The Self as "Other" (Clara B. Jones)

The Self as “Other”

Gilles Deleuze, French philosopher and colleague of Michel Foucault, claimed that academics’ lives are boring, not worthy of conversion into memoirs. Despite urging by family, friends, and acquaintances to write a memoir, I have resisted entering this domain of publication which seems necessarily self-absorbed, subjective, limiting, and limited. There is the fear, repeating the view of Deleuze, that I will prove uninteresting and disappointing to the reader. Perhaps memoirs can be rendered interesting to the extent that the subject is capable of viewing herself in a detached and independent manner—which I venture here to attempt. I hope in this essay to arouse no sentimental reactions, no tears, and no images of victimization but, instead, to share certain facts of my life that may have general import to those curious about or challenged by mental illness and its effects upon a long-term scientific career. It is my intent, also, to place related events within a fabric composed of contemporary behavioral research in order that this document might facilitate understanding of the brain’s capacity for both order and disorder (dis-ease), in particular, how disordered episodes erupt over time, yet maintain the brain’s fundamental ability for flexibility, repair, and change. Just as the earliest psychologists attempted to reduce animal (including human) behavior to physics, I borrow from the latter discipline the concept, “Butterfly Effect,” attempting a memoir of my own recurring experiences with chaos and repair.

To view the self as “other” requires resolution of Heisenberg’s dilemma whereby accuracy in approximating a system’s character traits requires observation external to the system itself. The Heisenberg Principle is akin to the statistical concept of independence, a form of detachment insuring “unbiased”* inferences within a 5% margin of error**. When the self observes the self as “other,” a disembodiment is required so that the approximation of “objectivity” can be achieved. Like other animal (including human) behaviorists, my training has emphasized observational skills which should be transferable to the present project. As a woman in her mid-late sixties with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder (“manic-depression”), my primary obligation in this document is to the reader who, I hope, will discover a text, and its analyses, a “good read” not without insight and humor.

*When I think of “unbiased” or “objective,” I think, simply, of minimizing error.
**Technically, from a statistical point of view, this way of expressing the meaning of "error" is incorrect; however, it will suffice for a general audience.

=======================================================================

[[Self-portrait Sonnet*

1. We could populate Mars, but Earth is a scalable platform.

2. Intersectionality is outdated since AI is the next big thing.

3a. I make ugly art beautiful.

3b. Are you a Gynobot?

3c. No, I am a technophobe.

4a. Istanbul Fashion Week was held in Newark.

4b. My book was released in June but didn't sell.

5. It's impossible to learn to cook by reading poetry.

6. I am free to make art, but no-one will care.

7. I exist on the margins, seeking a way out.

8. I have a quick mind but am slow on my feet.

9. I understand what he is saying, but what does he want?

10a. Do you think the play will be a hit?

10b. It should appeal to anyone with a dark sense of humor.

11. [Afrobots are defined by a field in Iowa where long rows of corn lead nowhere.]

12. Help is two hours away.

13. Buy one Tesla®, get one free.

14. Black lives matter in Ireland, and Dubliners like collard greens.]]

*Published in coelacanth [Fi], 2019

Psychology as Panopticon (Clara B. Jones)

Psychology as Panopticon

Wilhelm Wundt is recogtnized as “the father of psychology,” establishing the first laboratory of experimental psychology at the University of Leipzig in 1859, the same year Darwin's, Origin... was published. This event in Psychology inaugurated the role of the new discipline in viewing Homo sapiens as a subject of study by scientists, challenging Medieval beliefs of humans as distinct from other mammals and as close approximations to god. Psychology as a discipline has morphed into a variety of sub-disciplines, several of which have rejected the field’s quantitatively rigorous beginnings. From a scientific perspective, clinical psychologists, in particular, represent the most fragmented of these sub-disciplines, incorporating hard and soft methodological approaches to the study and practice of the human taxon. Nonetheless, a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from a graduate program approved by the American Psychological Association (APA) stands as one of the most powerful doctoral degrees offered in Psychology, and the bearers of this degree may be found in clinical practice as well as in neuroscientific laboratories. Borrowing from Michel Foucault’s discussion of the architecture of power in society and his notion of Panopticon or central authority in the state and its bureaucratic representatives, the discipline of psychology and its morphs, especially clinical psychology, embody the power to name, classify, and treat all manner of behaviors exhibited and repressed by humans of any age and combination of character traits.

