. When I was seventeen, my family decided to leave Iran. We immigrated to America not because of conflict—the Iran–Iraq War had already ended by then—but for opportunity. My father was an engineer, and my mother had studied law before becoming a stay-at-home mom. They wanted their children to have a good education.

Growing up in Houston in the nineties, I fought with my mom because I didn’t want her to pack Persian food in my lunchbox. The salt-laden Lunchables would do—anything to fit in among my new classmates. During lunch breaks, I used to hide in the piano rooms to avoid the humiliation of not speaking English. At home, I practiced pronouncing words properly, without the thick Iranian accent. “The,” not “de”—so what if we didn’t use the sound th in Farsi? We were living in America. We needed to respect its language.

As I grew older, I distanced myself from the Iranian community and embraced American culture. Though I was born a Muslim, most of my family and friends had lost interest and trust in religion, thanks to Iran’s Islamic Republic. From early on, I had steered clear of mosques. Yet in America, whenever friends invited me to church, I went. Defying my parents and their Iranian values, I dated American boys without plans to marry. Once, my mom—playing matchmaker—asked me to meet her friend’s son, who had traveled from Switzerland to see me. I refused to go.

When it came to school, however, my two brothers and I were good Iranian children. My father, who had gone from building factories to manufacturing blinds, had no time for nonsense, and demanded hard work and excellence in whatever we did. He was the type of immigrant dad who, if I got a 98 on a test, would ask me, “Who got the 100?” Once the managing director of an engineering firm in Iran, he had been forced to take a job as a low-level supervisor at the blinds plant when we moved to America. He expected much more for us, and his high expectations paid off: two of us earned doctorates, and the third, an MBA.

At dental school, I’d been one of a large number of immigrants in my class. Being around people who shared my experience as a newcomer had been good for me, and by the time I graduated I was no longer as anxious about sticking out as an Iranian. After I finished school, I started an oral and maxillofacial surgery residency at a hospital in New Jersey.

I was in my second year there when the September 11 terrorist attacks happened. A few days afterward, a group of us were in the operating-room holding area waiting for a patient. News streamed on a small television set. We congregated around it, watching footage of the collapse of the Twin Towers over and over.

Soon the anesthesiologist and nurses were peppering me with questions about why the terrorists had done this. “You are from the Middle East, aren’t you?” someone asked me.

For years, every time I traveled by air, I was pulled out of the line for a “random search”—something my then-husband, also Iranian, avoided because of his light complexion.

After my hospital residency, we settled down in Atkinson, a tiny New Hampshire town along the Massachusetts border, and I became a US citizen. When I was finally able to vote in 2008, I felt such a sense of joy as I waited at the polling station to cast my ballot—only to have that feeling vanish when I overheard someone in line say, “We oughta show these towelheads who’s the boss.”

Let it go, I told myself. Why bother about what a couple of people in a small town think?

• • •

In Iran, we grieve the loss of a loved one for forty days, with ceremonies on the third, seventh, and fortieth days. We even have specific foods for funerals—halva, a sweet dish made with flour, butter, sugar, and rosewater and decorated with pistachios, is often served to mourners with tea.

In America, a culture of positivity, I don’t really know how to mourn. Right after Hal died, I disconnected from my emotions. Eventually, I became angry—at others for their platitudes, and with myself for how long it was taking me to get over his death. I needed to get away from it all, and so I went to Laguna Beach, where many of my old Iranian friends live.

I tell them how much Hal’s death has shaken me—and how much I’ve struggled to properly grieve for him. I need the ceremonies we used to practice, I tell them. I crave the taste of halva with tea.

They listen. Ironically, out of all my Iranian friends, the one who has the least nostalgia about her former life best understands the pain of that old wound. “You know, our parents are Iranian,” she says. “Our children are American. We, I’m afraid, are neither. We are orphans.”

I think back to my search for my childhood home in Tehran. I remember coming to the block where my family’s house had once stood, and seeing the sterile apartment complex they had built in its place. Good, I told myself. Who has the energy to feel emotional?

Afterward, a friend drove me around the neighborhood. We passed my middle school. The old mosque. The pastry shop I used to stop by on my way to school.

Suddenly, tears started streaming down my cheeks.

It wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t there.

Bahar Anooshahr is an Iranian American writer and recovering oral and maxillofacial surgeon. Twitter: @banooshahr

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
A protester-made statue with the Spanish words "dignity" and "fight" stands outside the Chicago Board of Trade building following a march in favor of a higher minimum wage. Scott L, via Flickr
Blog / Political Prose

A Minimum of Dignity


Fight for $15 statue
A protester-made statue with the Spanish words “dignity” and “fight” stands outside the Chicago Board of Trade building following a march in 2015 in favor of a higher minimum wage. Scott L, via Flickr

This weekend, low-wage workers from around the country will be arriving in my city, Richmond, to make a case for increasing the minimum wage. It’s the first-ever national convention for the Fight for $15 movement, which in the past few years has launched wide-ranging strikes and protests to raise awareness about how a $7.25-an-hour wage—the current federal minimum—just doesn’t cut it for many workers struggling to make ends meet for themselves and their families.

There’s a long line of economic arguments in favor of, and opposed to, increases in the minimum wage. Among other things, opponents say it will raise prices for consumers, cause employers to slash jobs or cut back on workers’ hours, and put many companies out of business. Advocates say it will help the economy by giving workers more money to spend in their communities, encouraging the unemployed to seek out work, and reducing the stress and anxiety the working poor deal with, as well as their reliance on government benefits.

As important as the economic impacts of this policy are, however, it’s even more important to consider its cultural and moral implications. After all, that’s what drives much of the widespread public support for increasing the minimum wage, even among people who have never heard of, say, the elasticities of labor supply and demand. Many Americans just don’t think it is right that people who work hard should have to struggle so hard.

To be sure, the research on the minimum wage gives us little reason to despair—or cheer—over its impact on the economy. The most rigorous studies seem to suggest that it doesn’t make a big difference in terms of employment and growth. A 2014 open letter signed by 600 economists, including seven Nobel laureates, advocated raising the minimum wage to $10.10, noting that the “weight of evidence” showed “little or no negative effect” on employment for minimum-wage workers. Meanwhile, the increase would lift wages for them and likely “spill over” to other low-wage workers, too, possibly stimulating the economy to a “small” degree, the economists wrote.

Most recently, a University of Washington study of the increase in Seattle’s minimum wage to $11—on its way to $15 in 2017—tried to sort out the impact of the wage hike alone, sifting away the effects of other changes in the economy occurring at the same time. It found mixed results. A bit higher wages, but a bit fewer hours. Somewhat less employment, but no increase in business closings.

Make of these studies as you will, but it’s hard to argue that the sky is falling down in places where wage policies have changed. And while a higher minimum wage will give low-wage workers fatter paychecks, it obviously cannot, by itself, pull the working class out of its decades-long malaise of stagnant wages and growing insecurity.

These economic analyses provide important context, but the policy question really boils down to one of values. America has always prided itself for being founded on principles rather than a single cultural persuasion, and Americans have held onto few principles as steadfastly as the value of hard work. An honest day’s toil should get you by. And yet we have millions of Americans who work full-time and are still in poverty. We have millions working at global corporations like Walmart and McDonald’s that pay their workers so little that their business models rely on government to pick up the tab—by providing Medicaid, food stamps, refundable tax credits, and the like.

Adapting our laws and our economy to match our principles will take time. With any change, there will be some who gain, and some who lose out, more than others. But overall society will be better off—and it’s not just because some people will make more than they used to.

When we pay living wages, the culture changes, too. As Katherine Newman found in her classic study of fast-food workers, No Shame in My Game, part of what makes it hard to take a low-wage job is not that people don’t want to work—it’s that society has such disdain for those making chump change behind a McDonald’s counter or in a Walmart stockroom. (This is also one reason that immigrants—who aren’t under the same sorts of social pressures as the native-born—will do the poorly paid jobs others won’t.)

In the research for my book about the long-term unemployed in America and Canada, I came across one man out of work for more than a year after the car-parts plant that employed him shut down. He had avoided having to live on the street by moving into his mom’s house. When I spoke to him, he had just given away his last unemployment check to his daughter so that she could have something of a normal Christmas.

