I own a book titled, The Morality of Gay Rights and another titled, What's Wrong with Homosexuality? As of this writing, amazon.com does not sell any books called either “The Morality of Heterosexual Rights” or “What's Wrong with Heterosexuality?”

Problems are part of the human condition and every individual has them, but our problems don't come down only to our individual experiences or our basic humanity. As suggested throughout this book, many of our problems stem from being denied the benefit of the doubt and grappling with bad-faith treatment. There is, however, more to say about the relationship between problems and systemic inequality. In this chapter, I consider three aspects of this relationship: the distinction between having a problem and being a problem, the question of who is held responsible for dealing with particular problems, and the way in which victim-blaming emerges from and reinforces inequality.

Having a Problem vs. Being a Problem

Whether someone in a difficult situation is understood as having a problem or as being a problem is a particular kind of moral alchemy, one in which we tend to have compassion for the person who “has” the problem while judging the person who “is” the problem. When someone “has” a problem, we help them if possible; when someone “is” a problem, we control them if possible.

Part IV, the appendices, consists of transcripts of interviews with Jeffrey Lee Davenport, Mary L. Trucks, and John Chambers Williams (Robert and Mabel's youngest son). It also includes an anthology of poems written by Williams. The interview with Davenport who first became acquainted with Williams after an event that happened nearly forty years ago when more than a dozen Michigan State Police (MSP) officers, Lake County Sheriff Department (LCSD) deputies, and FBI agents surrounded his residency in Pleasant Plains Township. A police report had been filed by the Birmingham Police Department (BPD) by Davenport's employer regarding a bomb threat he made during a heated telephone conversation with his supervisor. Davenport threatened to blow buildings up in the city of Birmingham after being frustrated as a result of the racist conduct, behavior, and treatment he received from coworkers in the city's maintenance department. The BPD in turn informed the MSP and LCSD to advise them of Davenport's Lake County residence while he was on leave from work. The BPD requested the LCSD to conduct surveillance on Davenport but not to confront or arrest him. More than thirty law enforcement officers representing the three agencies were on the scene and had surrounded his cottage while on the lookout for him. Davenport was not identified or located in the area. Davenport's cottage was searched and officers confiscated two handguns and other firearms from the premises. The interviews with Trucks and John Williams focused on Williams's activism and circumstances surrounding his poetic aspirations, which span over the course of his travels and life in Lake County. Many of the poems need literary analysis. Robeson Taj Frazier illustrates how in “each issue(s) of the Crusader, Williams included at least one poem that creatively drew connections between black liberation struggles in the United States and anticolonial movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. An Ocean Roar of Peace is one such example. In it, Williams articulates a politics of solidarity that proposes that oppressed groups of color become one great voice and speak in unison as they reshape world affairs … , a unified roar that would de-mythicize and demystify the power of the West—their puppeteers—and construct a new world order of peace and international friendship.”

As we’ve seen throughout this book, cultural processes of inequality are extensive enough and harmful enough when practiced by members of valued groups. Unfortunately, members of devalued groups can also withhold the benefit of the doubt from their own groups. Women defend accused sexual offenders. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas opposes antiracist social policies while Justice Amy Coney Barrett opposes feminist social policies. The five police officers who beat Tyre Nichols to death on January 7, 2023, were all Black. Until we know something about the cultural processes behind collusion, we will not have a complete understanding of how systemic inequality relies on both valued and devalued people to keep it going.

The topic of collusion is complicated and fraught. Pointing out that some people participate in devaluing their own social groups can look like—or turn into—blaming the victim. Moreover, focusing on such collusion can draw attention away from how those who benefit from the inequality in question are responsible for reproducing it. Describing the role of cultural processes in collusion, as this chapter does, may defuse the victim-blaming somewhat; colluders are as influenced as members of valued groups by cultural messages about who matters and who does not (as the two quotes that begin the chapter suggest).

My wife broke her arm in 2023, and one of our many doctor visits involved an emergency room trip when an urgent care doctor suspected circulatory damage. I was in line to go through security behind a young Black woman. The (white) security guard stopped her before she entered the screening machine and asked whether she had any guns or knives. She said no. He stared at her and made her go through the screening machine very slowly.