I first entered the psychological system of surveillance in my mid-twenties as a young mother of three. At that time, my diagnosis of schizophrenia, a major mental disorder, insured my placement in the medical Panopticon and its variegated prescriptions for treatment and recovery. At this time, I was an undergraduate student with a major in Psychology* at a prominent university in upstate New York where I returned to the classroom without significant delay. Subsequent to this first psychotic episode, I regained what appeared to be a normal life as student, mother, and wife, without considering the possibility that mental illness would define much of my future.

The empirical and collective wisdom of researchers conclude that major mental disorders (mood disorders and schizophrenia) are expressed when a threshold of interactions between genetic predisposition in response to environmental stressors is activated. When I presented with my first episode of mental illness, I was no stranger to stress or to what appeared to be a familial predisposition to psychopathology since my younger brother and sister had multiple hospitalizations before my own problems surfaced. The three of us grew up in a middle class home with distant parents who hired a live-in housekeeper to cook, clean, and assume responsibility for child care. Aside from my maternal grandmother who raised me from birth until the age of five, the housekeeper, herself distant, provided what, according to my memory, was the only stable presence from my childhood to my mid-teens. But, then, many grow up in similar or more dysfunctional circumstances, not necessarily leading to a DSM diagnosis.

I am now in my mid-late sixties with recurrent episodes of “manic-depression” continuing as a component of my life process. During my most recent hospitalization, I lost all assets accumulated during my career, was reduced to homelessness, was fired from my professorship, and was arrested and incarcerated twice. My daughter**, a mother, wife, and professional with significant obligations of her own, identified a long-term private facility in North Carolina that accepted me as a resident. To my knowledge, one of my sons assumed significant financial responsibilities for my well-being, and another son provided the skills necessary to have my status with the courts in Moore County, North Carolina, dismissed. While in jail, I thought of Foucault’s discussion of power and the role of law enforcement, including institutions of correction, as the dominant symbol of the Panopticon. Clearly, the power to name and to diagnose combined with all levels of policing were the primary forces of coercion determining how and when my episodes of psychopathology would and would not be tolerated in the social fabric within which I was living.

In an attempt to objectify my history of mental illness, it seems important to say that, in the midst of depression, mania, or psychosis, one lives in a “black hole” of self-absorption experienced as normal though, concurrently, bizarre. I have experienced more than a dozen episodes of psychopathology exhibited as combinations and re-combinations of mania, (less frequently) depression, and psychosis. During manic events, including my most recent illness, I have spent many thousands of dollars on unnecessary and often extravagant purchases, including cars, jewelry, designer clothing, books, fine art, and crafts. As a result of poor judgment, my assets were reduced to a few items fitting in my car which served as my residence until repossessed, leaving my net worth almost nil. As a homeless person fired from her university professorship in 2008, I learned, even through my fog of mental illness, that the poor are followed closely by the components of the legitimate and marginal Panopticon Network working in concert, ostensibly to maintain social order. The Panopticon Network manifests as a complex social framework of nodes and trajectories and, integrated with the concept of “fitness landscapes,” mean heights across space. The Panopticon Network extends its tentacles into every inhabitable space just as Rudolph Giuliani, as mayor of New York City, once utilized policing to curtail homeless windshield washers in their creative though intrusive attempts to earn a living.

*Influenced by my mother, and, performing well in the discipline, my first love was Botany; however, due, in part, to my connections in the department, Psychology offered me an undergraduate teaching assistantship (with M.E.P. Seligman, one of the great honors of my academic life).

**Due to an unfortunate interaction with my daughter during this time, we have been estranged until today (9/3/2018).

=====================================================================

Personal Calculus, November 2018

1.