“I’m forty-three years old and living off my mother,” he told me. He was ashamed about accepting his family’s help, but he felt he had to do it. What he wasn’t willing to do, though, was work at a fast-food restaurant. He had put in twelve years at a respectable job, he pointed out. “I don’t want to throw on a goofy hat.”

If we believe that certain jobs are so undignified that we won’t even pay someone a decent wage to do them, then we shouldn’t be surprised that people with a decent amount of self-respect won’t do them. Opponents of raising the minimum wage seem to be blind to this. They talk about the economic pros and cons of wage laws as if those were the only things that matter. But people in the real world don’t just have balance sheets, they also have pride.

If you don’t think that making economic policy based on principle is realistic, then consider the extent to which it has already occurred—in the direction of greater income inequality. In 1965, CEOs made 20 times more than a typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute; in 2014, they made 300 times more. Part of this shift was due to global competition and changes in labor and financial markets, but some of it can be linked to the dwindling sense of obligation that those at top now have toward their workers, as Mark Mizruchi and other scholars have noted.

As many of today’s corporate leaders see it, making obscenely larger amounts of money than their employees do is no longer cause for guilt. The boardroom culture tells them they deserve it. And so they continue to push for changes in tax laws to make sure the economy’s outcomes reflect their own principles of self-profit.

Indeed, in other rich countries with different social norms, the gap between CEO and worker pay is nowhere near as extreme—and the minimum wage tends to be much higher, too. These countries have clear notions of what’s fair and appropriate to pay for a day’s work, and they have chosen to pursue practices and policies in line with those beliefs.

Even those of us who want government to do more for the working poor often forget the importance of this broader cultural context. Yes, we should take advantage of targeted, technocratic solutions such as earned-income tax credits that make low-wage work pay better. But it should trouble us that these policies often amount to having the government subsidize employers who refuse to foot any extra labor costs. Furthermore, having a company pay a higher wage and having the government supplement that wage are very different things. Or at least they are when we look from the vantage point of flesh-and-blood human beings—as opposed to that of the rational-actor stick men in economic models. We brag about our paychecks, not our tax credits.

What we pay those at the bottom also has something to say about the dignity and connectedness of our society as a whole. If every wage is a living wage, those of us who are more fortunate won’t be living in such a different world from those sweeping our floors and serving our food. An entry-level job won’t be such a laughable and undignified proposition that a kid in a poor town or neighborhood won’t even consider taking it over a flashier (and deadlier) gig on the corner. If we think people are worth more than a pittance, they will act that way—and treat others that way.

In a sense, it’s fitting that Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, a city with a history of stark racial and economic inequalities, should host the Fight for $15 convention. The old plantation-based economy disappeared not because it wasn’t profitable. It disappeared because it wasn’t just. If we truly believe in our values, we should make our economy reflect them.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Hillary Clinton formally accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president on the fourth night of the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Ali Shaker/Voice of America, via Wikimedia Commons
Blog

Hillary Clinton and the Art of the Impossible


Hillary Clinton at the podium dressed in white
Hillary Clinton formally accepts the Democratic Party’s nomination for president on the fourth night of the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Ali Shaker/Voice of America, via Wikimedia Commons

Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech on Thursday brought to mind the wide gap that separates those in this country who want sweeping change and those who favor incremental reform. It’s played out during the presidential campaign, obviously, in the fierce primary clashes between Bernie Sanders and Clinton, and between Donald Trump and his Republican rivals. But it’s also a tension that can be seen in Clinton’s own politics.

Today, Clinton is the centrist foil to Sanders’s bold and radical idealism. She has explicitly described herself that way. “You know, I get accused of being kind of moderate and center,” Clinton told supporters last September. “I plead guilty.”

It’s easy to make the case Clinton has never really been a liberal, much less a progressive. As she noted in her autobiography, she was once a “Goldwater girl.” Raised in a conservative household, she volunteered for the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 (whose archconservatism later inspired the Reagan Revolution). In her first year of college, she served as the president of the Wellesley Young Republicans.

By then, however, she was supporting moderates—Rockefeller Republicans like John Lindsay, the mayor of New York, and Edward Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican and the first African American US senator. Her politics shifted further, as it did for many young people, as the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement made her question the policies and norms of the day. In his biography of Clinton, Carl Bernstein quotes a letter from around this time in which Clinton described herself as “a mind conservative and a heart liberal.”

