Kip’s Revenge: Race, Money, Property, and Parental Cruelty in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander (Book Review)

By Reginald Leamon Robinson[1]

Professor of Law

Howard Law School

Washington, DC 20008

Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor, Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness. UNC Press, 2009. 391 pp.

Why did Philip Rhinelander fund the annulment trial of his son’s, Kip’s, marriage to Alice Jones? It was the 1920s, and so perhaps the easy answer is race and class. In her ordinary but complicated thesis, Smith-Pryor bets on the dovetailing of race and racial ideologies. More than just retelling Rhinelander v. Rhinelander’s racist and legal saga, especially by stewing race passing, racial culture, and upper class consciousness together, Smith-Pryor hopes Property Rites contributes to and elaborates on growing studies of northern racism. Although I believe she succeeds on that hope, does Smith-Pryor race and racial ideologies thesis really expose Rhinelander v. Rhinelander’s the deep, existential cause?

Kip’s annulment trial has a family back story. In 1884, Kip’s uncle, William, married an Irish domestic, which erupted a bonfire, implicating money, property, and class. After all, in the 1880s, the Irish were some of the new Negroes. Undoubtedly, after William’s marriage, the Rhinelander clan wanted to kill off the offending marriage by buying her off Margueretta and urging her back to Ireland. Both refused. For his disobedience, his father humiliated and perhaps traumatized, if not destroyed, him. William was cut off, became Rynlander, moved about, settled in Brooklyn, had two children, fell on hard times, felt cheated by the family’s stipend-dispensing lawyer, and shot the lawyer, who he felt cheated him and attempted to seduce his wife. By the shooting, William had left his wife and kids and was living in a boardinghouse. More than that, the Rhinelander patriarch wiped William’s name from the family tree. To annul William’s marriage and keep him out of jail for felonious assault, the Rhinelander clan sought to have him declared temporarily insane. Clearly then, the Rhinelander children and grandchildren knew that if they disobeyed patriarchs, dirtied whiteness, and rejected high society’s morays by befouling filial purity with offending blood and brood, they’d become non-beings.

In Kip’s case, Alice Jones, a Nigger, was a domestic, just like William’s Margueretta. William, an heir to a fortune, was like Leonard, or Kip. Both sought love and well-being in low, dark, societal straits, and thus both married beneath their station. Both had their own minds. Or did they? Philip watched his Uncle, William, suffer ignominy. He’d learn well; he’d tow the line. So would his children, including Kip, or so he’d hope. But to avoid William’s weak-minded felonious assault on the family lawyer, a second, scandalous embarrassment for the clan, Philip would use similar legal tools, but he’d not drive Kip to ruin. Perhaps he didn’t need to do so, for William’s fall was likely widely shared in whispered tones as Kip grew to manhood. So, does that explain the Philip Rhinelander’s legal assault on Kip and Alice’s marriage?

Perhaps. Property Rites is not very clear on this question, even though Smith-Pryor ventures the historically situated answer: race and racial ideologies. As the later chapters confess, especially where we learn that Alice Jones prevailed, Smith-Pryor tells us that, in the annulment trial, the Rhinelanders ostensibly pursued the legal theory of racial misrepresentation but really wanted to preserve their fortune. At the time, New York like other common law jurisdictions recognized dower and curtsey. Upon marrying Kip, dower granted Alice a one-third life interest in whatever property he’d already owned or would acquired. Alice’s interest included rental income. Moreover, Kip had to get Alice’s permission and release before he sold property, and if he didn’t, Alice still retained her dower interest in that property. Alice did out lived Kip by 35 years. If Kip were a co-owner of property with the Rhinelander clan, including Philip, he could not sell that property without Alice’s permission, and if she agreed, she released her dower interest in the sold property. If Kip sold the property without her release, then the buyer took the property subject to Alice’s dower interest if she survived Kip’s death. Thus, by operation of law, when Kip married Alice, a penniless, domestic of questionable but still colored racial origins, he flung open some of the Rhinelander fortune and property holdings to a blood, low society stranger. Yet, because New York had limited fault-based pleadings for either a divorce, which was adultery, or annulment, which has material misrepresentation, retired Judge Isaac Mill and Leon Jacobs, Kip’s family retained lawyers, sought annulment for racial concealment. It’s a tactic that Philip had learned directly or otherwise in the legal maelstrom that cast William into filial oblivion. So, was Philip Rhinelander driven by Plymouth-Rock arrogance or by material high-mindedness coupled with racial insecurity?

After all, Rhinelander v. Rhinelander was held in the 1920s when Jim Crow and its offspring like Eugenics rabidly stalked the country. It took place before Perez v. Sharpe (1948), which denied a marriage license to a biracial couple, until the California’s high court overturned it. It was after United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), in which the High Court denied immigration to a dark-skinned Brahman, who argued not for a common, every white man’s understanding of Caucasian, but for a more technical, anthropological one.