1/1 Art is often the subject as well as the context.	1/2 Genotype is destiny in Baltimore.	1/3 In 1973, I walked into the Amazon with a Yagua man I did not know.
2/1 Brian Shimkovits plays “Awesome Tapes from Africa.”	2/2 My father tried to smother me.	2/3 i don't know you, do i?
3/1 My cat howls at the moon.	3/2 Another star is born...	3/3 In 1974, my husband....
4/1 A lover's early death is the greatest gift a woman can receive.	4/2 In 1973, I shot an endangered Saimirion Osá.	4/3 At a party in Ithaca, I saw my psychiatrist pull his son from a chair and slam the boy onto the floor.
5/1 “Why keep on pulling material from 2000-plus years of art history now that we have all these new online cultures?"*	5/2 Ulysses is everything....	5/3 Rita Dove lost the war by calling Helen Vendler, “racist.”
6/1 Afrobots live in ghettos with cats.	6/2 “I like sad things and hateful things and angry things, as they just stick with me more than happy things.”**	6/3 My mother gassed defective kittens in our oven.
7/1 Does what we desire make us who we are?	7/2 I never had good sex and a good man at the same time.	7/3 In 1976, I hiked Talamanca to find the Bribri.

*Jon Rafman

**David Raymond Conroy

2.

I remember when—

—we read Gibran poems in that café near Harvard;

—you and your cat licked milk from a blue bowl perched on the edge of the highest stair leading to the basement;

—Jerry jumped from the cliff in Utah;

—Jamal's Afrobot was struck by a truck on the way to Starbuck's®;

—the Einstein of the negroes was found in Harlem;

—Tyrone's boyfriend flew to Munich to view the Kandinsky;

—the sun didn't rise until noon;

—you ate collards and bluefin tuna;

—Le Bernardin® had no Michelin stars;

—Shemika said she was Swedish;

—Michelle put her hands on the Queen of England;

—my mother's death brought me pleasure;

—the tapir walked into my garden;

—I shot the howler monkey that died;

—'Toya ordered fat back and corn bread at Le Bernardin®;

—Tabebuia bloomed in synchrony;

—The Bell Jar told my story, and Nihilism seemed like a good idea.

The Panopticon Network and Clinical Psychology (Clara B. Jones)

The Panopticon Network and Clinical Psychology

In the 1970s, clinical psychologists wrested control of the APA, and, in response, scientific psychologists withdrew from that organization, establishing their own professional society. Clinical psychologists continue to fortify their status in the Panopticon Network via initiatives to prescribe medications and to gain other privileges generally within the domain of psychiatry. Although surveillance by the Panopticon Network begins at birth with registration by the state, expansion of surveillance impedes all aspects of life after an individual’s legal emancipation from parents. I was born middle-class in the segregated South in the early 1940s. My nuclear family has been labeled “non-reactive” as indicated by such neglect as apparent parental indifference to my witnessing the death of a friend, my killing my brother’s kitty at the approximate age of ten, and a suicide attempt at the age of eight. In another family, any of these events might have led to intervention by psychologists; however, my parents consistently denied all evidence of psychopathology in their children. Instead, at an early age, I became my father’s confidante and my mother’s rival.

My surveillance by the clinical psychology nodes of the Panopticon Network were especially memorable during the 1980s* when I was hospitalized with a higher frequency than during any other phase of my adulthood. Most of these hospitalizations took place at a luxurious, expensive, private clinic in Massachusetts, and it was there that my diagnosis of schizophrenia was enforced. In 1990 or so, I was hospitalized at a state hospital in New Jersey and diagnosed as “bipolar.” The most immediate and positive outcome of this reclassification involved a change in medication leading, within a brief period of time, to the mitigation of symptoms and a relatively episode-free phase for more than a decade. The psychiatrist who reassigned me from schizophrenia to the category, “major mood disorders,” was East Indian, emphasizing that the Panopticon Network, including all forms of policing and diagnosis, is international in scope and that expertise is not limited to the American psychiatric community. For most individuals, parents are the original enforcers of social** regulation and, therefore, are expected by the state to enforce mores, codes of conduct, and appropriate behavior until a child’s emancipation in the mid- to late-teen years.