Her first major speech—one that unexpectedly made headlines—was the address she gave at her Wellesley College graduation in 1969, the first year that Wellesley featured a student speaker at its commencement. Clinton went up on stage following the commencement speaker—who that year was Senator Brooke. In her speech, a young Clinton mingles her characteristic pragmatism with an uncharacteristic idealism—a bold demand for transformative change.

Brooke had criticized the disruptive protests of the day as “unnecessary” and “ineffective.” “Potential allies are more often alienated than enlisted by such activities, and their empathy for the professed goals of the protesters is destroyed by their outrage at the procedures employed,” he said. Brooke then highlighted the “measurable progress” of recent years, including the drop in the poverty rate over the past decade. Change within the system works, he concluded.

In impromptu remarks at the beginning of her speech—words that incensed university officials—Clinton chided the senator:

Part of the problem with just empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do us anything. We’ve had lots of empathy; we’ve had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible. What does it mean to hear that 13.3 percent of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That’s a percentage. We’re not interested in social reconstruction; it’s human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends? The complexities are not lost in our analyses, but perhaps they’re just put into what we consider a more human and eventually a more progressive perspective.

A practitioner of the “art of the possible”—that seems to describe perfectly Hillary Clinton’s reformist politics of recent years. And yet five decades ago, she was talking—eloquently and off the cuff—about a more profound kind of change.

Glimpses of that younger, idealistic Clinton came out in her husband’s remarks on Tuesday, as he described her legal work on behalf of children and the poor. But even after Bill Clinton was elected president, Hillary Clinton could still sound at times like the socialist Vermont senator she’d face decades later in the primaries. When White House advisers critical of her single-payer health care plan called it unfriendly to business, she bluntly told her husband, “You didn’t get elected to do Wall Street economics.”

How much things have changed for Clinton: from a First Lady berating her husband for doing Wall Street’s bidding, to a presidential candidate being berated for doing Wall Street’s bidding. By the time of her 2000 Senate campaign, Clinton was projecting an image of being anything but business-unfriendly—one that she further cemented by developing, as New York’s junior senator, close ties to the financial sector. In terms of policy, she advocated piecemeal reforms. “I now come from the school of small steps,” she said.

Her critics might call this shift a sign of her inveterate duplicity—her willingness to do anything to get elected. More charitably, you could call it a symptom of a political post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s clear that she was chastened by the catastrophic failure of health care reform. She was humbled, too, by the disastrous 1994 midterm election that swept Republicans into power.

But in her acceptance speech on Thursday, Clinton seemed to be trying to bridge the gap between her younger and older selves. She spoke of “big ideas.” She spoke of “understanding.” She spoke of “healing.”

I refuse to believe we can’t find common ground here. We have to heal the divides in our country. Not just on guns. But on race. Immigration. And more. That starts with listening to each other. Hearing each other. Trying, as best we can, to walk in each other’s shoes.

It was the sort of touchy-feely rhetoric that might have come from the lips of George McGovern, the unabashedly liberal Democratic senator whom she and Bill Clinton campaigned for after college.

Of course, even as she appealed to ideals rather than policies, Clinton turned to what her campaign calls the central motif of her career: action. As in her 1969 commencement speech—when she made the brash statement that “empathy doesn’t do us anything”—she stressed the long and hard struggle for political change. But also like in that earlier speech, she made a conscious effort to balance that pragmatism with idealism—in her words, “action” with “understanding.”

I went to work for the Children’s Defense Fund, going door-to-door in New Bedford, Massachusetts on behalf of children with disabilities who were denied the chance to go to school. I remember meeting a young girl in a wheelchair on the small back porch of her house. She told me how badly she wanted to go to school—it just didn’t seem possible. And I couldn’t stop thinking of my mother and what she went through as a child. It became clear to me that simply caring is not enough. To drive real progress, you have to change both hearts and laws. You need both understanding and action. So we gathered facts. We built a coalition. And our work helped convince Congress to ensure access to education for all students with disabilities.

It’s a big idea, isn’t it? Every kid with a disability has the right to go to school. But how do you make an idea like that real? You do it step-by-step, year-by-year … sometimes even door-by-door.

