What I Don't Understand About the Rachel Dolezal Case

Here's what I think I do understand about the strange case of Rachel Dolezal:

• Ms. Dolezal's experiences bring her to the conclusion that she is more "black" than "white." Since racial designations in the United States have very little to do with outward appearance (as demonstrated by the fact that she had to be "outed" by her own parents), this is not a nonsensical thing to do. 
• Many leaders of Civil Rights Movement and other black leaders have been very light skinned. See, for example, the aptly named Walter White, one of the founding members of the NAACP.

Walter White, son of two parents born into slavery, identified as black.

• Many African-Americans resent it when white Americans co-opt "black culture" to suit their own needs. As rapper Talib Kweli noted, this kind of behavior may be intended as sympathetic, but usually it's just exploitative or selfish. That Ms. Dolezal reportedly sued Howard University for not showing her work because she was white only reinforces this view.

Here's what I do not think I understand:

• Why exactly are people so angry at Ms. Dolezal. The whole point of her story is that race is socially constructed in so many ways. She did make up a story, but the whole concept of race in the United States is a story, fabricated by those in power so they could stay in power. The episode makes me sad, not angry.
• Whom did she harm? Kweli says that she probably took positions from women of color when she led the Spokane NAACP, and I suppose that's right. But if there were so many people clamoring for the job, why did she get it?
• Why is this about white privilege? That's not to say the sense of entitlement felt by white Americans is not a problem in general, but it seems to me that we have to be careful about how we use the term lest it lose all meaning.

Effective Students = Effective Schools

If we are to achieve Thomas Jefferson's dream of an informed, independent polity, we need effective schools. Children need to acquire certain skills in order to function politically and economically in our society, and so adults need to hep them acquire such skills. Some people would like to think that home schooling is the best way to attain that goal, but they are being unrealistic at very least, and may even be wrong in their basic conclusions. If "society" needs young people to be educated, then "society" must do the educating, and that means we need schools.


One serious problem with this conclusion, however, is that bad schools are at least as harmful as no school at all. They may be physically dangerous, they may teach kids that life sucks because it is boring or arbitrary, and they may train people in destructive habits. As a result, we cannot just say we want schools; we want schools that teach effectively.
So, what makes an effective school?

The best answer -- and I do not mean this facetiously or cynically -- is that effective students make effective schools. In one sense, this statement is not very helpful. Students with the talent, discipline, and family support necessary to succeed don't need a lot of help from professional teachers. (Let's call this the First Premise of School Evaluation.) These kids will find a way to do well even despite bad teaching. If everybody in the school has to tools when he arrives, then the school looks, and maybe even is, a good school. Admission offices at selective private schools, like the one I work in, understand this fact, and seek applicants who will make the institution and the community stronger.

The less obvious sense of the statement is more important. Our goal is not to have effective schools, but to have effective students. The only reasonable measure of a school, therefore, is whether its graduates can so what they need to do when they leave. (This will be the Second Premise.) If a school's alumni, by and large, live happy and productive lives, then the school has met its ultimate purpose.

Of course, if we go back to the First Premise, though, we can't know whether the alumni's happiness and productivity came as a result of or despite the actions of the school. To evaluate the schools themselves. therefore, we need to find a way to measure the difference between the kid when he arrived and when he left.

This is a difficult thing to achieve, and will be the subject of a number of later posts.

"Reading The Master and the Margarita in Saint Petersburg" by Lucy Papchristou

An Examination of the Effects of Samizdat on Domestic and

Transnational Relationships in the Former Soviet Bloc

            On March 5, 1953, the citizens of the Soviet Union breathed a sigh of relief. Joseph Stalin was dead. In the years following his death up until the demise of the Soviet Union, the intellectual classes engaged in an elaborate system of underground publishing called samizdat, which involved not only the various literary and political factions of the Soviet Union but also intellectual circles in the West. The primary paradigm of the Soviet Union during this time was that the Soviet government had a monopoly on the possession and circulation of ideas and thought. While there certainly existed in great numbers samizdat works of political and social significance, the true threat to the Soviet regime samizdat posed was not in its content, but in its very existence, in what it stood for. Samizdat was a kind of “gateway dissent,” deriving its power from its ability to build foundations—connections between people of different backgrounds living on opposite ends of the globe—upon which future change could occur. Thus the content of the works was not of great importance; rather, it was the effect experienced by each person or social group as the clandestine material was passed from hand to hand that generated the most powerful dissent. By creating this channel of communication to encourage the exchange of thought, samizdat served to subvert the paradigm of the Soviet regime.