Then, it was my turn. As I emptied my pockets, the guard glanced at me and waved me through the screening machine without saying anything. When I collected my things, I noticed that the guard had picked up a book and appeared to be absorbed in it. He had not even watched as I passed through the checkpoint.

While I will never know what that guard was thinking, either about the Black woman or about me, it's reasonable to think that the question the guard asked her—but not me—followed from an assumption. He thought there was a chance that she was armed, but not that I was. As with all those police officers who did not pull me over, I was understood to be innocent until proven guilty—a courtesy not extended to the woman in front of me.

In Chapter 3, I listed assumptions that can inform whether someone receives the benefit of the doubt or has it withheld from them. Many of those assumptions fall into one of three clusters: competence, morality, and dangerousness. This chapter discusses assumptions about competence, trustworthiness, and innocence. It then addresses self-fulfilling prophecies, which are circumstances in which acting on an assumption changes reality such that the assumption becomes true even though it was not initially so.

Competence

Thus far, we have explored connections between power and inequality; good-faith/bad-faith treatment and the benefit of the doubt; moral alchemy; assumptions related to competence, trustworthiness, and innocence; self-fulfilling prophecies; positive and negative in/visibility; and relationships between people and problems. While I’ve provided examples of how these processes work separately, they often combine to make situations of inequality even more troubling or dangerous. In this chapter, I discuss five situations of inequality in which multiple cultural processes work in tandem: women's pain, how we think about sexual assault, antiabortion discourse and laws, race and school discipline, and racial profiling outside of schools.

Women's Pain

Women's pain was mentioned in Chapter 1 as an example of whose comfort matters and whose does not. The discussion of heart attack symptoms in Chapter 6 also noted that women are more likely to die of heart attacks because the “textbook,” “traditional,” and “classic” heart attack symptoms (which involve pain) are universalized despite the fact that they describe male heart attacks rather than all heart attacks. We know that women experience and report more pain than men, but receive less intensive and effective treatment for it. Why?

Journalist Maya Dusenbery points to a knowledge gap and a trust gap as the factors underlying women's challenges in having their pain taken seriously:

As Dusenbery further observes,

WILLIAMS HAILS CUBAN MILITARY MIGHT

Havana English School of the Air in English January 3, 1962–F

(A Special Broadcast: Robert Williams Tells His Impressions of the Third Anniversary Rally and Military Parade on the Plaza de la Revolucion)

Question: Tell me, Bob, are you an American citizen? Answer: Yes, I was born in the United States as an Afro-American. An Afro-American in the United States is a second-class citizen.

Question: Were you invited here as a member of the delegations to the anniversary of the revolution? Answer: Well, I am a foreigner here. I am a guest of the Cuban people. I was invited indirectly by John F. Kennedy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation on a trumped-up charge of kidnapping in the United States. Question: Have you seen any Americans here among the guests who were invited from all over the world? Answer: No, I have not seen any American with the exception of the ones who are already here. It is very difficult for Americans to come to Cuba. In fact, such displays as we witnessed today are meant to be kept away from the American people. The U.S. government is determined not to let the truth be known about Cuba. Therefore, they have decided not to let Americans travel here, and the strong thing about this is that the United States claims to be a democracy. Yet I tried to come here for the 26 July and asked permission to do so from the U.S. State Department. The U.S. State Department said that I could not be allowed to travel to Cuba, because they had broken off diplomatic relations with Cuba and that they could not guarantee my safety here. The strange thing about this is that in another two weeks the U.S. government attempted to kill me. It happened that I ended up in Cuba and that is the only place that I could be safe. Question: Are you a veteran? Answer: Yes, I am a veteran of the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps of my State. Question: I suppose then that you have seen a great many military parades in your life? Answer: Yes, I have participated in military parades in the United States in the Army and in the Marine Corps.

Introducing Power

I still remember waking up with a knot in my stomach on June 26, 2015. The US Supreme Court was due to announce its findings in Obergefell v. Hodges, and I hoped my same-sex marriage would still be legal in an hour. That day brought good news for my household and many other households. Almost exactly seven years later ( June 24, 2022), I woke up with a knot in my stomach again for a different reason: it seemed clear that the Supreme Court was about to overturn Roe v. Wade and, in so doing, take rights away from women and make a lot of lives harder. Sure enough, an hour later, rights that allowed women to flourish had been stripped of their national protection and were soon overturned in many states. And indeed, another year later ( June 30, 2023), the Supreme Court ruled, in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, that it was legal to discriminate against same-sex couples in the marketplace if the discrimination was based on sincerely held religious beliefs.