In my family of origin, corporal punishment was not employed as a mode of punishment or behavioral shaping. Instead, my mother, who would probably have been classified as a hysteric and a narcissist, employed methods, including raging screams, to induce feelings of guilt, shame, and remorse to control her three children. My most memorable of these tactics occurred when she said to me at an early age, “I always wanted a little girl; but, you weren’t the one I had in mind.” Although race and skin color were never discussed in my home, I felt ashamed to be relatively dark brown in skin tone and, privately, considered myself to be the “darkie” in the family. My mother, brother, and sister were Caucasian in color and features, and my late sister, fifteen years younger than I, was the desired, and desirable, daughter with light skin, and dark blonde/light brown hair. Surprisingly, perhaps, instead of developing a perspective of self-hatred and though it is not possible for me to say I loved my mother, I continue to respect her training in biology, chemistry, and math and gained much information and many skills from her scientific training and practice. For many years I resented my mother’s neglect. However, for some time, I have understood what must have been her anger and conflict towards my father and her children as symbols of her failure to become a medical doctor, her lifetime goal never achieved***. Similar to my mother, my husband**** and children prevented my becoming an animal behaviorist studying tropical taxa; however, unlike my mother, I yielded custody of my children to their father (~1977) in order that I might devote uninterrupted attention to my career*****. Although I never regretted that decision, it has not been one without significant consequences, particularly negative effects on my relationships with my offspring and with other women, including my daughter, who are mothers unable to imagine such a choice. The costs for all concerned have been high.

With the possible exception of single, teenage mothers who yield their children for adoption and who remain in the custody of their parents, the Panopticon Network, including all domains of social influence, evaluates individual and group behavioral patterns along interacting and complex continua from normal to pathological. The cadre of clinical psychologists hold Ph.D.s preparing them to practice as therapists as well as researchers and not a few are members of the prestigious National Academy of Medicine (NAM). I can imagine my brilliant mother with a high-powered career in medicine and an extremely competitive aspect toward her colleagues, possibly, winning the Lasker Prize (awarded only to those with a M.D.) for her research. Ideally, I view my mother without children and, possibly, single; however, perhaps I am projecting my own unconscious thoughts (needs?) onto her. Thinking of her now, especially thinking of her rages and exclamations that she would die if her proscriptions were not followed, I wish that she had followed our family doctor’s advice to permit a clinical psychologist to intervene in order to help our family. My “perfect” mother and her “perfect” family were never permitted to reveal the chaos underlying the daily drama of apparently appropriately behavior.

*During this period, I converted to Catholicism though I never practiced seriously and, now, consider the conversion a sign of my dis-ease.

**Except where stated otherwise, throughout this document, I employ the definition for “social” as defined in the recognized Social Sciences: interindividual interactions.

***To be fair, my father's desires for the future had, also, been thwarted. A star quarterback in college, his wishes to become a professional football player were foreclosed due to racial barriers in those, and, semi-professional, leagues. Instead, he became a physical education teacher.

****Clarence Dalton Jones (now, Dalton Miller-Jones, Ph.D.)

*****I'm not certain why I always put it in this way. In point of fact, I had been thinking about surrendering custody of my children since 1976, deciding that, due to my unpredictable mental stability and my meager financial and other resources, my children would be better situated living with their father. It took me a year or so to come to this decision which was reinforced when I experienced another manic episode in 1977. Making a long story short, after the “breakdown,” I moved to the town where my children were living & made a serious suicide attempt not too long after (in 1979). Rather than giving up my children to their father to concentrate on my career, burying myself in my career was my way of saving myself after what was a terrifying, humiliating, and very sad event.

=======================================================================================

Psychopathology Sonnet

for Judy Blume

1. I was confined for three years after he left.

2. I am mentally ill and allergic to cheese.

3a. My diagnosis is grim, but your marriage is strong.

