Forum des supporters du LOSC

In the wake of the Trayvon Martin case, politicians are calling again for a national conversation on race. Previous attempts at this conversation have often broken down. Let’s learn from our mistakes. With the help of my colleagues, here are some suggestions for thinking and talking about race and racism. I’m white, and so are the vast majority of my colleagues, so most of this advice is written from and to a white perspective. (For a black perspective, I recommend the Root’s excellent Race Manners column, written by Jenée Desmond-Harris.) But I hope everyone will find something useful in it.

1. Don’t freak out. When somebody accuses you of racism, it’s natural to get angry and deny it. Relax. We’ll never be able to talk about this stuff if racism is always a firing offense. Treat racism the way you’d treat sexism. You can have sexist moments or sexist blinders without being a pig. Inadvertent sexism is something you’re allowed to work on. Racism should be the same. The way you’re talking about that “nice African-American gentleman”? Yeah, that’s a little bit racist. Don’t get defensive. Just understand why and try to do better next time.

2. Treat each person as an individual. Don’t tie yourself in knots trying to be politically correct. There’s no special way you’re supposed to treat this or that group. Just remember what Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned 50 years ago: a nation in which people would be judged not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” That’s the ultimate principle. Resist inferences based on classification. Judge each person on his or her merits.

3. Practice what you preach. Nobody likes to be accused of racism. The best way to open hearts, eyes, and minds is to apply the same scrutiny to everyone, including yourself. If you want people to see racial bias in George Zimmerman’s reference to “punks,” don’t rationalize Trayvon Martin’s use of “cracker.” No, these terms aren’t equivalent. Yes, Zimmerman is the one who pulled the trigger. Yes, white-on-black racism dwarfs black-on-white racism. But if your goal is to persuade, get past the differences. Focus on shared failings, shared lessons, and shared rules.

4. Don’t pretend you’re perfect. If you’re racially colorblind, great. But it’s more likely that you’re human like the rest of us. Studies have documented pervasive, unconscious racial bias even among people with pure hearts. That’s understandable, given our history and the common tendency toward intergroup bias. To overcome this bias, you have to notice it. You don’t have to think about it all the time—that would make your interactions weird. But every now and then, reflect on things you’ve done or said. The seat you walked past on the bus, next to that woman. The way you tightened up as you passed that guy on the street. What was that about? Little by little, you’ll clean yourself up.

5. Be gentle and forgiving. People have been uncomfortable around race for a long time. Some will presume, accuse, rationalize, or deny. Others will speak obtusely or ineptly. Resist the urge to rebuke them. Summon the grace to forgive. Don’t just correct people; change them. You’ll get your message across more effectively through kindness, good humor, and clear but friendly engagement than through confrontation. And by listening, you might learn.

6. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Did you hear President Obama on Friday? He talked about the Martin case. Here’s a bit of what he said:
“There are very few African American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. … There are very few African Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.”
If, like me, you’ve never had any of those experiences, imagine how they feel. Imagine how you’d react to the story of a young man like you, your brother, or your son being suspected, followed, and killed. How can you comprehend the outcry over Martin’s death without understanding that feeling? You don’t have to shut up about the case. But try to understand where others are coming from.

7. Separate the issues. The legal case against Zimmerman is related to, but different from, nationwide problems affecting young black men. Everyday personal prejudice is related to, but different from, ways in which our institutions—schools, markets, sentencing laws—exacerbate racial gaps. Black-on-black violence, like white-on-white violence, is a bigger killer than white-on-black profiling, but all three problems are real. It’s a lot easier to discuss these questions intelligently once you distinguish them and stop using one issue to drown out the others.

8. Race isn’t everything, but race isn’t nothing. Conversations about cases such as this one often get bogged down in a fight between “This is about racism” and “You think everything’s about race.” Let’s drop the caricatures. Consciously or not, race influences many things: Zimmerman’s suspicions, Martin’s reactions, the police response, and the jury’s inferences. But other factors also come into play: vigilantism, concealed firearms, self-defense laws, and 911 protocols. Race isn’t the whole story. But if you leave it out, you’re kidding yourself.