Yet, Smith-Pryor also noted that Property Rites was not just a non-fictional, legal historical narrative about a bygone era. One-part historical legal drama, it was also a current discourse, dealing with our extant struggles around racial, class, and wealth.

Given Property Rites apparent scope, I initially thought otherwise.

Then I recalled that in October 2009, Keith Bardwell, Justice of the Peace, Tangihaposa Parish, Louisiana, had denied a marriage license to Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay, both of Hammond, Louisiana, because he utterly rejected biracial marriages. What really confused Bardwell was this question: why did white women want to marry black men? Apart from this existential and psychological query, Bardwell was burdened by an unconstitutional, non-legal social justification for rejecting such license applicants: it was bad for biracial children, often the product of such marriages, and he opined that when such marriages failed, often leaving their product, i.e., biracial children, in the lurch, it’d be grandparents’ custodial hands into which these unfortunate children would fall.

Hadn’t Bardwell heard of Loving v. Virginia (1968) or even perused the pages of Zablocki v. Redhail (1978)? Motivated by what others thought, especially his black friends, Bardwell frustrated, at least delayed, biracial couples by requiring them to go else where to get such a license.

Was Philip Rhinelander driven by Bardwell’s fears or cares? That is, was Philip attempting to buttress the clearly and increasingly erstwhile racial divide between whites and blacks? As more blacks migrated out of the South and found higher wages, better housing, and greater political rights in northern geographies, century-old, well-defended racial pinions faced slow oxidizing pressures. And so yes, Rhinelander turned on real race-based fears, or Philip’s legal team cynically exploited the usual fears of the existentially insecure masses, which for them made Rhinelander about their racial fears. Hence, Property Rites becomes both a historical narrative and contemporary critique. To present this reveal, especially in New York where racial rules did not bar such marriages, Smith-Pryor’s deft writing and keen insights in Property Rites thoroughly disentombed whatever racial bones had existed in the case’s records. And if Philip learned this strategic play at the knees of the Rhinelander patriarch, his father, then he gambled wisely that fears, money, and power could get proper results. As tabloid journalists waded in, poor and society whites pledged their fear-based sympathies. In the end, Philip would destroy an offense to God, and along the way, he’d drag Kip back to the filial nest where white, wealth, and power conjoined appropriately.

In Property Rites, Smith-Pryor deftly weaves race, power, privilege, and wealth together, which were especially clear in the post-trial unfoldings. In 1927, years after the jury had turned away Philip’s cynical race-based annulment claim, Alice sought a legal separation and support, alleging that Kip abandoned her and treated her cruelly and inhumanely. Having no ability to serve Kip, Alice’s petition died. After losing the annulment trial, Kip got a Nevada divorce, at one point seeking help under that state’s antimiscegenation laws. Urged perhaps by his family, he needed to quiet Alice’s claims against his money and property. Under Pennoyer v. Neff, a New York court held that Nevada’s 1929 divorce decree was powerless against Alice Jones’ support claims. In 1929, Alice filed a claim against Philip, alleging alienation of Kip’s affection, and demanding $500,000.00. In 1930, Alice pursued Kip again, now a Nevada citizen, seeking support, and a New York court ordered temporary support and later sequestered his property when he refused to comply. With Alice’s petitions, especially Philip’s reaction to the alienation claim and court’s sequestering ruling, money and property – the case’s stalking horses – became the Brailled text that even the socially and legally blind could read. From the beginning, that text had always been writ large for Philip and the Rhinelander clan. By Kip’s and the clan’s legal reaction, by which I mean the legal pawing at Nevada’s divorce laws, the fears that had driven the Rhinelander patriarch to disinherit William were now before them.

Even though Smith-Pryor had interlaced race and racial ideologies with subsidiary issues of society and wealth, the Kip-Alice saga refined itself in later years into chess-like moves to protect the Rhinelander purse. As such, property and preventing wealth transfers through common law mechanisms like dower were not subsidiary but primary forces. It was these forces that were Rhinelander v. Rhinelander’s maison script, now lifting the 1924 flat, two-dimensional legal pleadings into sharp relief.