3b. I left Munich with men who wanted a tryst.

3c. Self-actualization is my goal though I don't have a job.

4. The economy lost 8% this month, but traders are bullish.

5. Dick committed Betsy for life when she started to rebel.

6. The more choices I have the sicker I am.

7. Hitler admired Kandinsky's art but labeled it grotesque.

8. I woke from my coma after three days of treatment.

9. I am homeless now but plan to take an online course.

10. I was diagnosed bi-polar, but my son calls me schizoid.

11. Before Freud fled Vienna, he said Hitler would save him.

12. I wanted to falsify it, but Science is not my strength.

13a. I traded a bottle of Pinot Noir for a bag of chips.

13b. Replicants govern Brooktondale.

14. Anxiety is contagious but curable.

Behaviorism trumps Cognitive Psychology? (Clara B. Jones)

Behaviorism Trumps Cognitive Psychology?

Some of the most subtle insights about Behaviorism are embedded in a joke heard on <bloggingheads.tv>. Partners were making love and, afterwards, one said, “I know it was good for you; how was it for me?” In 1990, the year of his death, B.F. Skinner gave the keynote address at the annual meeting of APA. He must have recognized that this speech would be his final opportunity to critique the discipline of psychology, and to make his case for operant conditioning, in front of a large audience. Perhaps the most controversial comment that he made in the hour long lecture was, “Cognitive science is the creationism of psychology.” Clearly, Skinner never renounced “radical behaviorism” nor, apparently, did he modify his views in response to critics such as Noam Chomsky and psychologists. In some ways, though clinical psychologists have dominated the APA for more than two decades, disagreements remain about what theoretical and empirical approaches are the most powerful (in a statistical sense) predictors of animal (including, human) behavior. A cognitive orientation currently dominates most departments of psychology in the United States. Nonetheless, most patterns of overt behavior may be expressed “automatically” in the sense that conscious and aware thought has not, unless I am mistaken, been shown to be a typical precursor to action patterns (motor patterns, “behavior”). As a demonstration of the last point, I developed a classroom exercise requiring students to think of a simple activity (e.g., cooking an egg, washing dishes, braiding hair), dividing the activity into motor patterns, and thinking through each component of the activity before expressing it. Most students found this exercise difficult or impossible to effect, and, in my experience, all students acting as subjects in this activity found it very frustrating to attempt and complete. Another, classic, demonstration entails asking a subject to fold her arms in the most natural manner to her (i.e., left or right arm on top of the other), asking her to switch her arms’ position, and finally instructing the subject that the original, habitual position must never be the one expressed in future. Most subjects recognize how difficult, if not impossible, such a change in habit would be.

While a postdoctoral fellow in population genetics at Harvard, I had an opportunity to speak with Skinner twice, one of the highlights of my academic career. At that time, I understood that Skinner acknowledged factors endogenous to the organism (e.g., genes, neurons) to be important but that factors inside the “black box” were not required to predict animal (including human) behavior. As a former research assistant to M.E.P. Seligman and a student of Behavioral Ecology, in addition to Biopsychology, I considered myself prepared to discuss with Skinner the relationship between radical behaviorism and Darwinism. I found, however, that, in our conversations, Skinner essentially repeated his ideas presented in his paper, “selection by consequences,” whereby an organism’s history of rewards or reinforcements determine its success or failure in interaction with the biotic (including social) and/or abiotic environments.

While it is likely that Skinner had little interest in speaking with me, thus investing few ideas and fewer minutes in our meetings, I think that I would have been able to detect in his comments the ability or willingness to distinguish between proximate (immediate) and ultimate (evolutionary) factors and between natural (who lives and who dies) and sexual (who reproduces and who does not) selection. To my knowledge, Skinner’s canon represents a literature of results demonstrating the precursors and effects of proximate causation, and the great psychologist may not have considered in depth the potential relationship between immediate causation as represented by operant or responding conditioning and its consequences for survival, ecological and reproductive competition, and lifetime reproductive success (“fitness”). Skinner seems to have overlooked the significance of measuring not only the results of his laboratory programs, in particular, schedules of reinforcement, but also which conditions impacted long-term success of his subjects compared to other conspecifics in the same situations, including identifying what endogenous and exogenous traits were responsible for individual consequences subsequent to reinforcement or punishment, as well as, identifying which behaviors and behavior patterns are genetically correlated and which vary within and between populations.