These three rulings are a useful place to begin considering how power works as well as its relationship with systemic inequality. The rulings have two lessons for us: first, some people have the capacity to impact other people's lives, for good or for ill, in ways that are built into our society and accepted by most if not all people. Second, while this point is not immediately obvious to some people, heterosexuals and men, rarely, if ever have to worry about their rights (as heterosexuals or as men) being up for a public vote, about Congressional legislation that might overturn those rights or about a Supreme Court decision that might strip those rights.

We began this series by reviewing the way comparison set up the beginnings – and perhaps the limits – of our discipline, anthropology. We then moved to the history, and indeed the myth, of ethnography, our mainstay method. In the last lecture we considered the importance of historical diachronism as a key element in the production of social – we might bravely say “cultural” – forms, and what I like to call cultural flows. But where are we with regard to culture itself, that contested term? Can we recuperate the concept of culture from its embattled terrain? And if so, how might we productively define it in such a way that we avoid the pitfalls that led many in our discipline to challenge – even discard – the word in the first place?

Over the past half-century, we have encountered a series of critiques of the concept of culture that explains why we have tried to leave it behind. For starters, it sounds fixed; it sounds narrow; it sounds bounded. Lila Abu-Lughod has eloquently argued that the concept “tend[s] to overemphasise coherence” (1991: 146); Sherry Ortner points to “the problem of essentialism” in the attribution of qualities attached to human collectives (2006: 12). Kuper worries not only that we have “endow[ed] it with explanatory power,” but also that the conflation of the concept of culture with ideas of identity, especially in a political climate where nationalism is on the rise, makes it unsuitable for anthropological use at all (1999: xi). Together these constitute a good set of reasons for why anthropology might consider being a post-culture discipline altogether.

And yet I am suggesting that we reject the idea of culture at our peril. My argument in this book is that we bring culture back into our disciplinary conversation, not in the form that we knew it – singular cultures attached to singular places – but as the living, active process through which we as humans, invariably as part of collectives, come to see and act in the world. The process of human perception means that that which we see (or experience, or feel, or understand) is always and only through such a lens: there is no other way to perceive. That is why we need to continue to grapple with culture as part of the human condition: it is integral to what makes us human.

LETTER TO FIDEL CASTRO FROM ROBERT F. WILLIAMS

August 28, 1966, Peking, China

Dear Fidel:

First of all, I want to thank you and the Cuban people for assisting me when I was escaping from the United States. I will always be grateful to the Cuban people, and I will always be a friend of the Cuban Revolution. In fact, this is the very reason that I take the liberty to write you this letter from my second exile. The reason that I bother to bring these matters to your attention, or later to the attention of the public, if necessary, is because I find it impossible to believe that Commandante Vallejo, Peniero, and others close around you have fully, truthfully, and faithfully informed you of these ignominious experiences that I encountered while living in Cuba.

Shortly after my arrival in Cuba, I requested support for the Afro-American struggle in the United States. I first requested an information office with the purpose of acquainting the peoples of Latin America, Asia and Africa with the revolutionary potential of the Afro-American struggle and the brutal nature of U.S. racism and its relation to U.S. imperialism. This revolutionary request was never granted. I also requested permission and facilities to broadcast both long and short wave, especially to the Afro-American people in the United States. After much bickering and red tape, I was finally allowed to proceed with the broadcast from Radio Progresso, however, the facilities of Radio Havana, which was to be the short-wave broadcast in the name of Radio Free Dixie, were completely denied. I was told that this was because Radio Havana is the official voice of the Cuban government and that the Cuban government could not be identified in this way with the Afro-American struggle. I was never allowed the use of the shortwave facilities which would have enabled me to reach the great masses of our people all over the United States and especially on the West Coast where there is a heavy concentration of my fellow workers and followers.

