We Need Better Tools Of Persuasion

A couple of years ago a high school friend of mine wrote a short piece for HuffPost about the inequities in our criminal justice system––the very disproportionate percentage of people of color who are in prison compared to their percentage in the general population. The key point of the piece isn't the inequity but our difficulty making white conservatives care about the inequity and the clear injustice. This point is important whether the issue is racial justice or economic or gender or religious justice or issues of basic practicality and survival like climate change and good government.

In his piece Gilliam discussed the problem of persuasion in the area of racial justice. Blacks are far more likely to spend time in prison than whites. Blacks are more likely to be convicted and more likely to receive prison sentences and longer sentences than whites convicted of similar crimes. Sure it’s unfair, but for some reason unfairness isn’t an effective argument against it with people who are not directly affected by the injustice, white people and conservatives. Conservatives are likely to reply that life is unfair. Hearing that far more black men are in prison conforms with the entrenched idea among white people that more black men are in prison because they commit more crimes. Even though they do not commit more crimes. Explaining this does not persuade whites who are inclined to think otherwise.

Unfortunately, some progressives are satisfied with expressing a pure and logically consistent idea regardless of its ineffectiveness, its unpersuasiveness as an argument.

We see these inequities as injustice and wonder how Americans can stand for it––if it is clearly an injustice. It has to do with mindset. The reason may be how it’s framed in arguments and discussions and political discourse. In recent decades white conservatives have done a very effective job of creating white unease over the issue of race and religion and orientation and otherness.

Now psychologists have learned that it is unhelpful to counter those carefully created sentiments (that are cemented daily by FoxNews and talk radio) by explaining they are incorrect or hateful or unChristian, which they are.

It is better to reframe the issue in terms the other side is likely to understand and relate to. We aren’t persuading ourselves here. We are trying to persuade them.

Here are the relevant paragraphs from Franklin Gilliam’s piece at Huffington Post:

"In a series of experiments, [Stanford psychologists Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt] report that, “...exposing people to extreme racial disparities in the prison population heightened their fear of crime and increased acceptance of the very policies that led to those disparities”. Hetey and Eberhardt conclude that “... bombarding the public with images and statistics documenting the plight of minorities” is unlikely to increase support for progressive reform policies."

"We have found that starting a conversation with the American public by essentially claiming the system is racist does, in fact, dampen support for progressive reforms. But, and this is an important finding, our research also shows that starting the conversation with the values that many Americans adhere to, and then pointing out racial disparities, is effective in garnering support for progressive reforms.

"In a recent piece in Slate, Jamelle Bouie argues that, “...advocates might want to try different language (or a different approach) in their campaign to reform the criminal justice system.”

"We believe we have identified a better strategy that allows advocates to both use facts and talk about race. Paying attention to values and order in criminal justice reform communications is an important framework for moving public will."

Which is, essentially, the same argument made in an Atlantic piece this week. The Atlantic also buries the gist in its discussion and supporting information.

The gist is: frame the argument in values which the other side already has, like patriotism and faith, instead of trying to prove they are dead wrong… even if they are.

The article in the Atlantic this week can be read here

We need to integrate these findings into how we work to persuade people. Our scripts need to be less about gratifying our own feelings of righteousness and anger and more directed at changing and shaping opinions that are different from ours.

The Fine Print We Just Signed Has Nullified Our Legal Rights

A very disturbing article in the New York Times explains how corporations have nullified our legal rights. It's all there in the fine print at the bottom of the agreement we just signed.

I can’t decide if this is Orwellian or Kafkaesque. Maybe it’s both.

Why don’t corporations write contractual language saying we agree to allow them to commit crimes against us? If it’s written into a contract’s fine print which we must sign to complete a purchase of something we need, I guess the corporation whose product we need owns us body and soul. They can do with us as they wish.

If something is in a contract we sign is it automatically legal? Can a lawyer legalize murder in a properly written contract? Can a contract absolve a company of all responsibility for its deeds or its products? Apparently. There are arbitrators, but arbitrators need the corporations’ business. They are bound to them as firmly as we are, and will do as the corporations wish.

Our grandparents used to say “they have you over a barrel.” You’re helpless to resist. You can’t say No. You can’t fight it. Surrender. Give up. Give in. The contractual language of everyday life has put us over a barrel.

Somewhere in the fine print our corporate masters have nullified our legal rights. They have deleted their legal responsibilities for anything that might happen, for anything they might do. They have blocked our access to the justice system forever, nullifying one of the three branches of our constitutional government, at least as far as ordinary citizens are concerned.

How can this possibly be legal?

The point is, it’s not for us to say what is legal. We are nobodies. Our legal rights were suspended when we signed the agreement on our last online purchase.

If the document said we were now the legal property of the lawyer who wrote the fine print would we even know?