Clinton has been described—and has described herself—as a “work horse, not a show horse.” In Thursday’s speech, she could have said more more about her background and experiences to soften her hard-nosed public image and connect with voters. After all these years in the political spotlight, she still comes across as (at least relative to most politicians) a private person, one who is uncomfortable with making a personal connection from far across a stage. As she noted, “The truth is, through all these years of public service, the ‘service’ part has always come easier to me than the ‘public’ part.”

Luckily for her, many Americans can, in theory, relate to that kind of personality type—because it describes who they are, too. Clinton hasn’t done enough to relate to voters in this way, but her speech on Thursday was a step in that direction, stressing to them her indefatigable determination—an oft-ignored, almost folksy trait in a political system increasingly fueled by Hollywood-style celebrity and telegenic charisma.

But I’m here to tell you tonight—progress is possible. I know because I’ve seen it in the lives of people across America who get knocked down and get right back up. And I know it from my own life. More than a few times, I’ve had to pick myself up and get back in the game. Like so much else, I got this from my mother. She never let me back down from any challenge. When I tried to hide from a neighborhood bully, she literally blocked the door. “Go back out there,” she said. And she was right. You have to stand up to bullies. You have to keep working to make things better, even when the odds are long and the opposition is fierce.

Bill Clinton is a master of the politics of personal connection; Obama, a master of the politics of inspiration. Those traits matter mightily for any president, who must often rely on charm offensives and the bully pulpit to advance policy. Obama once implied that his hope was to “change the trajectory of America” and put the nation on a “fundamentally different path,” in the ways that his predecessors Reagan and Kennedy did. How would he do that? Through persuasion as much as policy—by tapping into the culture of the moment as much as altering the structure of law.

If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, we’ll learn whether a modern president of a quite different temperament can also succeed in this task. Her strength—as she admitted half-jokingly on stage—is in the unglamorous work of rolling policy boulders up political hills.

And yet her speech also reminds us that there is still something of that young college grad in Hillary Clinton. There’s still a belief in big ideas—a boldness that the Sanders campaign, among other things, has helped stir in her again. There’s still an ambition for something more than small steps—for a politics of the impossible. If she can rekindle that part of her, she may put this country on a fundamentally different path.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
At a vigil in Paris the night after the November attacks. Garry Knight, via Flickr
Blog

Helpers


It was the last night of my conference in Paris, and I was sitting with some new friends in a Brazilian restaurant near the Avenue de la République. We had just wrapped up a day of panels and presentations on the topic of race at the Sorbonne, and the six of us—two Dutch scholars, an Italian, a Belgian, a French woman, and me, the American—had gone out to celebrate. I felt a bit sheepish, as an American, to be eating food from the Americas in Paris, but a few drinks erased that feeling.

We had just finished eating and were sitting around chatting when the once emptying restaurant became full of people again. A young French couple hurriedly slipped into the restaurant and sat down at the table next to us. The man spoke English to us. “Don’t go outside,” he said.

The people at my table huddled anxiously around him. People were running in the streets away from something, he told us. I glanced around the restaurant and saw that everyone was already staring at their phones. Looking at my own, I saw a news alert that said that several bombs had gone off in the Bataclan concert hall.

“That is just 1,000 meters from here,” the French man said, eyes wide. Some of the women around me gasped.

“How far is that?” I, the American, asked.

“Very close, very close,” he said.

Continue reading Helpers →

Chinyere Osuji is the author of Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race, uses social science to understand how Blacks interact with ethnic and racial “others,” and has watched Something in the Rain five times. Site | Instagram | Twitter | Clubhouse

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Dr. Martin Luther King delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington on August 28, 1963. National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia
Blog / Political Prose

Progress for African Americans? Yes, and No


Martin Luther King at podium
Dr. Martin Luther King delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington on August 28, 1963. National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia

All the discussions today of how much racial progress we’ve made since Dr. Martin Luther King was alive reminded me of a disturbing point about the black−white health gap mentioned in recent research, some of which I discussed in an Atlantic essay over the weekend.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, African Americans have been catching up with whites in terms of life expectancy at birth. So things are looking up, right?