What of the primacy of race and racial ideologies? Did they govern later negotiations? Perhaps, because we simply can’t reduce the noise of our biases; yet, in the Psychology of Consciousness (1972), Robert Ornstein would argue that the Rhinelander clan could tune it out, at least long enough to legally end the risk that Alice could impact how the Rhinelander clan did business. With Alice’s order for temporary support, the sequestration of Kip’s property and income, and her claim for $500,000.00 against Philip, they had to focus. They had to get to the issues that drove Philip’s father to truly humiliate William: money and the privilege that it purchased. In the deal, where race and racial ideologies played an ever decreasing if no role, they released each other’s property interest, even though Alice had nothing to risk or lose. Under this economic and financial deal, Alice would abandon her then existing claims, and she would extinguish “all rights or claims of dower, inheritance and descent, and all rights or claims to a distributive share of his [Leonard’s] personal estate, and all other rights and interests or claims in any manner arising or accruing out of the marriage relation.” The specter of race and racial ideologies did not occupy a seat at the table. It may have hovered in the room. Money, wealth, power, and the loss of it were whips on Philip’s privileged flesh. It drove Philip’s father to kill William symbolically. In the end, the Rhinelander had to shield their raison d’etre from any offending invader whether poor, Irish or Colored.

Now, back to Philip. It is clear that the Rhinelanders were elite snobs, who viewed other non-society folks through downcast eyes. Despite such elitism and perhaps racism, Kip could sow his royal oats with racial filth and secretly entertain other flirtations. However, he could not marry low caste or racial trash. That was William’s and Kip’s unpardonable offenses. And these breaches of social etiquette and racial codes were most threatening to the Rhinelander clan because they carried unacceptable wealth implications. Hence, in a choice between love, tenderness, and happiness on the one hand, and power, wealth and status on the other, William and Kip had to embrace the family credo: absens haeres non erit (an absent person will not inherit). This credo required William’s “death” because it kept Margueretta and her children from getting anything. Yet, I imagine that Philip suffered greatly when William was so humiliated and roundly rejected, and so for his own selfishness, he’d not visit such disgrace on Kip, who by all appearances was not as resolute as William. Rather than destroyed Kip, Philip targeted Alice. Philip cynically used race and racial ideologies. Slight diminution of Rhinelander wealth by Alice survived Kip would garner no sympathetic appeal. (Alice’s annuity of $3,600.o0 per year amounted to 0.004 of Philip Rhinelander’s gross estate.) Racism coupled with a dark, wily vamp who stole her way into an easily influenced Kip’s heart would sell. Such a theory might sway a proper jury. It certainly sold lots of newspapers. If Philip used race and racial ideologies cynically, even if he were privately a racist snob, then something else, even besides property and wealth, was at stake. After privileging race and racial ideologies in her argument, and after interlacing them deftly with culture, privilege, and property, Smith-Pryor hints at other equally powerful motives for Rhinelander v. Rhinelander. However, she doesn’t gumshoe these pulp-novel threads down the mental dark allies where they scurry and hide.

What could be more powerful than race and racial ideologies, especially in a legal narrative that culturally situated in the Jim Crow 1920s, and more pointedly, what scurries and hides in the recesses of our minds? Typical of the times, the Rhinelander fathers were rulers, and they more than likely engaged in emotional if not physical maltreatment of their children. Consider what William risked. He risked everything for love, emotional touch, and real companionship. He wanted to marry not for more money but for love. Despite his father’s appeal to either not marry her or to abandon her after he did, William, who was named after his father, did not relent, having been perhaps ordered about and humiliated for the last time. For his refusal, William humiliated his son by denying him what he clearly viewed as vital to the Rhinelander clan: money, society, and power.

Consider Kip and the effects of his maltreatment. He suffered a stutter, which we know today at the very least suggests emotional abuse. He was more than likely emotionally broken. For example, Alice’s letter reveals her frustration with Kip’s fear, inability, or unwillingness to stand up to his father, Philip. Even if she were cynically motivated, she pled with him to take control of his own life. Irked by Kip’s diffidence, Alice wrote: “I will help you fight [your father] . . . . If you only had a trade, and you would not after look forward, for your father’s help.”

Another effect of emotional maltreatment was Kip’s learning challenges and physical awkwardness. Kip, taught by private tutors, was a slow but an eventual learner. Judge Mill and Leon Jacobs relied on Kip’s emotional challenges to argue that Alice had easily duped him. Less than 18 years old, and perhaps exhibiting too few fruits of his father’s efforts, Philip “dropped him off at a Connecticut institute for nervous and mental disorders and never visited him.” Philip either didn’t care about Kip, or he’d never forged a close, emotionally supportive relationship with his son. Regardless, Kip had to feel abandoned, perhaps again. If he had an emotional ally and supporter, it was Kip’s mother, Adelaide Kip, who died unexpectedly from burns when he was 12. This sudden loss would have been bewildering and traumatizing, especially if he were different from his siblings, not close to his father, and in need of special care and emotional feeding. If Philip at the very least emotionally maltreated him, then Kip also lost in his mother a protector. Adelaide thus would have been Kip’s “helping witness.” According to Alice Miller, a helping witness is:

someone who acts (routinely, or even once at a critical time) with kindness toward the child and who somehow, by looking into the child's eyes, shows the child another way to live and be. This helper may have no idea of his or her role but nonetheless acts as a counterweight to the cruelty or neglect a child experiences.

According Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good (2002), the “helping witness” offers love, compassion, and kindness to the maltreated child, so that she does not completely identify with her tormentor, and thus believe that the world at large is violent and must be dealt with accordingly. By the time Adelaide passed, Kip had already experienced life-shaping maltreatment, even if his mother blunted her husband’s power to thoroughly poison him. Stuttering thus reveals the emotional and psychological effect of Philip’s suffocating control and perhaps emotional indifference. Although he had no conscious ill will toward Philip, Kip’s body retained a memory of the repression, which impacted his ability to speak fluently and forcefully. This inability confessed Kip’s willingness to suppress what his body knows. Kip, in order to live with his parents, especially Philip, and around his siblings, had to suppress his hurt and angry feelings, which is self-denial and self-deception. Based on The Body Never Lies (2005), Alice Miller would argue that Kip “emotional traumas, repressed humiliation, and bottled rage can manifest themselves as serious adult health problems.”

Eventually, Kip’s self-deception caught up to him. He’d done as he was told. Dropping petitions and releasing all claims, Alice made the deal, and she submitted to the Nevada courts. They were finally divorced. She’d surrendered the Rhinelander brand. Philip’s wealth and the Rhinelander holdings were secured from this interloper. Alice agreed to an annuity, unfortunately without adjustments for present value. He and Alice never lived together again. Yet, I believe that Kip actually loved Alice. In her, he perhaps found what was lost in his mother’s sudden passing: love, support, acceptance, compassion, and strength. And yet, Kip kept repressed his deep pain over his childhood maltreatment and the then-present realization that he was controlled, weak, and broken, especially in having to give up Alice’s love. After the deal making, Kip worked for his father, and by the time he died at a very young age, he suffered from bloating, pneumonia, and perhaps deep loneliness. Having repressed his true feelings, Kip suffered lung ailments, which eventually suffocated him.

Despite what he suffered and how he lived, Kip unconsciously wanted to live an authentic life. By simply viewing the on-and-off again relationship between Kip and Alice through a racialized lens, Smith-Pryor’s narrative and analysis corral Kip and Alice’s amorous and nuptial doings simply within Jim Crow sensibilities, thus permitting us to downplay their powerful psychological and complex existential features. Indeed, Philip did control Kip and perhaps his other children with a powerful hand and economic blackmail. Alice thought of Kip as too yielding to his father’s wishes, especially because they kept Kip away from her. Yet, despite Kip’s apparent masochistic personality, which gave him a more subservient and surrendered acceptance of his father’s overpowering style, Stephen Johnson’s Character Styles (1994) would argue that Kip was really passive-aggressive and spiteful. Smith-Pryor use of the personal data between Kip and Alice revealed that he could be as controlling of her as he was perhaps controlled by his father. In this sense, Kip was not devoid of personal power; he’d rather deploy it in a non-confrontational way. For example, Kip, through a letter read by the Rhinelander lawyer, encouraged Alice to fight, and in so doing, Kip indirectly brought notoriety and ill-repute to Philip and the Rhinelander clan. Second by encouraging Alice to fight back, Kip indirectly placed at risk what Philip cherished more than he loved his own children: money, property, and wealth. Third, Kip also indirectly exposed his father to Alice’s alienation of affection claim for $500,000.00, and along with the judge’s sequestration of Kip’s income and property within New York, Philip begrudgingly sent his lawyer to the bargaining table. In this way, while he looked weak, withdraw, and diffident, Kip knew what frightened Philip, and rather than suffer the fate that befell his uncle, William, Kip drew Philip into a no-win legal battle with Alice, who he knew was strong and determined, and to the extent that he viewed Adelaide and Alice as genuinely devoted to his happiness and well-being, then Kip attempted to pay homage to both by inflicting a grievous wound in Philip’s soft underbelly: money.

In Rhinelander v. Rhinelander’s legal historical drama, do race and racial ideologies matter? Of course, they do. As Smith-Pryor aptly uncovers, this case and its handlers just exploited the cesspool of eugenics. It was not ultimately about these distractions, for the real soft underbelly was preventing Alice from relying on dower to influence the Rhinelander holdings and its wealth accretions. So, while race and racial ideologies were critically indispensable stage props, the case’s chorus was money and property, which posed characters and put words in their mouths. Together, race, racial ideologies, and property drove the case’s legal theory and courtroom tactics. But property was this play’s central character, which only takes on added meaning in Property Rites if Smith-Pryor would have followed the existential breadcrumbs that laid about this critically important legal narrative.

Yet, if race, society, whiteness, and property are the soft underbelly of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander, Smith-Pryor’s Property Rites shares a table at which other great luminaries like Sharon Davies, Rising Road (2009) and Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice (2004) eat silver-plated dinners. In Rising Road (2009), Sharon Davies exquisitely accounts the race, whiteness, and religious context in which Edwin Stephenson, a Methodist minister, murdered James Doyle, a Catholic priest, after he married Stephenson’s daughter, Ruth, to Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican immigrant and practicing Catholic. As the Rhinelander clan had done to protect William and to annul his marriage to Margueretta, the future Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black argued that Stephenson was temporarily insane, and then he attempted to distract the jury with religious hysteria and with baiting claims that Pedro was really a “Negro.” In Arc of Justice (2005), Kevin Boyle’s award winning treatment masterfully retells the trial of Dr. Ossian Sweet and 10 others, including his wife Gladys, for the murder of Leon Breiner after a neighborhood improvement association and a mob of at least 600 surrounded his newly bought bungalow, all in the hopes of keeping this Detroit neighborhood lily white. In the masterful hands of Clarence Darrow, Sweet and the other defendants were acquitted, but having lost his infant daughter and shortly thereafter his wife, he was never the same. And despite his financial success, he declined, sold his house to another black family, moved into a flat above his pharmacy in the ghetto, and eventually put a bullet in his head.

Notwithstanding its overlooked but critically important and driving psychological and existential elements, which add but don’t detract from this contextualized work, Smith-Pryor’s Property Rites will be recognized for its textual richness, deep research, moving prose, and analytical power.

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[1] Copyright © 2010 by Reginald Leamon Robinson. Professor of Law, Howard Law School, Washington, DC. B.A., Howard University (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude), 1981; M.A., The University of Chicago (Political Science), 1983; Exchange Scholar (Political Science & Economics), 1984-85; J.D., The University of Pennsylvania, 1989. Of course, the politics and errata belong exclusively to me.

Beyond the Race Card's Two-Value Logic: Thoughts on Richard Ford's "Race Card at Your Own Peril"

I read Professor Richard Ford's Op-ed piece (Wash. Post, Feb. 16, 2008) with interest, hoping that it'd show greater dynamic ways in which race and racism operate in our lives beyond its usual structural features. In his piece, the structural features have faces – cynical politicians who seek personal advantage through the political process. In some ways, his analysis tracks that of Kenneth O'Neill's Nixon's Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton (1995). As a macro analysis, I agree with his points. Yet, macro and micro levels work together seamlessly, and while it's relatively easy to examine broader, structural features of race and racism, I think that the real action happens at the micro level, the pool on which the scum of ignorance can either float or sink.

In fact, politicians cannot do anything externally or structurally to whip up racist fervor if it does not already exist in our egoistic mental patterns, and hence the real remedy is not just punishing cynical politicians who play the race card, but also demanding that ordinary people, including minorities, take responsibility for their mental patterns, the very source of fear, judging, violence, and ignorance. In their 2005 book entitled The End of Suffering, Russell Targ and J.J. Hurtak argue that suffering originated in Aristotle's two-value logic (or the Law of the Excluded Middle): (1) whites are good; (2) non-whites are not good. This corollary of racism means that politicians have fertile ground on which to work their self-interest. However, it would be all for naught if ordinary people did not view the world through this very simplistic (racist) prism.

For example, on the AALS Minority-section’s List Serv, some concerns have fallen squarely within two-value logic. Some law professors have argued that Senator Obama is either going to champion of the cause of black Americans and minorities in ending racism or going to promote a color-blind agenda that will placate white interests and leave blacks and minorities little better off than they have been under President Bush. He can't do both. Such simplicity promotes a degree of fear that I've witnessed in these exchanges, and as I've noticed, few of us are capable of leaping beyond two-value logic very easily.

By steeping ourselves in either-or logic, politicians can appear to provoke or steer or guide the worst features of so-called human nature to heighten racism and needless separation among us. By rationalizing this either-or logic and its attendant fear, judging, violence, and ignorance, we, most if not all of us, place our considerable mental power at the disposal of politicians who purport to advance our cause, who validate our egoistic mental patterns, and who reinforce that racial politics is the way the world really works. Outside of our fear, we all know better.

By stationing our analysis at the two-value logic level or macro level, we, especially Race Crits or race scholars of traditional sociological analysis, seek out the exogenous or external variables that act as triggers for this either-or logic. Once we've identified these triggers, we focus our considerable intellect on etching the contours of these variables, all in the hope that we'll educate others or neutralize a cynical politician’s ability to stir up the ugly of racism at least in the way she succeeded previously. Unfortunately, what goes missing in their subtle and not-so-subtle analyses is the ways in which ordinary people have been, and are, the timber on which the whipped up racist flames depend.

In practical terms, one cynical politician cannot divide a community, unless ordinary people find so-called external validation for their either-or thinking of the politician’s words. One person can't destroy or unite the world. Cynical politicians or charismatic leaders depend on either our ignorance or hope. In either case, we then serve as the oceanic swell that gives rise to the crest on which these politicians or leaders ride. In short, when we focus our considerable intellect force simply on these triggering human beings (e.g., cynical politicians), especially because we want to avoid needlessly blaming the victim, we too place our mental power in the service of Aristotle's two-value logic (or the Law of the Excluded Middle), and we too operate – even in a sophisticated way – within egoistic mental patterns that contribute to our suffering and the suffering of others.

With self-reflection, we can do better. We must find a way to get beyond two-value logic. For the exclude middle is where greater possibilities exist. For example, Senator Obama can be: (3) black and non-black at the same time. Or he can do: (3) good for the collective community and not good for traditional civil rights politics. By recognizing that the excluded middle offers us greater possibilities, thus getting us beyond the simplicity of either-or logic, we can have different, perhaps more fruitful discussions, in which we implicate minorities and women too.

At three-value logic, we can sincerely say that minorities, who have been on the receiving end of some of the worse treatment excepting the genocide of American Indians, can be: victims (although I really reject this concept) and non-victims. As victims, we can say that social institutions, driven by white males’ collective two-value logic, denied minorities and women access to resources that white males took for granted. As non-victims, they too engaged in a different kind of two-value logic: (1) America will always be a white racist nation; (2) America will overcome its white racism if it enacts race-conscious remedies. The upshot: if America rejects race-conscious remedies, blacks can expect to suffer white racism, to face racial discrimination, and to never get a fair break in America. Of course, the tragic problem is that success stories, however few (e.g., Oklahoma's black Wall Street that was later destroyed for cynical racism), belies such explicit or implicit claims.

Yet, on their status as non-victims, I'm introducing the Law of Attraction, which says: "likes unto themselves are drawn." According to Esther Hicks and Jerry Hicks’ The Law of Attractions: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham (2006), this principle would mean that minorities are as responsible for the way in which they view the world and for the experiences they attract to themselves as whites might be. What's particularly important about this principle is that it's part of the excluded middle, and it argues that minorities are co-creators of their own experiences and realities. Professor Leon Litwack's Trouble in Mind (1998), a very important contribute to the analysis of Jim Crow politics, reveals the degree to which black community’s two-value logic was a powerful co-creator of their experiences, and even if blacks later succeeded, they still internalized deep suffering that belies their material success. Just consider Professors Joel Feagin and Melvin Sikes' Living with Racism: The Black-Middle Class Experience (1994).

By getting beyond two-value logic, by exploring the excluded middle, where greater possibilities exist, we can understand different ways of co-creating the world. By interrogating how minorities co-create reality constructs and thus attract good and not-good personal experiences, we can sincerely and honestly examine at least two vital issues: those who ride the crest of the wave; those who generate the oceanic force on which this wave's existence depends.

Harder still is moving from three-value logic, where Senator Obama can engage in racial politics and non-racial politics, to four-value logic, in which he is (4) neither black nor not black. At this level, all things are possible. More important, we can begin to recognize that we are connected to everything and everyone. Leading up to the 2000 census, bi-racial and multi-racial identities argued for four-value logic. Their very existence did violence to official race-based constructs, which were: (1) "I'm white" or (2) "I'm black". I made this argument in The Shifting Race-Consciousness Matrix and the Multiracial Category Movement: A Critical Reply to Professor Hernandez, 20 Boston College Third World Law Journal 231-289 (2000). But officially, we can’t be (3) white and non-white. In this sense, our government has officially embraced two-value logic, not only in racial identities, but also in politics (i.e., Democrats versus Republicans), in foreign policies (e.g., pro-democracy or not pro-democracy), in fighting terrorism (e.g., you’re either with us or against us).

By the time we get to four-value logic, we enter into nonlocal causation (Quantum Physics/culture) and into naked awareness (Buddhism's emptiness). For example, we’ve heard the butterfly protocol: when the butterfly flaps its wings over Tokyo, Paris suffers a storm. Hence, at the nonlocal level, immediate, external events don’t necessarily cause what's happening to us. Rather, according to physicists like Professor Emeritus William Tiller, et al. (Conscious Acts of Creation: The Emergence of the New Physics (2001)) and early thinkers like Prentice Mulford's Thoughts Are Things (2007; originally published in 1889), a group of people in New York City can affect outcomes in California. At the nonlocal causation level, causative forces are unseen, and they still affect people, places, and things. Why? Because at the four-value logic, we are all One; all connected to all.

Furthermore, at this level, then, all thoughts matter, not just white folks, but also minorities and women too. More than theoretical, blacks affect other blacks and minorities by the degree to which they hold a specific set of beliefs or identify with certain egoistic mental patterns. For example, minorities believe or identify with the following thoughts: (a) America's racism is permanent; (b) the criminal justice system is racist; (c) race-conscious remedies can end racism; (d) white, racist cops cause the driving while black phenomenon, etc. None of these beliefs/thoughts is necessarily true. Yet, if we believe that they are true, our personal experiences and sense of social reality confirm that, for example, the criminal justice system is racist. By the by, we got to confront this issue in the case of the Jena Six.

In the context of Ford’s Op-ed piece, and the limits of two-value logic, voters don’t have to succumb to simplistic, racial tropes. Accordingly, if cynical politicians come to town and if voters show up to listen, then they don’t have to provide them the oceanic forces so that politicians can ride the crest of racism to public office. Voters can decide to punish politicians either by not showing at the polls, by voting against them, or by publicly denouncing this either-or approach of old-style politics. That is, they can prevent cynical politicians from using them. Once so used, voters become little more than objects within a fear-based collective who can be moved puppet-like by deterministic forces. Hence, Hispanic voters in the coming Arizona and California national election, and eventually in Texas’ primary, can reject politicians who engage in the old-style politics of divide and conquer so that later, as president, he or she can offer olive branches and political spoils to show that he or she is sincere about healing the ugly, unfortunate rift between blacks, Hispanics, and whites. Basically, we must expose cynical politicians who simply seek to manipulate us for their own ends. However, we can only so do if we move beyond two-value logic and view our world and possibilities from a broader perspective.

From this broader perspective, we can ask: isn't it entirely possible that the rest of the world, which is terribly sick of President Bush's militaristic, corporate-oriented foreign policies, is psychically and emotionally supporting Senator Obama's run for the presidency? From a nonlocal causation or naked awareness, wouldn't they as well as national voters be equally responsible for his ongoing momentum? Don't we all consciously or otherwise see in Senator Obama’s campaign a rejection of the two-value logic of old-style, divisive politics? Aren't we – and the world – now ready for three- and four-value logic, especially because we see the real limits of imperial presidents, military juntas, and totalitarian governments? I believe that four-value logic (or nonlocal causation or naked awareness) holds the greatest hope for our self-awareness that we, especially the United States, do affect the rest of the world, that we’re connected to all others, and that as Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now (1999) might argue, we can ultimately liberate ourselves from suffering, of which racism is just a temporary, historical feature.

Although Professor Ford’s Op-ed piece hovered at the macro level, focusing on deterministic triggers who, this time, were cynical politicians, I enjoyed the read, agreeing with most of his observations. His piece is deeply whetted to two-value logic. What’s missing is the micro level. At this level, we’d expose the degree to which minorities and others are the energy behind all of their best moments and worst, racist experiences. These experiences flow from two-value logic, and if we are to get beyond this source of our psychological, existential, and emotional suffering, we must interrogate the ways in which we rely on egoistic mental patterns like racial identities to engage in self-destructive judgments, violent thoughts, scarcity-based policies, and old-style politics of divide and conquer. Yet, to do so, we must fundamentally alter the way we think, act, believe, feel, and talk. At the very least, we must embrace four-value logic of nonlocal causation or naked awareness. With nonlocal causation, we’d appreciate that we’re not only the sum of our collective choices but also connected – mind, body, and soul – to every living thing on the planet. We harvest today the history of our aggregating choices. Hence, what we permit to happen to one of us today has happened, and may happen, to us again unless we alter our core beliefs.

Fortunately, by altering our core beliefs and by adopting nonlocal causation or naked awareness, we can strengthen and broaden antisubordination or empowerment principles. Within legal academe, Critical Race Theory (CRT) comes to mind. We can strengthen CRT by understanding that past, present, and future are linked. In this way, Race Crits can more persuasively argue that social conditions and present effects of past discrimination are still powerful explanatory forces in extant racism and racial discrimination. We can broaden CRT by tying these present effects to present core beliefs, egoistic mental patterns, and human agency, for thoughts are real, affecting everyone and everything around us. We can also broaden CRT by acknowledging that all humans are powerful reality co-creators, and as such we can attract good and non-good experiences. In this way, Race Crits cannot simply point to white structural oppression for what plagues minorities and women, and then argue that race-conscious remedies will eradicate racist ills, while they leave the two-value logic at the heart of the suffering of minorities and women untouched. To truly empower others, Race Crits themselves must psychologically and existentially embrace three- and four-value logic too.

Once these views are woven into our cultural fabric, our educational curricula, and our scholarly musing about social issues, we can gradually move beyond two-value logic to four-value logic, thus rejecting old-style politics and connecting to all human beings whether here or elsewhere. Perhaps we stand ready for this new world. After Senator Clinton and former President Clinton engaged in race-baiting politics, they lost broader support. With a far broader campaign based on the nonlocal logic of all for all, Senator Obama enjoys greater momentum. In this coming new world, we’ll refuse to send people to Washington or to gubernatorial offices who view us as billiard balls for their well-chalked cue sticks.

We’re not objects. We’re powerful reality co-creators who must reject views that Asians, blacks, Hispanics, whites, and other human beings have distinct, existential interests. We don’t.

Believe in White Racism and Attract Bad Things

As I read Joe R. Hicks’ “Drop the Race Card” (Outlook, April 15, 2007), I thought he’d hit the right note, especially as a reformed race-baiting adherent of “orthodox civil rights view” that silently argued against blacks thinking for themselves. With greater sobriety, Hicks realized that civil rights pundits (like well-paid “leaders” like Jackson and Sharpton) were lobbing about the race card liberally and wrongfully. Although he’d stopped drinking the toxic brew called “black victims,” his article lacked something.

First I liked Hick’s sobriety. Now free to think for himself, Hicks impliedly asked if pundits like Rev. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were really different from the self-interested politics of Nifong, the humanistically-challenged Imus, and the existentially-wrecked Michael Richards, all of who used racially-charged language or motives to promote themselves. He concluded that they were not. They didn’t use phrases like “nappy-headed hoes.” Rather they used Imus and Richards to pour the dark-poison of racism back into present-day America. The upshot: blacks beware, for white racism lives! Hicks, and I, rejected this pogrom. In a recent interview with Tavis Smiley, Eddie Glaude argued: “somebody gets hurt, somebody creates some noise, and somebody gets paid.” Who? Pundits like Jackson and Sharpton. What of black folks? Still the so-called black victims. On this point, Hicks argued: “[I]t is an agenda of racial opportunism that promotes the view that blacks are powerless victims of white racism. In this view, blacks are always in need of government intervention to save them from white hostility.” Glaude and Hicks got it right.

Second, Hicks’ sobriety avoids new analytical depths. If pundits like Jackson and Sharpton are effectively exploiting blacks for their personal gain as he and Glaude would argue, then are they encouraging blacks to use their considerable emotional energy to believe in white racism and black victimization so that they can draw bad things to them, all of which confirms that America hates them, and that so they need pundits like Jackson and Sharpton? Are they promoting fear? Few race scholars have made the link between beliefs, emotions, and experiences. But if they did, they’d come to realize that by so doing, blacks are using their consciousness to serve a well-worn but outdated orthodoxy that co-creates what they actually fear – victimizing experiences. This rabbit hole is too frightening, for it may explain Jim Crow violence and the current state of so-called black America. Yet, we must have Alice’s intrepidity. We must dare to take back our power, not just from do-wearing pundits like Sharpton, but also from neo-cons and wealth maximizing politicians whether they are Democrats or Republicans.

Didn’t “The Secret”, the New Age DVD campaign that trumpeted the Law of Attraction principle, declare that we get what we emotionally believe? Emotions – love or fear – are the fuel that attracts people, things, and experiences to us. In “Law of Attraction,” Esther and Jerry Hicks tell us that this Law works in our lives even if we don’t accept it. If so, they argue, we might as well use this Law deliberately to bring happier experiences and financial abundance to us. Or we can co-create by default, that is, place our emotional energy in the service of someone else’s agenda. Think about the never-found WMD, the flawed invasion of Iraq, or the rights-destroying war on terrorism! Weren’t you fearful?

Anyway, do pundits like Jackson and Sharpton have an orthodox agenda that keeps the fear of white racism, black victimization, and governmental dependence hammered into the minds of blacks? Many blacks believe in Jackson’s and Sharpton’s orthodox, even if they refuse to elect them to a public office. Are blacks co-creating experiences of racial fear that do not exist for many of us? If so, people like Jackson and Sharpton get served by this fear.

This Law applies to fears of white racism and black victimization. Despite Hick’s sobriety, he does not follow Alice down this rabbit hole. He said: “Jackson and Sharpton, among others of their ilk, are dinosaurs fighting only to maintain a patina of relevance.” Hicks quoted Cosby for its implications: “There are people [who] want you to remain in a hole. . . . [Y]our job is not becoming victims. We have to rise up and fight on all levels to succeed.” How can blacks succeed while living under the weight of their self-oppressive, agency-robbing fears? By serving these dinosaurs, blacks keep themselves in a present-day “Jim Crow”.

The Law of Attraction links beliefs, emotions, and experiences, and this principle gives blacks a tool to take personal responsibility for what they fearfully co-create: white racism, black victimization, and governmental dependence.