(One step toward removing arbitration clauses from consumer agreements.)

Unequal Justice

First off, a brilliant accusatory letter to Antonin Scalia from the Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts Jr., which I will insert in full. Emile Zola couldn't have done it better.

To the Honorable Antonin G. Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States:

Dear Sir:

Twenty-one years ago, your then-colleague, the late Justice Harry Blackmun, wrote what became a famous dissent to a Supreme Court decision not to review a Texas death-penalty conviction. In it, Blackmun declared that he had become convinced “the death penalty experiment has failed” and said he considered capital punishment irretrievably unconstitutional.

The death penalty, he wrote, “remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination...and mistake...From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.”

You mocked him for this stance in an opinion concurring with the majority, invoking as justification for capital punishment the horrific 1983 case of an 11-year-old girl who was raped then killed by having her panties stuffed down her throat. “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection,” you wrote, “compared with that!”

A few months later, the very case you had referenced came before the court. Henry Lee McCollum, a mentally disabled man who was on death row in North Carolina after having been convicted of that rape and murder, applied to the court for a review of his case. You were part of the majority that rejected the request without comment.

The demagoguery of your response to Justice Blackmun is pretty standard for proponents of state-sanctioned death. Rather than contend with the many logical and irrefutable arguments against capital punishment, they use a brute-force appeal to emotion.

Certain crimes, they say, are so awful, heinous and vile that they cry out for the ultimate sanction. For you, Sabrina Buie’s rape and murder was one of those, a symbol of why we need the death penalty.

As you have doubtless heard, it now turns out McCollum was innocent of that crime. Last year, he and his also mentally disabled half-brother Leon Brown (who had been serving a life sentence) were exonerated by DNA evidence and set free.

A few days ago, McCollum was pardoned by North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory.

The case against him was never what you’d call ironclad. No physical evidence tied him to the crime. The centerpiece of the prosecution’s case was a confession McCollum, then a 19-year-old said to have the mentality of a child 10 years younger, gave with no lawyer present after five hours of questioning.

“I had never been under this much pressure,” he told the News & Observer newspaper in a videotaped death row interview, “with a person hollering at me and threatening me...I just made up a false story so they could let me go home.”

But he didn’t go home for over 30 years. You and your colleagues had a chance to intervene in that injustice and chose not to. Not incidentally, the real culprit avoided accountability all that time.

The argument against the death penalty will never have the visceral, immediate emotionalism of the argument in favor. It does not satisfy that instinctive human need to make somebody pay — now! — when something bad has been done. Rather, it turns on quieter concerns, issues of inherent racial, class, geographic and gender bias, issues of corner-cutting cops and ineffective counsel, and issues of irrevocability, the fact that, once imposed, death cannot be undone.

Those issues were easy for you to ignore in mocking Blackmun. They are always easy to ignore, right up until the moment they are not.

This is one of those moments, sir, and it raises a simple and obvious question to which one would hope you feel honor-bound to respond. In 1994, you used this case as a symbol of why we need the death penalty.

What do you think it symbolizes now?

Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald


The problem we have in this country is too many public duties are handled in a "businesslike" way, as cheaply and superficially as possible. But complex matters like criminal justice shouldn't be managed the same way we manage a fast food restaurant.


There's also this story, from Texas Monthly. A prosecutor loses his job after a man spends 18 years on death row only to be exonerated.


And meanwhile (in case you didn’t think our justice system kicks down and kisses up) there are these stories:

From TIME, a story about a rich kid getting off after using the excuse that he suffers from being rich.

From Alternet, a perp walks free and an innocent goes to prison.

It gets hard to tell satire from reality.

Kicking the Poor: An American Pastime

Barbara Ehrenreich has a trenchant and disturbing piece in this morning's Guardian. It is a well-reported piece, thoroughly footnoted and linked to sources of further information. So why is it labelled "opinion" rather than published as fact? (And why did Ehrenreich have to cross the Atlantic to get it published?) Fact editors have to be extra careful not to lay blame. Fact reporting is one more thing under the thumb of the advantaged. Journalism, which once took appropriate pride in discomforting the comfortable, is now especially careful not to offend. It's one more advantage in the powerful system of Accumulated Advantage and Disadvantage.

This journalistic caution has increased as the comfortable class has narrowed and grown comfortable beyond the dreams of avarice. Their comfort must not be disturbed, and reining in these systems that prey on the poor might result in the comfortable having to pony up their rightful share of public costs. The rich might have their puny taxes increased if we stopped hitting up the poor for the costs of being poor.

The bizarre injustices Ms. Ehrenreich describes here are positively Dickensian, but in a time so rich with injustice, too many of our best writers devote themselves to chronicling the struggles and ennui of the moneyed, the leisure classes.