This week we turn to the subject of history, or more precisely, to the subject of time. Rather than speaking about the formal – or even the conceptual – relation between the disciplines of anthropology and history, my comments today are offered in the spirit of Barney Cohn's famous book, An Anthropologist among the Historians (1987): I am thinking about anthropology in a relaxed conversation with history, in order to evoke different ways that we can think about – and use – the arc of history in anthropology. My intention is partly to emphasize the importance of history and historiography, alongside mythography or even, perhaps, what I might call mythopoeiography, the process of the production of myth, in our discipline. But more importantly, it is to consider the concept of time, and specifically how historical trajectories – let us call them cultural flows, or cultural pasts – can be traced or tracked in a particular cultural milieu. My contention is that anthropology is uniquely capable of understanding how what Geertz called “symbolic action” or “symbolic formulations” (1973: 27; 120) can, over time, come to constitute a particular landscape that we are researching in the contemporary moment. Those “systems of symbolic meaning” (49) have led us to where we are today, and anthropology can research both the past and the present through a lens that accommodates such temporal flow.

My discussion of “history” is thus not an archival one as such (cf. Dirks 2001, 2015). I am interested instead in the way we map cultural flows that evolve or develop over time, and how we can use those cultural genealogies – genealogies of ideas; of symbolic nexuses; of praxis and ideology – to help us understand the contemporary formations of social worlds. In short, I am talking about the social – and the historical – construction of the present. To understand the ways ideas have been transmitted and inherited – not in a fixed way, but in a dynamic one – is part of what anthropology must undertake if we are to uncover how they come to be seen as natural.

My genealogy of our discipline in these lectures is not unlike the kind of genealogy I am suggesting is productive for the study of any cultural mode of thought.

Part III includes a selected bibliography of published works written by and about Williams. This selected bibliography consists of important institutional papers in archival collections, including the papers of Robert F. Williams, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Mae Mallory, Conrad Lynn, Richard T. Gibson, and others, as well as a list of primary and secondary sources, including books, government documents, as well as a list of secondary sources, including books, book chapters, dissertations, peer-reviewed journal articles, pamphlets, and the online newspaper articles I discovered that were useful in my scholarship.

The documents selected for the prefatory notes for Robert Franklin Williams Speaks provide a summarized account of Williams's life and activism across various geographical locations, offering insight into the broader content of the civil rights movement, racial tensions in the U.S., and international solidarity during the mid-20th century. Each section of document serves a specific purpose in illuminating Williams's journey and the political and social environment he and Mabel navigated.

In Chapter 1, from 1956 to 1961, the family of Robert Sr. and Mabel Williams, which included their sons, Robert Jr. and John Chambers Williams, lived on Boyte Street in the Newtown neighborhood of Monroe. After returning home from the Marine Corps in 1955 and being elected as president of the Union County chapter of the NAACP, my detailed account of his efforts to combat racial injustice, his involvement in the Negroes with Guns campaign, and his early activism are revealed. This section underscores the genesis of Robert Williams's approach to civil rights, emphasizing his philosophy of armed self-defense and direct action against systemic racism. It sets the stage for understanding his evolution from a local activist to an international figure in the Black liberation movement. Four months after the August 28, 1955, Mississippi kidnapping, brutal beating, lynching, and murder of fourteen-year-old Emmitt Till, and three months after the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks and the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Robert Williams escalated his resistance against the policies of the Monroe government, its local police and sheriff's department, and the white racist and terrorists threats from citizens over Jim Crow beliefs and politics. A map drawing of Monroe illustrates the racial divisions in Monroe through the railroad track marking. Because Williams, a veteran of two wars, believed the Constitution guaranteed African Americans full citizenship rights, he made efforts to address white America's refusal in Monroe and elsewhere to abide by its federal laws. Williams delivers a rousing sermon on March 25, 1956, entitled, “Col. Jim Crow's Last Stand” at All Soul's Chapel Unitarian Fellowship Church, calling out “the hypocrisy of a democracy with Jim Crow policies.”