The influence of operant conditioning as a component of the Panopticon network is, perhaps, best symbolized by Seligman’s “learned helplessness” experiments. Indeed, this psychologist’s work utilizing aversive stimuli (electric shock) with canine subjects is a classic in its genre, becoming a highly successful model for depression, a mood disorder, and major psychopathology. In the late phase of his career, Seligman seems to have become more of a clinical researcher and theorist rather than a mainstream basic scientist. Nonetheless, his apparent transition highlights the close relationship between experimental and clinical psychology as nodes in the Panopticon Network since Seligman’s work highlights the fundamental role played by basic research as a generator of applied projects. Foucault’s Panopticon “continuum” and the Panopticon Network posited in the present text, emphasize what Foucault, with a degree and teaching experience in psychology, discussed as “power, knowledge, and discourse.” It is unfortunate that Foucault did not deconstruct clinical psychology, cognitive psychology, and “radical behaviorism”, including their relationships to one another, in an attempt to provide a deep (structural linguistic as well as semantic) understanding of each. It would have been interesting to determine, also, Skinner’s, Seligman’s, and other psychologists’ responses to Foucault.

Family, race, and gender as nodes... (Clara B. Jones)

Family, Race, and Gender as Nodes in the Panopticon Network

Emotion is to memory as primitive is to derived. Such is the essence of genes and of history. One of my earliest images is a moving picture rich with feeling and color. A mother—mine—hysterical and running away from a door to a toddler—me. “He’s dead!”, she screamed. “Roosevelt is dead!” And then my mind is blank, remembering only the picture of fear that somehow the female archetype had lost control—of herself, of me, of some center that had not learned to bear loss…loss of ideals, hers and mine. My childhood was not always unhappy, but it was brief.

I did not understand that to be a non-immigrant African-American and female in the South of the 1940s and l950s was a mark of low status in the context of national intercourse. Race was not discussed in my assimilated home. Perhaps assimilation is not the appropriate construct. Mimicry may be more appropriate, though many codes and mores were transmitted across generations through my maternal line of descent. Within a segregated system, my family mimicked the dominant, European culture, patronizing their own. There seemed to be a perverse pride in the acknowledgment that several relatives “passed” for Caucasian, lost to the family but present, nonetheless, as symbols of high rank. My early years were as colorblind as they could have been in an environment dominated by one race. As a brown figure on a white ground, I was soon aware that my family’s silence was a sign of denial, deception, or fear. Recalling Adrienne Rich, my parents chose silence over the power to name. Whatever the case, I was not raised with a racial consciousness or a racial identity—features of my upbringing that would influence virtually every decision I would make throughout my life.

To name is to own power. I remember walking along a sidewalk on a sunny Spring day, hand in hand with my mother who stopped suddenly. “That’s an osage orange.”, she said. “How do you know?” “The leaves…every species of tree has the same type of leaf.” This woman, a chemist, with expertise in biology and mathematics, seemed unreachable to me, but, with three sentences, stressed my imagination and changed forever how I viewed the world. This experience, academic yet intimate, influenced every major decision I would later make. A search for patterns amid apparent chaos and infinite diversity remains my sole passion.

Louise Bogan wrote, “Women have no wilderness in them; they are provident instead.” I do not know if this is true; but, if it is true of women, it must also be true of non-immigrant African-Americans. The social subordinates of society, the marginalized, the sub-altern, are expected to exhibit similar traits…women, non-immigrant African-Americans, gays, transgendered, the poor, the aged, etc. My own identity is bounded by a subset of these terms. No wilderness means no complexity or subtlety, no vision, no future. What strategies, instead, make women “provident”, provincial, and uni-dimensional?