            One of the most important effects of samizdat stemmed from the quintessential characteristics of the text itself. Samizdat was produced by individually typing-out the works on privately-owned typewriters due to a lack of copy machines, the few of which were operated exclusively by the government. Once finished, the typescripts were then shared among a circle of trustworthy friends and acquaintances.^[1] Often retyped by dozens of typists during their lifetime, the typescripts were riddled with typos and grammatical errors.^[2] Ann Komaromi calls samizdat an “object-sign,” meaning that the physical product has value in and of itself.^[3] A western reviewer describes this idealization from the Russian perspective: “‘the memory of a first encounter with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is as much a physical memory—the blurry mimeographed text, the dog-eared paper, the dim glow of the lamp switched on late at night—as it is one of reading the revelatory text itself.’”^[4]

            The visceral feelings experienced from the examination of the text had great implications for the ideological connections the work eventually served to form. The name “samizdat” is a parody of the word Gosizdat, the acronym for the state publishing house,^[5] and the underground publishing houses milked the idea that samizdat was a clandestine parody of the powerful state institution to their advantage. Komaromi describes how samizdat was an “opportunity for carnivalesque consumption, something on which to get high.”^[6] There was a primitive sense of thrill derived from circulating, possessing, and reading such illicit material. However, the real danger samizdat posed to the Soviet regime was not due to the content which so enthralled the reader, but what it represented. In an article written for Canadian Slavonic Papers entitled “From Gosizdat to Samizdat and Tamizdat,” D. Pospielovsky calls samizdat a “historically unprecedented phenomena” because it is “a product of a system which rejects and bans independent thought as a matter of principle…” not because it was “considered to be a direct threat to the public order.”^[7] From the perspective of the Kremlin, neither the subject nor the content of work mattered as much as what it represented. Samizdat was an act of restoration—returning power back into the hands of the people. This posed a great threat to the Gosizdat, who had previously had control over the circulation of ideas and was now unable to ease the flow. On this most basic level, samizdat formed a connection between author and reader—not because of any political agenda espoused or cultural phenomenon elucidated, but merely due to its physical presence and tangibility.

            The circulation of samizdat caused immediate and widespread government crackdowns, proving that the material did in fact have an effect on the ability of the Soviet government to operate in the way in which it wanted to. The empowerment people experienced as a result of distributing and reading samizdat breached the concrete walls of Soviet control. The first government action occurred in September of 1965 when two writers, Andrei Sinyavksy and Yuli Daniel, were arrested and charged under article 70, which prohibited “agitation or propaganda carried on for the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet Regime.”^[8] After a number of resulting protests and three petitions signed by Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, the XXIII Congress passed 190-1 and 190-3 into the Criminal Code. The articles condemned public protest and the dissemination, production, or printing of “anti-Soviet slander.”^[9] The head of the KGB in 1970, Yuri Andropov, went so far as to say, “the Committee for State Security is taking the requisite measures to terminate the efforts of individuals to use ‘samizdat’ to disseminate slander against the Soviet state…they are under criminal prosecution…”^[10] The “prosecution” of Alexander Solzhenitsyn ended in his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, and Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a human rights activist, was sent to a psychiatric facility in 1969 for two years.^[11] While the preceding examples prove that samizdat was capable of disturbing the foundations of the Soviet government, as the following examples will demonstrate, the subversiveness of samizdat lay not in its content, but in its power to bring otherwise disparate groups of people together and lay the seeds for future dissent.

            In an example of a second class of connection formed by samizdat, the actions of two disparate political groups resulted in the revolutionizing of the very structure of the underground publishing houses. Their specific discussions, however, were irrelevant to the outcome of their relationship: the subversion of the Soviet political paradigm. The two groups involved were the socialists and the democrats, the former of which revered Leninism and the old Soviet ways and the latter of which turned their heads wistfully towards Western liberal democracy.^[12] When Brezhnev visited Washington in June of 1973, socialists and democrats were thrown into widespread debate over the possible source of reforms in the Soviet Union, for which both sides lay in hopeful expectation as a result of the détente.^[13] Eventually, Medvedev was worn down and conceded that pressure from the West and from the lower Russian classes could in fact generate change. This democrat “victory,” which crowned Sakharov as the “conscience of the Soviet dissent movement,”^[14] had profound implications for the future of  samizdat.