9. Don’t polarize. The world isn’t black and white. The U.S. population is 17 percent Hispanic/Latino, 13 percent black, 5 percent Asian, 1 percent Native American, and 2 percent biracial. Obama descended from Kansans and Kenyans and grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia. Zimmerman has a Peruvian mother, an “Afro-Peruvian” great-grandfather, and an old Myspace account that once disparaged Mexicans. Everything about race and ethnicity—identity, integration, prejudice, conflict—is getting more complicated. Don’t oversimplify the topic or the individuals involved.

10. “They” don’t all think alike. Don’t speak loosely for or about “white people” or “the black community.” Charles Blow, Charles Ogletree, and Charles Barkley see things differently. So do Cornel West, Allen West, and Kanye West. These differences don’t weaken black America any more than the differences between Joe Biden and Joe the Plumber weaken white America. It’s diversity. Deal with it.

11. Put things in perspective. Slavery, segregation, cultural dysfunction, and economic stratification are, to put it mildly, a difficult legacy to transcend. It’s easier to say “get over it” when you’re not the one being followed through the store. But don’t forget how far we’ve come, either. Laws and culture have changed. Disparate treatment persists, but it’s less racially motivated and more mediated by class. Forty-three percent of whites voted for our first black president. We have an attorney general who knows what it’s like to be profiled. “Things are getting better,” says Obama. He’s right.

12. Build trust. You can stand there all day defending drug laws, racial profiling, and a jury with no black members. But if millions of black Americans vehemently disagree, that’s not just their problem. It’s your problem. A healthy society requires broad public confidence in its institutions. When people march in the streets because they don’t trust the criminal justice system or the voting process, their confidence must be earned. These are your countrymen. They need answers, reform, and hope.

