Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (75): Freedom Riders

1961, Freedom Riders Julia Aaron and David Dennis sit aboard an interstate bus as they and 25 other civil rights activists are escorted by Mississippi National Guardsmen on a violence-marred trip between Montgomery, Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi. Originally published in the June 2, 1961, issue of LIFE – Photo by Paul Schutzer

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Freedom Riders

were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States in 1961 and following years to test the United States Supreme Court decisions Boynton v. Virginia (1960) and Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1946).  …

Boynton outlawed racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals serving buses that crossed state lines. Five years prior to the Boynton ruling, the Interstate Commerce Commission had issued a ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company that had explicitly denounced the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of separate but equal in interstate bus travel. The ICC failed to enforce its ruling, and Jim Crow travel laws remained in force throughout the South.

The Freedom Riders challenged this status quo by riding various forms of public transportation in the South to challenge local laws or customs that enforced segregation. The Freedom Rides, and the violent reactions they provoked, bolstered the credibility of the American Civil Rights Movement. They called national attention to the disregard for the federal law and the local violence used to enforce segregation in the southern United States. Police arrested riders for trespassing, unlawful assembly, and violating state and local Jim Crow laws, along with other alleged offenses, but they often let white mobs attack them without intervention. (source)

More on Jim Crow and segregation. More iconic images of human rights violations.

What is Freedom? (6): Objective and Subjective Freedom

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G.A. Cohen and Nicholas Vrousalis have suggested that we should distinguish between objective and subjective freedom:

• We are objectively free if there is no interference with our actions and if we have a real opportunity to act – in other words, if we have the capabilities and other means necessary for action and if afterwards no one stops us from acting. For example, I am free to speak f I have the education and money necessary for me to engage in meaningful speech and if no one censors my speech.
• We are subjectively free if we do something from reasons that are our own or that we do not mind acting from after due consideration of those reasons. I am free to be a janitor if I have my own, well-considered reasons for choosing this occupation (I may have a deep sense of service to others and strong feelings of humility), but not if I somehow convinced myself that there are, regrettably, no reasonable alternative occupations available to me – even though in reality there are (if there are no real alternatives, then I’m (also) objectively unfree rather than merely subjectively). In the latter case, my being a janitor is not something that I do not mind to be and is not something I do for my own reasons. For the same reasons, I am free to be a doctor if I have arrived at my reasons motivating me to be a doctor through my own sound and independent thinking, and not if I have convinced myself that in reality I have arrived at my reasons through parental influence and indoctrination. Similarly, I’m not subjectively free if I’m a drug or sex addict, if I wish to quit, and if I’ve convinced myself that I can’t quit (if I really can’t, I’m (also) objectively unfree).

Both objective and subjective freedom are important. Someone who is not interfered with and who has all the necessary means and capabilities can still be unfree if he thinks – probably incorrectly – that he is lived by others, that his reasons for doing things are other people’s reasons, that there is no free will and only determinism, or that there are no alternatives. The case of paranoia comes to mind. Vice versa, people may feel subjectively free even though they are objectively unfree, for example if they think that their reasons are their own even if that is objectively not the case. Think of the effects of advertising, beauty ideals or political indoctrination.

How does this distinction between objective and subjective freedom relate to human rights? Objective freedom is clearly dependent on human rights: these rights can stop interference and can offer the means and capabilities necessary to act (the latter is the case for the right to education and the right to a minimum living standard).

However, subjective freedom is in some instances also dependent on human rights. You can best arrive at your own well-considered reasons for your actions, and convince yourself that you have and that your reasons are really your own, when you are a member of a thriving public space where the relative merits of actions, goals and reasons are freely discussed and where the presence and feasibility of alternatives can be clearly seen.

More posts in this series are here.

Political Jokes & Funny Quotes (117): Women Are Always Wrong

More political jokes here.

The Causes of Poverty (58): Low Average Intelligence in Poor Countries?

girl in a school in Africa

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The claim that poverty is caused by the stupidity of the poor has an international equivalent: some people look at the fact that most wealthy countries in the world are mainly populated by white people, combine this fact with the claim that non-Western countries have lower average IQ, and conclude that they have found the reason why poor countries are poor.

This is of course a nasty piece of victim blaming on a global scale. It’s also borderline racist. Moreover, if successful, this view will make poverty reduction impossible, given the genetic determinism that is often paired with IQ analysis. If kids get their IQ from their parents, if IQ determines wealth, and if nothing else causes poverty, then why bother doing anything at all?

For example, a book by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen titled “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” suggests that the average IQ in Africa is around 70, much lower than in East Asia or the West. They also claim that lower average IQ scores are the cause of low levels of development, income, literacy, life expectancy etc.

There are many problems with this theory. First, most of their data are made up. IQ score aren’t available for many countries. At best, the scores are extrapolated on the basis of tiny samples. Second, the theory confuses cause and effect. It’s poverty that drives down IQ rates. The Flynn effect suggests that factors such as improved nutrition, health care and schooling improve IQ test performance. IQ determinism is simply wrong.

Even if the data could tell us that poor countries have indeed relatively low average IQ rates, that’s no reason to assume that low IQ causes poverty. Causation may go the pother way, and it’s also possible that there’s something else, a third element that causes both poverty and low IQ, namely the experience of colonialism. The colonizers were no more interested in creating education institutions than in fostering sustainable, non-extractive economies. Don’t forget about the omitted variable bias. However, here we’re assuming that the data can tell us about IQ, and they currently can’t.

Other posts in this series are here.

Annals of Heartlessness (20): Reporting a Crime is Worse Than the Crime

Hasidic Jew sitting in a bus

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The first shock came when Mordechai Jungreis [a member of an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community in NY, not in the image] learned that his mentally disabled teenage son [not in the image either] was being molested in a Jewish ritual bathhouse in Brooklyn. The second came after Mr. Jungreis complained, and the man accused of the abuse was arrested.

Old friends started walking stonily past him and his family on the streets of Williamsburg. Their landlord kicked them out of their apartment. Anonymous messages filled their answering machine, cursing Mr. Jungreis for turning in a fellow Jew. And, he said, the mother of a child in a wheelchair confronted Mr. Jungreis’s mother-in-law, saying the same man had molested her son, and she “did not report this crime, so why did your son-in-law have to?” …

While some ultra-Orthodox rabbis now argue that a child molester should be reported to the police, others strictly adhere to an ancient prohibition against mesirah, the turning in of a Jew to non-Jewish authorities, and consider publicly airing allegations against fellow Jews to be chillul Hashem, a desecration of God’s name.

There are more mundane factors, too. Some ultra-Orthodox Jews want to keep abuse allegations quiet to protect the reputation of the community, and the family of the accused. And rabbinical authorities, eager to maintain control, worry that inviting outside scrutiny could erode their power. … “They are more afraid of the outside world than the deviants within their own community,” Dr. Heilman said. “The deviants threaten individuals here or there, but the outside world threatens everyone and the entire structure of their world.” (source)

More about pedophilia here. More in the annals of heartlessness here.