            While Sakharov’s deification may appear to be the outcome of the debate, the more profound result actually involved the democratization of the samizdat system, a process which served to undermine the paradigm of the Soviet Union. After the democrats obtained control over samizdat and gained credibility in the eyes of the other dissident factions, some party members expressed a desire to reorganize and rejuvenate the democratic movement. Plans were made to unite democrats using kolizdat—collective samizdat produced using a “‘home-made printing apparatus’”^[15]—so that information and ideas could flow more efficiently. However, another group of democrats, among them P. A. Abovin-Egides and P. Podrabinek, believed that it was in the best interests of the democrats to reach over to other dissident groups, such as the socialists and the Slavophiles.^[16] A third internal faction believed that democrats should work towards going “‘back to the people’” by making an effort to write a “‘common language’” with “‘men on the street.’”^[17] All three of these ideas were extremely important for the future of samizdat. The first two proposals were all about facilitating connections, both within the faction and among other dissident groups. Stronger connections meant a more reliable flow of information and therefore a better-armored militia of dissent to wage peaceful war on the Soviet government. The third proposal, in which the democrats strove to relate to the common man, was in fact borrowed from their own political ideologies. It was only when these ideas were implemented, however, that the democrats began to challenge the authority of the Soviet government.

            The concept of the role of the individual in society, closely tied to the philosophical concept of democracy, was another important aspect of samizdat that aided dissidents in their quest to subvert the Soviet system. The Russian dissident Andrei Amalrik believes that in contrast to most dissident movements, samizdat was unique in that it did not require the individual to “sacrifice [his or her] ‘I’ for the sake of the general public.”^[18] The “I” was in fact elevated to previously unforeseen status in the dissident movement. However, instead of living just for oneself—for the sake of the “I”—the individual became part of a larger collection of “I”s, living “with all and for all.”^[19] Everything about samizdat, from its production to consumption, therefore became an act of searching for and expressing the self within a network of similarly-seeking souls. This confluence of otherwise isolated people was essentially the creation of a make-shift democracy. Democracy—from the Greek demos meaning people—is fundamentally concerned with establishing a chain of communication between the government and its citizens. The government knows what its citizens think, and the citizens are able to criticize the government. In Soviet Russia, the democrats were essentially building a miniature model of a democracy within the confines of an extremely rigid communist system. Not only did this democracy aid the flow of ideas, but its very existence was poisonous to the Soviet regime, whose survival depended upon universal acceptance of communist ideals. This concept of going back to the people, of involving everyone—not just the intellectual circles—in the dissident movement, directly subverted the contemporary paradigm: the Soviet government has a complete monopoly on the flow of thought.

            Although the process by which the samizdat system was democratized was facilitated by the existence of samizdat (all of the socialist-democrat and democrat-democrat discussions were conducted via samizdat), the subversion of the paradigm of the Soviet Union was not a result of the content of the debate. The substance of the debate was not, after all, about ways to bring samizdat back to the people or create a network of “I” spheres. Samizdat itself accomplished that organically; its very existence and facilitation of the connection between the two dissident groups caused that outcome—not anything that was actually verbally communicated. In the next and final example of the effects of samizdat, a similar phenomenon occurred when two countries banded together to, albeit unwittingly, sow the seeds of future revolutions.

            The final case of a samizdat relationship most aptly demonstrates the concept of “gateway dissent” because the connection formed between the two parties served to lay the foundation for more potent acts of dissent in the future. This connection is singular in nature because it involves two vastly different groups of people: émigré Poles residing in Sweden and the opposition forces back in Poland. During the period of détente in the 1970s, Poland looked toward neutral Sweden as a possible “channel” between them and the West, a bridge across the mighty Iron Curtain.^[20] In the early 1970s, Poland and Sweden began to take advantage of the two countries’ shared Baltic Sea ports to circulate samizdat material—a method far safer and convenient than transporting the works by land, as was previously done.^[21] In 1976, however, the articles being smuggled changed. After a series of antigovernment protests in Poland that spurred the founding of a number of human rights and social change organizations, an increasing number of underground publishing houses began to crop up in Poland, notably Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza (Independent Printing House, NOWa).^[22] Almost all of these new publishing houses, including NOWa, received their supplies (mimeograph machines, typewriter ribbons, pressure rollers, etc.) from Sweden.^[23] In addition, their relationship with Sweden allowed the dissidents to quickly develop strong relationships to a larger émigré complex in important Western cities, most notably Paris, London, and New York.^[24] (Kultura, perhaps the most influential of all Polish samizdat journals, was published by a Pole living in Paris.^[25]) For the first time since the birth of the Soviet Union—or at least since the end of Khrushchev’s Thaw—the Iron Curtain had been successfully breached. And samizdat itself was the vehicle which carried these relationships over the Curtain.

