This Week:

Quote of the Week

Drunken Boaters and the "R" Word

"How Are We Doing?": Toward a National Social Report

Greetings,

Readers may have noticed that I have written nary a word about the ongoing presidential election. That's because I think other people are saying what needs to be said. I try to use Nygaard Notes to say things that aren't being said, or aren't being said as clearly, elsewhere. If people want, I could give some sources of good information that you can hunt down for yourselves. If enough people tell me this would be useful, I'll do so in the next week or two.

In the wake of my appeal for donations a couple of weeks ago I have received many contributions. I am going to give it another week or so to settle down, then you will receive a personal acknowledgment and thank-you for your generosity. A full accounting of the funds will be available in some form, too, as soon as I figure out how to do it. I very much appreciate all the kind and supportive comments that many of you have sent along with your checks. And I appreciate the few rude and antagonistic cranks who bothered to write, as well. It all gives me energy to continue.

‘Til next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

"A resolution on how police handled the ISAG protest is fine. The protest is just a microcosm of how some officers patrol the neighborhoods...What [protesters] told us is no different than what people of color have told us for years."

-- Minneapolis City Council member Brian Herron, speaking at the explosive public hearing called by the council's Committee on Public Safety in regard to the police conduct during July's protests of the International Society of Animal Genetics conference held in Minneapolis. Herron represents the City's 8th Ward, one of the city's most racially diverse. Herron is the only African American person on the Council. The quote is from the independent weekly newspaper "Pulse of the Twin Cities."

Drunken Boaters and the "R" Word

About a month ago I talked about "Racial profiling," which is an issue where the importance of race is obvious. One of the consequences of the "Minnesota Nice" policy of avoiding discussion of uncomfortable issues is that many "white" people find it very difficult to even talk about race, let alone to do some serious work on undoing the effects of the racism from which white folks benefit. This ignorance leads to a mis-reporting or under-reporting of many important issues on the part of the media. This mis-reporting in turn leads to, among other things, a failure by the media to point out the many ways that race affects our lives every day. And the ignorance of the majority of "white" folks prevents the media from getting any flak for the race-blindness in their reporting (or, worse, their intentional minimizing of the role of race.)

I thought of this a couple of weeks ago when I heard a report on Minnesota Public Radio about drunken boaters. It seems that many Minnesotans go "up to the lake" on the weekends, get loaded, and go out cruising in their powerful motorboats. Well, according to the MPR story, the State of Minnesota has decided to crack down on this practice by instituting random stops of boaters to check blood alcohol levels. The story focused on the outrage among many of the boaters, reporting charges of "harassment," the heavy hand of the state, outrageous law-enforcement over-reactions, civil liberties, and so forth.

What does this story have to do with race? Absent from the report was any mention that this sort of law-enforcement behavior is commonplace in urban poor neighborhoods, populated largely by people of color. Same behavior, different victims. Different news coverage? The failure to mention the connection suggests a lack of consciousness about race on the part of the MPR reporter, whose name I don't recall. It also means that this story will be likely be heard differently by black listeners than by white listeners.

The lack of race consciousness on the part of the MPR reporter is likely invisible to him, and to the majority of white listeners. But it jumps out at many people of color and at anti-racist white folks. What is the effect of such unconscious reporting? Unconscious white people remain oblivious, and the rest of us see reinforcement of our suspicion that MPR is a "white people's" station. Some will refer to MPR as "racist," meaning that it is an institution with power that is allowing or supporting beliefs and attitudes that are damaging to people of color. That belief, if expressed forthrightly, will be dismissed by some "white" people as an overreaction, as unreasonable "blaming," as "playing the race card," etc etc etc. All of which illustrates the idea that I mentioned in NN #81 when I said that I "have witnessed on many occasions the refusal on the part of "white" people to believe the things that African-Americans tell them about racism."

When "white" people hear the word "racism," they often get so defensive that the conversation stops entirely and the blaming begins. The next time you hear an accusation of racism that you consider to be ridiculous, stop for a moment and try to imagine why whoever-it-is might be using that word. You might be able to think of something. You might not. Either way, you're bound to learn something about yourself.

"How Are We Doing?": Toward a National Social Report

If someone asks you, personally, "How are you doing?" it's unlikely that you will mention only your gross financial income, although that will be part of the picture. You might want to tell them that your kids are healthy and doing well in school, or that you just visited your elderly parents who are enjoying a comfortable retirement. You'd want to mention how your recent surgery went, and how much you are enjoying that auto mechanics class you are taking in community ed. Although all of these things are somehow related to "the economy," they all go beyond financial success. There's more to life than that, and everyone knows it.