Yes, and no. To a sizeable extent, what explains the narrowing of the life-expectancy gap in the last couple decades is not just that things are better for African Americans (though they have improved), but also that things are worse for whites—working-class whites above all.

A New York Times piece over the weekend highlighted this fact. “A once yawning gap between death rates for blacks and whites has shrunk by two-thirds”—but that’s not because both groups are doing better, according to the article. Overall mortality has declined for African Americans of all ages, but it has risen for most whites (specifically, all groups except men and women ages 54-64 and men ages 35-44).

Furthermore, younger whites (ages 25-34) have seen the largest upticks in deaths, largely because of soaring rates of drug overdoses, and those who have little education are dying at the highest rates. The mortality rate has dropped for younger African Americans, a decline apparently driven by lower rates of death from AIDS. Together these trends have cut the demographic distance between the two groups substantially.

For middle-age African Americans, the progress in improving health outcomes implied by the shrinking black−white mortality gap is also less cause for celebration than it might seem at first.

A much-discussed study last year by the economists Anne Case* and Angus Deaton found that huge spikes in deaths by suicide and drug poisonings over the last couple decades have meant that the trend of declining mortality rates we’ve seen for generations actually reversed for whites ages 45-54 between 1999 and 2013. Again, those with little education were hit the hardest.

In my Atlantic piece, I pointed out that the growing social isolation and economic insecurity of the white working class might explain some of these trends. One of the caveats I mentioned is that death and disease rates remain much higher among African Americans and Latinos. (I should have been more precise in the article: although Latinos have higher rates of chronic liver disease, diabetes, obesity, and poorly controlled high blood pressure, they have lower rates of cancer and heart disease, and lower or at least equivalent rates of death).

But it’s not just that the black−white gap persists. Here’s an important passage from Case and Deaton’s paper:

Over the 15-[year] period, midlife all-cause mortality fell by more than 200 per 100,000 for black non-Hispanics, and by more than 60 per 100,000 for Hispanics. By contrast, white non-Hispanic mortality rose by 34 per 100,000. CDC reports have highlighted the narrowing of the black−white gap in life expectancy. However, for ages 45–54, the narrowing of the mortality rate ratio in this period [1999−2013] was largely driven by increased white mortality; if white non-Hispanic mortality had continued to decline at 1.8% per year, the ratio in 2013 would have been 1.97. The role played by changing white mortality rates in the narrowing of the black−white life expectancy gap (2003−2008) has been previously noted. It is far from clear that progress in black longevity should be benchmarked against US whites.

Let me reiterate their point: for Americans ages 45-54, the narrowing in the black−white gap in life expectancy in recent decades was “largely driven” by more deaths among whites.

It’s heartening that overall life expectancy is increasing for many Americans, including African Americans. But it’s also important to remember that, almost a half century after King’s death, people of all races continue to be left out of this country’s progress, and some—whites and nonwhites—may, in fact, be seeing an unprecedented step backward.

* I want to apologize to Dr. Anne Case for mistakenly identifying her as “Susan Case” in the original version of my article in the Atlantic. (The only reason I can think of for why I made that dumb mistake is that a friend of mine is named Susan Caisse.) This brilliant scholar has already suffered the injustice of having her study erroneously called the “Deaton and Case study” rather than the “Case and Deaton study” (for better or worse, first authorship is everything to us academics), and here I’ve added insult to indignity. My sincere apologies.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Mazatlán. Eli Duke, via Flickr, edited
Blog

Mazatlán


The sun was sinking, the day finally ending. I sat on the beach in Mazatlán, propped against my pack, swim trunks still damp under my jeans. At this hour, the beach was empty.

The night before I’d stopped in Mazatlán, a city on Mexico’s northwestern coast, to break up the long bus trip from Tijuana to Guadalajara. Back in Seattle, the Sunday travel section had made the place sound like paradise. All I’d found was a gloomy hotel room, an ocean too hot for swimming, Gila monsters splashing in an open sewer nearby, and a couple of scrawny teenagers humping alongside a broken concrete path near the beach.

Continue reading Mazatlán →

Paul Michelson lives and writes in Davis, California.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog / Political Prose

Best of In The Fray 2015


Monah Smith's hands, which she had tattooed as a young girl in Liberia
From Age of Isolation: Portraits of Older Immigrants. Photo by Dana Ullman




We need your help.

