Mom and Dad wanted a better life for me, so they had their babies in America... My flight out of Europe was from Malpensa Airport, just outside of Milan, direct to JFK. Thank God for direct flights.

I flew Delta (which is bankrupt). Check-in was off to a side, away from most every other desk at Terminal 1 and there was even a security check before check-in. I got through the security screening, and found heavy security with automatic rifles and bomb-sniffing dogs all around the baggage check. I soon realized why: everyone on this secure side of the terminal was flying to the US or Israel.

All that security is expensive. And then I realized how much I appreciate what my parents did for me. They left their home countries for the US because they wanted something more for their children. Because I was born in the US, have US nationality and an American passport, my life is worth a great deal. When I think of Delta, I think of unions and tall white pilots in black uniforms. I also think of the bankruptcy. Delta Airlines, which is broke, wasn't paying for that security. But somehow, American and Israeli lives are worth more than Iraqi or Palestinian lives, and so all this expensive security was provided. The world has decided this must happen, the powers that be have figured out a way so that even if I fly a bankrupt airline, my safety must be guaranteed and someone will pay for it. I am an American and in more ways than I realize and everyday I benefit from it indirectly.

So this is why Iraqis and Palestinians--or in my case, Colombians and Indians--want to come to the US: then maybe the world will hold more regard for the lives of their children. If their children carry American passports, then the world will treat the children as if their lives are valued, and figure out how to pay for it later. We inherit the world as it is given to us, and most of us try to make the best for ourselves and our loved ones in the world as it exists. If we gave American citizenship to every child born in American occupied Iraq, would it cheapen the value of American citizenship?

I am so thankful to be an American. I benefit from it in so many ways. But it is a bit different to be poor in America. Poverty is conflated with blackness and insipidity. Our society and culture (especially in elite circles) have racist and classist legacies which have yet to be fully reconciled or addressed. When elites contemplate and decide on policies affecting the poor, they make account for the fact that these lives are cheap. How are we, as a culture, to confront these sorts of cultural pathologies? We can blame certain individuals. We can claim that only elites think this way and attack the elites. We can attempt a period of national dialogue. We can use the theories of agenda setting and encourage the editors of The New York Times (the American vehicle with the most power in this realm) to publish more stories about these sorts of issues. Well-off Americans from the continental coasts and metropolitan areas, who contribute substantial sums to the Federal budget, can demand that their federal income tax dollars be put to work compassionately.

For days after Katrina hit, the streets of New Orleans were littered with the bodies of poor locals who were left to die in the storm and flood. For days, black bodies decorated the streets of an ancient American city--a poor and black city--and the richest nation in the world watched a new narrative of America as it unraveled on television screens across the globe.

Many regular--not particularly rich--Americans began filling the gap in funding left by Washington elites who misallocated a collective pool of tax funds to the disproportionate benefit of the wealthiest among us. How many black bodies did you see on television during the week immediately after the storm? How many photographs depicting this reality made it into the pages of The New York Times?

The telethons encouraged Americans to open their wallets after the natural disaster, but where has the coverage been of the human disaster we have created for ourselves, i.e American poverty? This has been factored into the aggregate image of America beamed across the world everyday in news reports and television broadcasts. The legacy of Katrina will factor into America's soft power and the positive perceptions of American culture and strength.


How often are these serious questions asked in our press and entertained by our journalists? We need to be contemplating what the aftermath of Katrina reflects about our society and our culture, not just because it effects our soft power, but for ourselves. Shouldn't we?

When I reflect honestly and deeply upon this, I don't see how we can reasonably call our's a "civilization." The irony is that our president continuously insists on framing foreign policy speeches about terrorism as civilization against savages. But clearly, there is evidence in our policy priorities and our national actions that our civilization is in decline, that America is acting as a savage nation. We don't even tend to our own.

We abandon our own people, treat them as if they are alien or inferior, seemingly because they are poor and have been for generations. Blackness seems to abdicate society of responsibility. Black suffering has become an internally coherent proposition, it is a brand of human suffering that doesn't demand pity, sympathy or empathy. It is alien but comfortable, expectable. How shall we deal with this state of affairs?

I was born lower-middle class and my life is worth more today than if I were poor. But I come from a family that makes me a bad example--we are immigrants of a particular sort, who have been constantly striving for more, making head way, etc. Most don't make that much head way. I think this has to do with the premium my parents/family have placed on education. In my instance, I believe that I am worth more to the world today than if (1) I had been born in the native country of my mother or father and didn't have American citizenship and (2) I didn't have +$200,000 worth in education under my belt. But I'm still not treated as well by society as I would be if I had $200,000 in the bank, or if my father had more than a million.

So class and money matter most in considerations of value by society, but education is a mediator: it permits for mobility between classes and provides access to more money. So giving poor kids education might provide them mobility out of the class in which they are born, give them access to money and an opportunity to achieve societal value.

It turns out that there is something which links poor American children with Palestinians and Iraqis. We divide people in the world into the categories of Clean and Dirty. Rich Americans, unionized Americans, white Israelis are clean people. Iraqis, poor blacks in New Orleans, and their children are dirty people. The rules separating dirty from clean are not clear or principled. Just to illustrate, a few examples.

Laurence Summers is president of Harvard University. He has led a very successful life as a professional economist. Summers served as treasury secretary to Bill Clinton and chief economist of the World Bank. He also achieved great success as an academic. As chief economist at the World bank, he wrote this memo about 'dirty industries', which was eventually leaked:

DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP

'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City....

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

Dirty industries should be exported to poor countries, because that's where the dirty people live. This is the logic of the argument, which is propped up with economics. There are different kinds of people in the world. We don't know exactly where to draw the line that distinguishes between them, but we know poor people in Africa are definitely dirty and rich people in the west are definitely not.

Now, I don't support this as a normative description. I'm just trying to make the logic explicit. There are examples which don't fall nicely into one category or another in this logic. My human ontology is different. In mine, there is such a thing as a savage, and Laurence Summers is definitely one. I understand that he is just applying the logic of economics, but civilized human beings understand that such logic, which is internal to a single discipline, does not accurately describe the world as a whole because it is reductionist. This logic reduces out other factors about the world which are only reducible at the price of sophistication and civilization.

You can reduce humanity to dirty and clean people and rationalize the special treatment of the clean (and the inhumane/mistreatment of the dirty) through an appeal to economics, but the price will be your humanity. You pay with your humanity and transform yourself into an unsophisticated savage. Maybe I'm oversimplifying things here--failing to see the nuance where it exists--but I'm quite sure that Summers' advocacy is just an example of the insipid, half-assed application of a social scientific principle in policy.

I can give you another more abstract example that illustrates what I'm saying on a different level. Jonathan Kozol has written some very good books about what I take to be our society's most pressing geostrategic problem and one which I have experienced firsthand: the abysmal state of public education in America, especially inequality in education. Recently, the Japanese automobile manufacturer, Toyota Motor Company, decided to build a new plant in Canada rather than Alabama and cited two reasons why. The first had to do with the reduced health care costs for workers, since Canada has a full-coverage health care system. The second reason cited was additional costs associated with the training of workers in Alabama, because American workers are getting a shit level of education, which later requires excessively remedial methods for training. This makes education in America a geoeconomic issue which affects our level of competitiveness.

In Harper's Magazine, Kozol recently published an article adapted from his newest book, Shame of a Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America ($16.50 from Amazon.com). The derivative article, "Still Separate, Still Unequal" from the September 2005 issue of Harper's, is republished on the web here.

My personal experience with this issue is as follows: I graduated from a de facto segregated school in an urban area in northern New Jersey (75% Hispanic, 15% black, and 47% of students were eligible for free lunch). Of my incoming freshman class of around 990, less than 300 made it to graduation. About 100 went on to higher education (either to a two year or four year college)--of these about five went to a private, out-of-state university. Now, my peers in this high school, despite their lack of opportunity, were brighter and more insightful than my peers at the relatively prestigious private universities I would later attend. Most could not afford attendance at those universities.

I went to high school with dirty people and college with clean people. But a private and prestigious university education is a resource as well as a privilege, and allocating that resource to less qualified (though wealthier) clean students at the mircoeconomic level, will have a macro effect since it is happening across the board. The macro effect is that this misallocation and inefficient distribution of education to lesser qualified clean students, produces a suboptimum workforce, while the systematic exclusion of dirty people keeps dirty thoughts out of the academy.

All the intelligent dirty people are squeezed out of the clean educational institutions. Later on, though they have the natural talents which make them superior candidates for higher positions, they will lack the credentials for those positions and will have to work underneath less qualified, though better educated people who were once clean children. That means in our economy, the talents and authority won't be distributed or placed efficiently. That means there is a massive opportunity cost suffered by our economy because of this misallocation of the resources of education.

Even before the university level, and independently of my personal experience, dirty children are being squeezed out and treated inhumanely across the board. And these bright but dirty children know it. They are aware of the treatment they receive while they remain trapped in the predictament. They have noticed patterns, and they begin to ask themselves quesitons. Why is it that they only ever see clean white people on television and from a distance, never as peers, only as teachers and superiors. And they know that clean white people get treated better.

These are some statistics from Kozol's article in Harper's:

In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.

Even these statistics, as stark as they are, cannot begin to convey how deeply isolated children in the poorest and most segregated sections of these cities have become. A teacher at P.S. 65 in the South Bronx once pointed out to me one of the two white children I had ever seen there. His presence in her class was something of a wonderment to the teacher and to the other pupils. I asked how many white kids she had taught in the South Bronx in her career. "I've been at this school for eighteen years," she said. "This is the first white student I have ever taught."

In San Diego there is a school that bears the name of Rosa Parks in which 86 percent of students are black and Hispanic and only some 2 percent are white. In Los Angeles there is a school that bears the name of Dr. King that is 99 percent black and Hispanic, and another in Milwaukee in which black and Hispanic children also make up 99 percent of the enrollment. There is a high school in Cleveland that is named for Dr. King in which black students make up 97 percent of the student body, and the graduation rate is only 35 percent.

Kozol, a Rhodes scholar and graduate of Harvard College--who had ambitions to become a professor before teaching in inner city schools and being exposed for the first time to the inequalities which plague our society, before being exposed to the reality of racism's legacy and the dividends being paid on it by beautiful brown, black, and white children in dirty schools--has dedicated his life to exploring and exposing these issues in his writings.

He also picks up on the socio-cultural pathology, the collective cognitive dissonance which we exhibit on the issue, and the inability of our press and politics to own up to the realities:

Perhaps most damaging to any serious effort to address racial segregation openly is the refusal of most of the major arbiters of culture in our northern cities to confront or even clearly name an obvious reality they would have castigated with a passionate determination in another section of the nation fifty years before—and which, moreover, they still castigate today in retrospective writings that assign it to a comfortably distant and allegedly concluded era of the past. There is, indeed, a seemingly agreed-upon convention in much of the media today not even to use an accurate descriptor like "racial segregation" in a narrative description of a segregated school. Linguistic sweeteners, semantic somersaults, and surrogate vocabularies are repeatedly employed. Schools in which as few as 3 or 4 percent of students may be white or Southeast Asian or of Middle Eastern origin, for instance—and where every other child in the building is black or Hispanic—are referred to as "diverse."

Kozol is a progressive reflector and a moral anchor for our society. His writings force us to ask hard questions. Why are children condemned to pay the costs of their parent's poverty, why do we tolerate this? So Harvard produces savages as well as saviours; but is a man like Jonathan Kozol regarded with a level of esteem as a savage like Laurence Summers? Despite degrees from Oxford and Harvard, Kozol is not held in the same regard. And this despite the fact that one is a savage and the other a fully formed human being with a strong grasp of reality without the need to reduce out humanity. This is a fully formed human and a role model.

Summers is a savage so narcassitic and self-impressed by his own talent for quantification that he reduced out the human dimensions of macroeconomic problems without noticing it. Those human dimensions are the perceptions and experiences of real children, insightful and capable, who learn from observation that they are considered dirty and not clean and that society and strong men, under the advise of men like Summers, will treat them as such. From Kozol again:

High school students whom I talk with in deeply segregated neighborhoods and public schools seem far less circumspect than their elders and far more open in their willingness to confront these issues.

It's more like being hidden," said a fifteen-year-old girl named 'Isabel' I met some years ago in Harlem, in attempting to explain to me the ways in which she and her classmates understood the racial segregation of their neighborhoods and schools.

"It's as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don't have room for something but aren't sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don't need to think of it again."

I asked her if she thought America truly did not "have room" for her or other children of her race.

"Think of it this way," said a sixteen-year-old girl sitting beside her. "If people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone, that we had simply died or left for somewhere else, how would they feel?"