Roots, Racism, Routes, and Resistance: Robert and Mabel Williams's Take on Patrick Henry's “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death”

In the American tradition, Patrick Henry's rousing 1775 speech during the Second Virginia Convention “fired up America's fight for independence.” Henry's meaning of self-defense in the battle for independence internalized a love for freedom and humanity against tyranny. Robert and Mabel Williams's meaning of self-defense expressed the same kind of love for freedom, justice, and independence. Robert Williams's meaning was offensive, not on the defensive despite what some imagine. Williams was a pragmatist and he believed, to borrow from Malcolm X, that armed self-defense meant to embrace a “by any means necessary” approach if required to defend oneself and to achieve freedom. Williams's mandate was a rallying call for self-love but open to guerrilla tactics to achieve self-preservation, human dignity, and community objectives. The philosophy of Robert F. Williams as president and Dr. Albert Perry as vice president of the Union County Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed “self-defense prevents bloodshed,” “forces protection,” is “born of our plight,” and is “an American tradition.”1 Self-defense, from Williams's perspective and Afrocentric worldview, guarantees humanity and that every African American individual, family, and community receive equal protection and support from the three branches of the federal government. Williams insisted on and petitioned for these native-born American rights. However, when studying him, scholars tend to under-appreciate important aspects of his political philosophy, identity, and family history. As such, multidimensional figures such as Robert F. and Mabel R. Williams—and by extension their most vocal supporters: Mae Mallory, Rosa Parks, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall—“are often ignored [and/or misinterpreted] because they cannot be cap-tured by singular analytical constructs nor reduced to single dimensions of Black political activism for social justice. Extant treatments of complex figures such as Robert F. Williams are often framed by scholars as homogenized or reduced to characters that fit one of the diverse dimensions of their makeup.”

I moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2003, and promptly got my first speeding ticket ever. I was driving 40 mph, which I noticed right after I drove past the 30-mph sign. Then I heard the siren.

The (white) police officer was very polite. He could see that I was nervous and apologized for having to write me a ticket. As he left, he waved and yelled, “Drive safe now!” Throughout the interaction, he was gentle and friendly. His final words felt more like a kindness than an instruction. I still remember how light his voice was. He wasn't worried or concerned or afraid. He did not see me as a problem.

To this day, that is the only speeding ticket I’ve ever received. Not that I haven't driven above the speed limit. I do so regularly. And not that I haven't sped in front of marked police cars. I have, on multiple occasions. But somehow, my speeding is never an issue. Every time I speed past a police officer, they decide that I am not a problem. They give me the benefit of the doubt.

On November 22, 2014, a 12-year-old Black boy playing alone in a park and causing no harm to anybody was seen as a problem and denied the benefit of the doubt. Police officer Timothy Loehmann shot Tamir Rice to death for the “crime” of playing with an Airsoft gun in a park while being 12 years old and Black. The 911 responder appears to have asked twice whether Tamir was Black or white before deciding whether to send police. Loehmann fired within two seconds of arriving on the scene.

Loehmann, it turned out, had been deemed “an emotionally unstable recruit and unfit for duty” in a prior position as a police officer and supervisors had sought to terminate him for lying and insubordination. He had not revealed this to the Cleveland police, and they never reviewed his previous personnel file before hiring him.

I remember my first encounter with Robert Williams as if it happened yesterday. I was briefly introduced to Robert Williams by Mabel Williams, whom I had met three weeks earlier in Baldwin, Michigan at St. Ann's Lake County Senior Meals Program. Mabel worked as program director “for many years, sitting on the church's finance board and serving as Lector and Minister of the Eucharist.”1 During my second or third week at the center to meet with and interview Idlewild elders, Mabel invited me to a senior citizen's party at the Henrietta Summers Senior Citizens apartment reception room in Idlewild. As I entered the building that evening, Mabel introduced me to Robert. We shook hands, greeted one another, and briefly chatted. I was impressed by the humble and welcoming demeanor he displayed. I was in awe. I was teaching at West Shore Community College in Scottsville, Michigan, as an associate professor of Communication during fall 1992 and spring and summer 1993 semesters. It was in February of 1993, when I met him a second time. Robert Williams was invited to give an African American History Month presentation at West Shore. David McCullough, a former colleague and professor, who taught sociology courses, extended an invitation to join his class during what was one of Rob's annual presentations in the area. I sat in the front row of the classroom with a notepad and pen in hand eager to actively listen and take notes. I was thoroughly impressed. Rob blew my socks off as he shared stories about his family's travels, his civil rights activism, calls for armed self-defense, NAACP leadership agenda in Monroe, North Carolina, and being exiled in Cuba and China from 1961 to 1969. He also talked briefly about his return to the United States in September 1969. The details were attention getting to say the least. The national impact and international appeal that Robert and Mabel planted left a permanent footprint in American and worldwide history in shaping Black political thought during the turbulent decade of the 1960s and beyond.