Our nonprofit magazine very much needs donations from readers like you if we’re going to continue publishing in 2016. Please support our efforts to produce the kinds of content you don’t find elsewhere—stories that further our understanding of other people and encourage empathy and compassion—by making a tax-deductible donation to our nonprofit magazine.

And while you contemplate the importance of independent media, check out some of the great articles from around the globe you might have missed in our pages this year. Here are the In The Fray pieces that our editors judged to be the best.

News: The War within the War, by Jo Magpie

Commentary: Cold Peace, By Chris Schumerth

Photo Essays: Portraits of Older Immigrants (Part 1: Age of Isolation, and Part 2: I Can Only Pray), by Dana Ullman

Interviews: Lost and Found: A Conversation with Writer Philip Connors, by Susan Dunlap

From all of us at In The Fray, we wish you and yours the best in 2016.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Don’t Blame Canada If They’re Doing What America Should Be Doing


Photo of tractor with Canadian flagI wrote an essay that appeared in the Atlantic yesterday. Based on the research for my book on unemployment, the piece talks about the debate over Denmark in last week’s Democratic presidential debate—and how the real debate should be over Canada:

Clearly, America won’t expand its social safety net to anywhere near the scale of Denmark’s over the next president’s time in office. Judging from their rhetoric in the debate, though, Clinton and Sanders both agree that government can and should play an important role in extending economic opportunities more broadly. Canada’s approach to policy shows us some of the practical ways a country can do that—without having to go far from our roots as a New World society of dreamers and strivers.

Today’s federal election in Canada should be interesting: will Canada move in the direction of America, or vice versa? (That said, as my friend Barry Eidlin reminded me, the provinces have a lot of say in putting forward policies of their own—to help the employed and unemployed alike—and so some things probably won’t change, regardless of the outcome.)

Unfortunately, writing the headline for this post put the South Park song “Blame Canada” in my head. Here is the video, so that you can share in my pain (NSFW, obviously):

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Page 99 of My New Book on Unemployment


I participated in Marshal Zeringue’s Page 99 Test at the Campaign for the American Reader. The blog is based on a quote by the writer Ford Madox Ford: “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” New authors talk about the ninety-ninth page of their book and what it says about its larger themes. Here’s what I wrote about my book Cut Loose:

Cut Loose book coverPage 99 talks about how the unemployed deal with the depression and anxiety that come from losing part of their identities. Work is central to our sense of self—it’s often the first question we ask someone we meet—and during the workday we build friendships that sustain us throughout our lives. Many of the people I interviewed felt isolated. Friends could no longer relate. Relationships with spouses and children became strained. Unable to provide the way they used to, they found themselves mired in blame and doubts.

One smart way to help the unemployed is used extensively in Canada: action centers. When a layoff hits, the government sets up a help center for the company’s workers and trains some of them to work there. Unlike strangers at a government agency, peer helpers can assist their former coworkers with a personal and personalized touch. Lynn Minick of the National Employment Law Project points out that America’s social safety net for the unemployed largely helps the assertive and self-reliant. For those who might otherwise fall through the cracks, it makes a big difference if they have someone willing to step up for them, he says.

While policies are important, they’re not enough. As I write on page 99:

Individuals internalize society’s belief that being unemployed is degrading, and their mental health and social ties suffer as a result. Regardless of how much they receive in benefits, the unemployed are less satisfied than those with jobs. Even in countries with generous unemployment insurance, the unemployed tend to die at a younger age.

Society treats the long-term unemployed—whose numbers have remained at unprecedented levels since the recession—as lazy and useless. My book focuses on unemployed autoworkers, many who had worked hard for decades and, thanks to good wages and benefits, achieved a middle-class lifestyle. Now, suddenly, they are failures. Some became suicidal because they felt they had let their families down.

Our society attacks the “takers” who live off government aid or the “pampered” union members who had the gall to attain a decent quality of life. It’s obsessed with performance and proficiency, self-improvement and success. But in a culture that values winning at all costs, the long-term unemployed are the ultimate losers. The solution, I argue, has to involve changing that culture.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also: