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Interesting article over at the New York Times, Growing Unease for Some Blacks on Immigration. (The article also reports on black civil rights leaders who support the immigrant efforts.)

Some blacks bristle at the comparison between the civil rights movement and the immigrant demonstrations, pointing out that black protesters in the 1960’s were American citizens and had endured centuries of enslavement, rapes, lynchings and discrimination before they started marching.

Funny, that’s the same sort of thing some blacks say about gay rights or gay marriage.

As an editor, I consider “civil rights movement” standard usage for the specific efforts beginning in the 1950s to eliminate segregation and Jim Crow, to gain voting rights for African Americans, and generally to make a course correction in American race relations. However, I reject the notions that the civil rights movement was/is the only movement for civil rights or that its unique characteristics make it impossible for any other civil rights struggle to be compared to it.

Some of the concern seems to be self-interest:

But nearly twice as many blacks as whites said that they or a family member had lost a job, or not gotten a job, because an employer hired an immigrant worker. Blacks were also more likely than whites to feel that immigrants take jobs away from American citizens.

This disparity represents part of the unfinished work of the civil rights movement. But I don’t believe that civil rights will be won one at a time. I think they’re connected. (And the article reports on some of those connections.) Sentiments like this make it clear how immigrant activists must continue the civil rights movement even as they build upon it.

The article also quotes statistics that “In 2004, 72 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20’s were jobless, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts.” I don’t doubt these numbers per se, nor that they represent dire problems. But having grown up in Southern California, where racism was defined as white and brown, I wonder why Hispanic dropouts are more likely to be hired than whites or blacks. And having lived in Philadelphia, where I began to become more aware of African American concerns, I wonder to what extent incarceration affects the numbers.

Warehousing young black men in prison is an outrage. Why does the Times obscure the problem as one of unemployment?

My friend and coworker Philocrites has written a smashing reflection: Bush and Colbert, Lear and the Fool.

Remember King Lear’s Fool? The jester in the play doesn’t crack Bob Hope one-liners or play the lute; he introduces a very dark kind of comic relief. He satirizes Lear’s misjudgments. He’s the only person who tells Lear the truth, even though Lear can’t bear to acknowledge the full significance of his mistakes until the end.

Go read the rest of it.

Richard Reeves has written a profile of John Stuart Mill in the May 2006 Prospect Magazine.

I haven’t read much political philosophy, so it was interesting to learn about Mill. Some nuggets (each paragraph lifted separately):

Mill was a man who saw little value in ideas unless they were tethered to human improvement, and was brilliantly successful at using his intellectual stature to influence the politics and culture of his age. He is the greatest public intellectual in British history

“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.”

Mill saw an important role for government, believing that people needed educational and economic resources to lead their lives along paths of their own construction.

Mill’s success rested on three factors. First, he wrote clearly and attractively. Second, he managed to attract liberal opinion without provoking too much opposition from the church, by simply putting to one side questions of supernatural power. Third, he appealed to the Romantics by giving poetry and art a vital role in establishing many of the goals for human improvement while remaining firmly on the side of reason and science against “intuitionism“—the idea that certain truths are known a priori without any need for experimental proof.

Public intellectuals can help to shape the general climate of ideas, but are rarely able to effect specific changes in law: one of the reasons why Mill later became an MP.

Unlike many Victorian intellectuals, he was not opposed to factories and trains and real income growth. But he was concerned, like Keynes 80 years later, that the habits of competition might become entrenched: “I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels… are the most desirable lot of human kind.”

But for Mill, liberty consists of much more than being left alone. It requires choice-making by the individual. “He who lets the world . . choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation,” he writes. “He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties.” For Mill, a good life must be a chosen life.