            But what is the significance of this growing alliance between Poles and Swedes? The important question to ask here is how this relationship was perceived back at the Kremlin. The answer requires a leap forward to 31 August, 1980, when the Polish Solidarity movement (Solidarność)—began at the Gdańsk Shipyard,^[26] the first non-communist labor union in the Soviet Union.^[27] Samizdat, as it turned out, played a pivotal role in the development of this movement. Pamphlets were often handed out at the shipyard and activists frequently published organizational announcements to inform the public about what was going on.^[28] The development of Solidarność was a crucial step towards the destruction of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet bloc. In June 1989, members of Solidarność were elected to seats in Parliament, electing in August of that year Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first noncommunist premier since the 1940s.^[29]

            But what does this have to do with Sweden? The answer is that without the relationship Polish dissidents formed with Sweden (which led to, of course, the founding of numerous samizdat publishers, many of which aided in the circulation of samizdat during the Solidarność years), Solidarność would not have been nearly as organized, efficient, or efficacious as it was. The samizdat produced in the early 1970s with the help of Sweden can therefore be classified as “gateway dissent,” for it lay the foundations for future acts of far more extensive and profound dissent. However, the samizdat of the early 1970s did not cause the events of 1980 in its content, but rather in its existence; the relationships it formed during that time led directly to Poland’s ability to start a large-scale revolution. In this way, Swedish-Polish samizdat did indeed subvert the existing political paradigm of the Soviet Union—although it did take nearly a decade to lay out the groundwork. Solidarność proved that the people did have a voice of their own separate from the dictations of the Kremlin—and they proved this by their usage of samizdat.

            The existence of samizdat in the Soviet Union was one of the most remarkable acts of dissent in the history of oppressed populations. It had a strong presence in many countries in the Soviet bloc and involved thousands of people from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds who would have otherwise remained socially isolated. However, despite the positive outcomes samizdat produced, what was written down on the page was not of great importance in the grander scheme of events. The discussions between the socialists and the democrats did not reach the ears of the Kremlin; what did was due more to what samizdat stood for than what it was actually trying to express. The connection formed between the Sweden and Poland in the 1970’s—not the content of the samizdat which they produced together—helped to set to the stage a few years later when the Polish Solidarity movement was born. In short, presence was of more significance than substance. The effects of samizdat in the twentieth century pose interesting questions in the twenty-first. The path of Russian dissent is yet unknown. Who will step up to the plate and challenge Putin’s totalitarian monstrosity? Will it be Pussy Riot? Alexei Navalny? In the years ahead, who or what will replace samizdat?

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^[1] Ann Komaromi, “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat,” Slavic Review 63 (Autumn, 2004): 599.

^[2] John D.H. Downing, Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements (London: Sage, 2001), 356.

^[3] Komaromi, “Material Existence,” 609.

^[4] Ibid, 603.

^[5] Gordon Johnston, “What Is the History of Samizdat?” Social History 24 (May, 1999): 122.

^[6] Komaromi, “Material Existence,” 605.

^[7] Dimitry Pospielovsky, “From Gosizdat to Samizdat and Tamizdat,” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 20 (March 1978): 46.

^[8] Tania E. Lozansky, “The Role of Dissent in the Soviet Union Since 1953,” The Concord Review 2 (1989): 7.

^[9] Ibid.

^[10] “Creating an Underground Press: Samizdat in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc,” Tavaana, accessed 7 April, 2014, https://tavaana.org/en/content/creating-underground-press-samizdat-soviet-union-and-eastern-bloc.

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] Hyung-min Joo, “Voices of Freedom: Samizdat,” Europe-Asia Studies 56 (June, 2004): 579

^[13] Ibid, 580.

^[14] Ibid.

^[15] Ibid, 581.

^[16] Ibid.

^[17] Ibid.

^[18] Ann Komaromi, “Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics,” Slavic Review 71 (Spring, 2012): 76.

^[19] Andrei Amalrik, Notes of a Revolutionary, trans. Guy Daniels (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 26.

^[20] Lars Fredrik Stöcker, “The Baltic Connection: Transnational Samizdat Networks between              Émigrés in Sweden and the Democratic Opposition in Poland,” in Samizdat, Tamizdat & Beyond: Transnational Media During and After Socialism, ed. Friederike Kind-Kovács et al. (Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), 54.

^[21] Ibid, 57.

^[22] Ibid.

^[23] Ibid, 59.

^[24] Ibid.

^[25] Marek Suszko, “‘Kultura’ and European Unification,” The Polish Review 45 (2000): 183.

^[26] Stephen W. Mays, “A Synthetic Analysis of the Polish Solidarity Movement” (Graduate thesis, Marshall University, 2011), 33.

^[27] “Solidarity,” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed 9 April, 2014, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/553374/Solidarity.

^[28] Mays, “A Synthetic Analysis of the Polish Solidarity Movement,” 137.

^[29] “Solidarity.”