As in our personal lives, the answer to the question "How are we doing, as a nation?" is incomplete if it only focuses on economics. A nation, or a society, also has a "social health" that can be measured and talked about. And yet, our national news reporting reflects an obsessive focus on economics, and doesn't tell us too much about our social health. We have innumerable and well-known "thresholds of performance" for the nation's economic life. The daily news gives us endless reports on the GDP, the balance of trade, housing starts, the Flow of Funds accounts, the Index of Leading Economic Indicators, household debt, the Dow Jones, the NASDAQ, business starts, business failures, the Consumer Price Index, and on and on and on.

We even have a federal agency that tracks all of this stuff – the National Bureau of Economic Research – which has official definitions for those things that we call "recessions" and "expansions." And, of course, the President has his Council of Economic Advisors to help him understand the nation's economic performance, identify problem areas, and take appropriate action when needed.

Reporting on these statistics, studies, and shenanigans is not relegated to obscure scholarly journals and dusty library stacks. TV gives us shows like "Wall Street Week," "Bloomberg Money," and "Marketplace." Minnesota Public Radio has placed their popular financial show "Sound Money" in national syndication, and NPR offers a daily economics show called "Marketplace." Every newspaper has a "Business" section focusing on every conceivable economic fact, trend, statistic, report, policy, and forecast. The Wall Street Journal, with its daily acres of market reports, is the widest-circulation newspaper in the U.S.

As a result, everyone "knows" that the United States economy is "doing well." We are in the "longest economic expansion in U.S. history," they tell us, and everybody who gets quoted in the newspaper seems to be hysterically happy about it. Have you ever heard of a guy named Alan Greenspan? I'll bet you have. And I'll bet you're aware that the nation's unemployment rate is low, and that the Federal Reserve Bank is afraid of the risk of inflation, aren't you? Come on; it's been in all the papers.

There is little doubt that the United States leads the world in the collection, analysis, interpretation, and reporting of information about what is called "the economy." And it is well known that the "economy" of the U.S. is the world's largest and most powerful. Whether the high level of knowledge about our economy one of the causes of its dominance, or one of the results of it, either way the two are connected. Why is our society so obsessed with economic news? Societies, like individuals, tend to pay close attention to the things they care about the most. Our society cares about money. And since the United States is the unqualified leader of the world's economy, everybody wants to know how and what we are doing in the economic realm. So our economic news goes around the world.

Enlarging Our View of the National Life

Economic news is important, no doubt. But there is another realm that we need to understand if we want to get an accurate read on "how we are doing" as a nation. Unlike "the economy," we don't even have a word for it, but this realm is the social realm which shapes our lives in concrete ways every day. For lack of a better word, let's call it our "social health." The general well-being of the nation's people is profoundly affected by the performance of the economy, about which we are fantastically well-informed, and by the performance of our social processes and institutions, about which we mostly know very little. Why is that?

It's not for lack of available information. Statistics and reports are available on a wide range of social indicators, such as teen suicide, incarceration rates, poverty, inequality, education, wage levels, infant mortality, life expectancy, drug use, crime, housing affordability, and countless others. Yet few of us know much about these indicators, and fewer still would be able to organize what we do know into a brief assessment. We know, and can say, when the economy is "doing well." Everyone would know if we went into a "recession." But when it comes to our social health, most of us would be hard-pressed to say how we are "doing" in general. The information is out there, or at least much of it is. But nobody ever talks about it, at least not on the radio or TV, or in the newspapers.

Even when bits and pieces of this information do get on the news or in the papers, there is no context for them. Maybe there will be a short article reporting on the latest child welfare report put out by the Children's Defense Fund. So, the skyrocketing rate of child abuse may be in the news for a day, and then it's gone. People who rely on the mainstream media will hear, see, and read more about the Fed's decision to raise interest rates one-quarter of one percent than they will hear about suffering kids. Even supposedly well-informed progressives are often hard-pressed to back up with facts their gut feeling that "the economy is doing well, but the people are not."

It's no wonder that this is so. Although the United States produces a mind-boggling amount of social statistics, there is no systematic way to collect and synthesize, to relate and understand, this myriad of numbers. Although individual commentators may be looking at these things, and publishing the results of their studies in obscure scholarly or professional journals, there is no high-profile, easily reported number that gives a "quick read" on our social health which could be used to more fully inform our democratic process.

This is not the way it has to be.

There is a growing "Community Indicators Movement" in the United States which is seeking to create the tools that will allow us to begin to go beyond economics to more fully answer the question "How is the United States doing?" Ironically, although the idea of national social accounting was first proposed in the United States 35 years ago, our country is today the only one of the industrial countries that still does not issue periodic and widely-distributed national social reports. And, despite the fact that this movement has already taken root in over 150 communities here in our own country, so far it has passed almost unnoticed in the corporate media.

Next week I'll take a look at the history of attempts to report on the nation's social health over the past 100 years (including a Minnesota connection). I'll also report on what might be involved in producing a national "social portrait" for this country, and cast a glance at how other nations do it.