"How do you think they'd feel?" I asked.

"I think they'd be relieved," this very solemn girl replied.

We live in a world where sixteen year olds, who will eventually be completely marginalized in society, understand more about society than men who pilot our economies from the World Bank and Treasury Department. Ghettoized, dirty children know more about reality than the perpetual children, who lead our society's most influential and agenda shapping educational institutions, in this case Harvard. Does this shock you? Do you find this in anyway revealing about our society and what you should eventually expect to come from it? Should such a society really be regarded as a leader for all the nations of the world? Should we even regard ourselves as a civilization? Or, sincerely, is our's a nation of savages, led by savages? What has become of our once respectable, principled leadership?

Dirty and clean help me to understand my society in ways that I don't want to accept, but with the introduction of the terms a reality is revealed that I cannot deny. Savage men divide humanity into the dirty and the clean, and these men are leading our society and occupying some of the most influential positions in my nation. America has been rewarding and promoting savagery to the helm of Harvard and the Department of the Treasury. And every other nation in the world follows this society's lead.

Do you want to live in this society? Do you think this should be tolerated? Really, "savage" is such a strong word, with so many connotations, but I want to be honest and I can't come up with a better word. Can we address the children in our nation, who we have abandoned, with an honest answer to the questions of why their schools are in such conditions without saying that, "The men who control our nation's resources, who provide the leadership for our society , are a group of savages and we have become savages for having followed their lead. And this is why we have abandoned you." Is there any way to honestly explain what we do to them without having this factor into the answer?

Urban children know more about the world than the clean among us. Do we have the courage to accept the truths which we must to actually help them? Or are we cowards in addition to savages, and so will continue to deny rather than deal with what we are doing to them, what society does to them, which we do nothing about? Do we have too much pride to accept the truth because it is easy to deny it when it comes from a poor child of six or sixteen?

"Dear Mr. Kozol," wrote the eight-year-old, "we do not have the things you have. You have Clean things. We do not have. You have a clean bathroom. We do not have that. You have Parks and we do not have Parks. You have all the thing and we do not have all the thing. Can you help us?"

The letter, from a child named Alliyah, came in a flit envelope of twenty-seven letters from a class of third-grade children in the Bronx. Other letters that the students in Alliyah's classroom sent me registered some of the same complaints. "We don't have no gardens," "no Music or Art," and "no fun places to play," one child said. "Is there a way to fix this Problem?" Another noted a concern one hears from many children in such overcrowded schools: "We have a gym but it is for lining up. I think it is not fair." Yet another of Alliyah's classmates asked me, with a sweet misspelling, if I knew the way to make her school into a "good" school—"like the other kings have"—and ended with the hope that I would do my best to make it possible for "all the kings" to have good schools.

As a society, we are in quite a bit of trouble. I often advocate education as a solution, but it is clear that education is no panacea. Laurence Summers has degrees from MIT and Harvard. Humanity is the key. Education can be spread in ways that are oppressive and repressive. And educational institutions can be used as tools of social stratification. I do believe the more people we educate to be morally active and grant with intellectual tools, the better the mechanisms for checking the powerful and elite will be. Maybe we can't give such an education to everyone, but we can do a better job of educating more people.

I'm making a tremendous effort to be fair to elite institutions like Harvard, which educated Summers and Kozol. But clearly, I'm on the side of Kozol and another graduate of Harvard College, Cornel West, as against Summers, who only did is graduate work at Harvard. West and Kozol are two of the most humane and fully progressive voices I know of in America. They write about crises that have taken hold of our culture and the effects of savage policies and societal neglect.

Many of our most prestigious institutions have lined themselves up on the side of men like Summers. The New York Times chewed up Cornel during his period of falling out with Summers, while he was still the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor but before he left to assume a position as Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton. Summers forced him out and the Times made it out to be a conflict over scholarship. West released an experimental rap CD, in an effort to reach more young blacks, and worked with Al Sharpton on his presidential exploratory committee. Summers insisted to West that this was distracting him from real scholarly work and that he should refrain from those actions. Even the Economist, a highly prestigious magazine, commented on the matter, siding with Summers and taking the opportunity to poke fun of blacks in politics and scholarship:

According to the Boston Globe, last October Mr Summers rebuked Cornel West, who holds one of Harvard's coveted university professorships. Mr West's alleged sins included recording a rap CD, leading a political committee for Al Sharpton's possible presidential campaign, writing books more likely to be reviewed in The New York Times than in academic journals and allowing grade inflation.