Last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer issued a vast formal memo setting out “a far-reaching realignment of the company,” one that would bring together its “silo” divisions to create “serious fun so intense and delightful that [it] will blur the line between reality and fantasy.” Despite the hyperbolized doublespeak, the go-to cliché for a corporate reorg of this type is “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” But to understand what’s happened at Microsoft during the past decade—as their bread-and-butter PC sales have declined, as their products (save for the Xbox) have stagnated, as Apple and Google and Amazon have lapped them on every course, as their stock has remained flat while Apple’s has soared by 4,000 percent—we wouldn’t look to a century-old passenger liner disaster. To really grasp the decline and fall of Microsoft, we need to look to the landmark HBO series The Wire.
What does Microsoft in the Ballmer era have in common with drug kingpin Avon Barksdale’s organization in The Wire? For years, both of them had the strongest package. They owned their territory, owned their market, owned their users. They were untouchable. Then times changed, bringing new competitors with new, intense products. Their own product went weak. But they couldn’t let go. “We got a weak product, and we holding on to prime real estate with no muscle,” Avon’s cerebral second-in-command, Stringer Bell, complains to him. For the Barksdale organization, the product was heroin and the real estate was the drug-ravaged Franklin Towers housing project. For Microsoft, the product is Windows and the real estate is the PC.
“We fought for every one of them Towers,” says Avon’s loyal sister, Brianna, “and to give them up now would mark us as weak.” The Towers were their pride and their security. Likewise, Microsoft hung onto their PC towers. They fought for them, even took on a massive antitrust lawsuit for them. As David Bank wrote in Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft, after Internet Explorer displaced Netscape Navigator in the ’90s, a debate ensued within Microsoft between the “doves,” who wanted Microsoft to embrace the Internet with or without Windows, and the “hawks,” who wanted to make Windows a mandatory part of the Internet experience. The hawkish position refused to accept the inevitable: The Windows high—like any high—would fade. Desktop apps would give way to far more addictive Internet sites.
Still, the hawks won. There was no room for a Stringer Bell–style dove to strike out and make a deal with an ambitious youngster like Marlo Stanfield (Google) or a wily long-standing rival like Proposition Joe (Apple) for a share of profits and a shot of innovation. (“It’s not even a thought, man,” Avon chided Stringer.) Why should they cut deals with the riff-raff? They had crushed Lotus, Novell, and Netscape. Office and Windows were stable, profitable behemoths. Sure, Linus Tovalds—aka Omar Little—was a perennial annoyance, robbing Microsoft of server profits by giving away Linux for free, but he didn’t threaten the main business. For novelty’s sake, they could cut Windows with all sorts of adulterants (remember Active Desktop? Or MSN Explorer?) and users would still keep buying, at least for a while. As far as Microsoft was concerned, consumers didn’t have a choice, because Microsoft couldn’t imagine being bested by upstart punks any more than Avon Barksdale could:
Avon Barksdale, October 2004: Marlo. Who the fuck is Marlo? An independent with no fucking support got all the prime real estate and we doing what exactly? Young boy ran us off the corner? ... Since when do we buy corners? We take corners.
Steve Ballmer, November 2004 (as quoted in a sworn affidavit by former Microsoft engineer Mark Lucovsky): Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that guy. I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.
Unable to innovate, Microsoft repackaged their product—as WindowsME, as Vista, as Windows 8—just as Stringer Bell was forced to repackage his weak product: as WMD, as Pandemic, as Bird Flu. At a grindcore show in 2007, I met a hip young woman who was being paid to push Microsoft’s Zune media player on me and other audience members. She admitted that she owned an iPod herself.*
Microsoft just couldn’t compete with the strong stuff: iPhones, iPads, Google, Facebook. With Windows 8 they mixed two weak strains together: the Windows desktop and Metro’s touchscreen UI. They put a touchscreen interface on machines without touchscreens. It was the opposite of synergy—it was a speedball.
And it had a lot to do with bad management. There’s too much personnel turnover in the drug trade for managerial rot to really set in—for the Microsoft analogy on The Wire, you’d look not just to Avon Barksdale’s intransigence but to his nemeses in the Baltimore police department, with its toxic strains of authoritarianism, politics-playing, bean-counting, and pure sloth. Consider Windows Vista, the much-maligned follow-up to the genuinely decent Windows XP. It took five years to produce something that was far worse than its predecessor. Three years into it, in mid-2004, they threw out all the code and started over. There was a big reorg then, too, just like now. Reorgs are the product of endless turf wars between executives and keep managers occupied with PowerPoint charts. Reorgs keep peons nervous about where the axe will fall, as does the brutal zero-sum stack rank review system that dictates that every good performance review in a group must be balanced by a bad one—and thus that you can only excel if your peers fall behind.
What reorgs don’t result in is a stronger product. They result in slow, clunky, buggy, yet long-in-the-making junk like Microsoft Surface, or Vista, or Kin. Why did it take two years to realize that Vista wouldn’t work? And how did Kin, Microsoft’s iPhone competitor, even get released? It landed in May 2010, it was universally loathed, and then it vanished. A contributor to the infamous Minimsft blog—ground zero for disgruntled employees—put it this way: “We all knew that Kin was a lackluster device, lacked the features the market wanted and was buggy with performance problems ... But when our best ideas were knocked down over and over and it began to dawn on us that we were not going to have any real affect [sic] on the product, we gave up.” Or, as the Baltimore police department’s deputy commissioner Rawls once said to a frustrated underling, “What part of ‘Bend over’ didn’t you understand?”
The Microsoft employees who stuck with the party line ensured that Kin would fail as badly as the War on Drugs, and that Prop Joe’s iPhones would lock people into multiyear addictions. “We began counting down to the 2 year point,” the Minimsft writer added, “so we could get our retention bonuses and get out.” Which is sensible enough. In 2006, just as Vista missed the holiday season and cost the company millions, Microsoft paid out $1 billion in bonuses to 900 top employees. As Baltimore police lieutenant Ellis Carver says of drug-trade soldiers: “They fuck up, they get beat. We fuck up, they give us pensions.”
David Simon, creator of The Wire, once said, “I am very cynical about institutions and their willingness to address themselves to reform.” He was talking about all institutions, from police departments to Congress to Microsoft. But there’s one place where the Microsoft/Wire analogy breaks down. Avon and Stringer faced jail and death. The cogs in the Baltimore PD were all trying to save their jobs. And Baltimore had next to no money. But as far as anyone can tell, Steve Ballmer cannot be fired, and has billions at his disposal. He is kingpin of Microsoft until he decides otherwise. So what’s his excuse?
Correction, July 19, 2013: This article originally referred to a woman who, while promoting Microsoft's Zune media player in 2007, admitted that she owned an iPhone. She actually admitted that she owned an iPod. (Return to the corrected sentence.)