Lying to courselves

Here's how it's done:

What stands out for me is [Katherine] Boo's work, now almost 20 years ago, on the impact of welfare reform. It's always interesting to think back on how the literature of your youth shapes your path. At the time policy wonkery about the potential effects of welfare reform was all the rage. But Boo's work treated the wonkery as an excuse to write about what ultimately mattered to me as a reader--the people.

The mandate, at the time in my life, appeared simple--"Tell stories." The point here isn't that narrative is superior to stats but that narrative has a different power, and one--in our current age--which is hard to capture. Stats fit into six minute debate segment in a way that stories do not.

That's Ta-Nehisi Coates. Yeah, I'm on about him again. I like his stuff, I really do, but there is a pervasive bias that runs right through everything he writes and he just can't see it and that is amazing for a writer who clearly sees himself as battling prejudice.

Think how much the good impression Boo has on Coates depends on his already agreeing with her. He praises one story about the victims of Katrina at the link. If someone who believed that the exiles from Katrina were just a bunch of lazy slackers produced a well-told, true story to back up the claim, do you think Coates would praise that?

Let's have a look at the opening of Boo's work. Here is how she describes the residents who received people fleeing the storm:

Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, is a hub of oil and fishing industries on the Gulf of Mexico. The hamlets along its waterways rise in elevation and affluence as they increase in distance from the coast. Trailers, aluminum foil in their windows to beat back the sun, give way to communities screened by oak and cypress trees. One of the loveliest neighborhoods is Bayou Black. There are thoroughbreds on lawns there, and an alligator farm. The week’s sole rush hour begins Saturday before dawn, when fathers and sons leave home to fish and hunt. Later that morning, the shell-pink great house of a nineteenth-century sugarcane plantation opens for tours. The gift shop, in what the docents call “the servants’ quarters,” sells books with such titles as “Myths of American Slavery” and “Slaves by Choice.” 

And then, just a little later she tells you how the people here think:

Popular sympathy, at least outside Terrebonne Parish, was with the displaced people, now known collectively as victims; and with that concern came the opportunity (“should they choose to take it” was the standard qualifier) to turn tragedy into renewal.

And that's just the more charitable ones from "outside". If you're a New Yorker reader this is an article designed to reinforce your favourite prejudices about white southerners. Just order yourself a latté and sit down with the magazine and prepare yourself to feel superior and, at the same time, virtuous because you, unlike them, really get it.

And it's not that it isn't true. Meaning, I doubt anything was made up in the story but I get a suspicion that she went looking with a clear picture of what she was going to find and she found it because that was what she was looking for. That's the way prejudice works. But I also know, having been there, that you have to filter out one whole lot of southern Louisiana to get the picture Boo gives us here.

And you can see the filtering happening right in her language as we move down smaller and smaller until we get to neighbourhood with the plantation with the gift shop that sells the books whose titles are going to make your blood boil with hate. Maybe you think she is just "picking out the relevant details"? You could just as easily find equally disturbing books in New York City and perhaps even the exact same titles, but that wouldn't prove anything because our New Yorker reader would (correctly) see these as exceptions that didn't prove anything general about New York. This sort of anecdotal evidence only counts against people we already want to feel superior too because, again, that's how prejudice works. Ask a white supremacist to write a story about a black community and she could produce the same kinds of anecdotal evidence without making anything up.

Katherine Boo writes narratives designed to reinforce prejudice. You don't have to write or read narratives that way. People didn't used to, but that is the way intellectuals of our era read narratives. As Oakeshott said of history, we treat narratives as a place to exercise our opinions like whippets in a park.