Since then the incident has spiralled into a full-blown academic tempest. The insulted Mr West is considering a rival offer from Princeton, his former employer. Henry Louis Gates, the department head, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher, are thinking of going with him. [Gates soldout and stayed, while Appiah left with West.] Mr West has also announced that he intends to take a leave of absence. [This is inflamatory: West was recovering from prostate cancer at the time. This was the reason for his leave.]

It will get worse. Jesse Jackson, that well-known crusader for academic standards, has arranged a meeting with Mr Summers. “The tension at Harvard is having an impact across the country,” says Mr Jackson, whose last venture into politics was to try to broker a deal with the Taliban. Mr Sharpton also wants to meet Mr Summers. He is considering filing a lawsuit against Harvard as “an aggrieved party”. [This strikes me as racist. I don't want to accuse the Economist of bad faith, but what the fuck do they know about black politics in America or dirty geopolitics in the world?]

If every professor who backed a lunatic politician were to be sacked, half the interesting minds in academia would be lost. Nobody denies that Mr West is talented. But is his work any good? He is the author of more than a dozen books, some of them serious contributions to his field. But lately he seems closer to becoming a performance artist—and a poor one at that. [Now the Economist is reviewing rap CDs? What do the pasty editors of this British journal know about black culture?]

So Mr Summers clearly has a point. But that does not mean he will win. Minority groups are very powerful in academia--Mr West's introductory course on Afro-American studies attracted more than 600 students this semester. [Blacks are 'very powerful in academia'? How the fuck does this assumption creep into their analysis? I have no idea what they could possibly mean.]

This entire article in the Economist can be found here.

What can be made of this? This is a clean institution talking about a tangle between Harvard and the dirty black progressives. I find the depiction pretty disgusting. I have a friend who took that last class of West's and she said it was an empowering experience. I've spoken with West several times before, and this makes sense, as he was very supportive in converstation.

As an academic and a miniority, I would never describe black professors as a powerful group. This description seems like something bordering on xenophobia: four black professors at Harvard and suddenly the Economist is screaming about how "the niggers are taking over Harvard." If I were at Harvard, I would enroll in West's class, not because he is influential, but because he tells the truth and he's an inspiration to be around. West uses a vocabulary that pentrates the clean culture, and offers truth over sanitized knowledge. That to me is his appeal.

In 2002, I got into a bit of an argument with Grace Yu, an incredibly progressive and impressive Rhodes Scholar from Syracuse (the second in our history). She took the side of Summers and I couldn't understand why. She knew little of Cornel West or his work, but she insisted upon the position that he hadn't been contributing enough in terms of scholarship. It turns out that this was the line assumed by The New York Times in its coverage. But they failed to mention that when West asked Summers to explain what dimensions of his work were insufficiently scholarly, Summers revealed he hadn't actually read any of West's work.

This is to be expected, savages talk out of their asses about things they haven't read, because if Summers would have read West's work, he wouldn't be such a savage. You can't escape the tone and purpose of Cornel West, which is singular and unifies his work. But because Summers continues to talk out of his ass, The New York Times was willing to parrot his argument without the context of West's side. Eventually, that incomplete argument was repeated by many with little knowledge of the events, including those at the Economist, and a Rhodes Scholar in a Thai Restuarant on Erie Blvd.

If there is a lesson I would want you to derive from having read this, it would be that we should all beware of anyone who is too clean. Clean culture is achieved through the denial of reality, which is messy. Reality is dirty. I am a dirty person. I am real and I am honest. If you want to be those things, then you're going to get dirty too.

UPDATE... Since I wrote this piece, the New York Times Magazine published an article on the same theme. The article, written by Kwame Anthony Appiah and adapted from his forthcoming book, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers ($17 on Amazon.com), appeared on the cover of the 1 January 2006 issue of that magazine. That article was titled, The Case for Contamination: No to purity. No to tribalism. No to cultural protectionism. Toward a new cosmpolitanism.

The distinction of 'clean' and 'dirty' first arose in my head from the word juhta which appears in many languages of the Indian subcontinent. The most direct translation of juhta is 'contaminated' though for the purposes of this article, I used the world 'dirty'.