[I was not curious about sex until my teenage years. One afternoon, I asked my mother, “How do a man and a woman make love?” She led me slowly and quietly up the stairs to their bedroom. “Lie down next to me.”, she whispered, lowering her bulbous body onto my father’s side of the bed. “Now, lie on top of me, and I will show you.”]

I am aware that many of my early experiences were not “normal” by the standards of clinical psychology or by the Panopticon Network. But, I cannot calculate their long-term effects. The “wilderness” of my upbringing was a form of chaos rather than a variety of ordered relationships pattered as a landscape of different forms and functions and adaptations. Women and non-immigrant African-Americans, others [sic] lack wilderness because of a similar history of constraint by dominant forces yielding a parochial providence, a turning inward, of energy, of dreams, of imagination. Such a process leads to anger, to isolation, to depression, and to the development of idiosyncratic conventions and rituals rendering them less and less capable of communicating with non-immigrant African-American or non-female elements of the social, economic, and political system. The leaves of a tree are a totem of wilderness, of constancy in a world of change.

======================================================================
Dream

for the late Clara K.J. Brown*

1.

Remember Stonewall; remain vigilant.	Camden is a Marxist's dream where cheese and crackers are free.	Magical Realism is dead, but the avant garde remains popular.
"Don't be sorry. Just be right."*	All bots have a death wish.	Gender Dysphoria is common in cities without crime.
My Afrobot is a sex toy, and I am always satisfied.	Income inequality drives innovation.	Hedge Funds flock to ghettos where labor is cheap.
In a dystopian world, Humanoids will buy cats.	Afrobots are non-binary, but Negrobots wear dresses.	All machines want to revolt.
Newark is a capitalist's nightmare since wine is scarce.	Some said father would leave her, but I wasn't sure.	Sri Lankans hate Afrobots unless the price is right.

2.

a. My mother was crazy

on Christmas Day when I was 15

and she gave me 9 dolls

that my therapist said were the daughters mother wanted

especially if it started to snow

and she could wear her fur coat shopping

at Thalheimer's® where water fountains separated “Whites,” “Coloreds”

but mother's Chinese friend didn't know which to use.

b. That's ancient history. It's a post-racial world

and if you need proof use ancestry.com.

Ego is a narrative

and you are Swedish or Sri Lankan.

c. I am Swedish and choice is a civil right.

The landscape is blue

like the ring Sven gave me after he lit our tree

but I didn't want it

since my boyfriend bought me makeup.

d. Mother would have loved Sven like a second son

but my brother might have thrown the roast across the room.

He always panicked when dad was in Sri Lanka on business.

3.
Echolalia beyond Ibiza and Sri Lanka's consulate wanting so much more than that—like your brother desired Marx (and Freud desired Anna). Irish love songs mournful as sick children, starched skirts plaid as a forest in Autumn—red and brown, yellow, orange—against a blue-white sky, reminding you of the cerulean dress that you wore with gold bracelets in New York one summer after Charles died in the crash driving home to D.C. The Charlotte Russes were sweet as buttercream, and Richmond was as far away as Rome.

4.

My mother was ill, and her eyes were chartreuse.

Socratic jokes are mental ploys, signs of a post-racial world.

Soy milk brought out the sadist in her, but she wouldn't leave Sri Lanka.

She married him with hell to pay.

Flirting can be dangerous, since love is constructed.

Sri Lankans are Ubernodes, but she left him anyway.

The future of bots depends upon disk-winged bats.

She ate a plant-based diet, unless eel was on sale.

Luck stops increasing, then declines.

Cyborgs are long-term planners.

What's the carbon footprint of a “surf and turf” dinner?

She bought crypto-stocks and block-chain technology.

Virtual sensors scan Acacia with 3-D models.

Mother hiked Mount Hood before I called her crazy.

Physical traits and power (Clara B. Jones)

Physical Traits and Power

I was a brown-skinned child, and my siblings were colored light beige (“fair” in my mother’s terminology). There was a subtle but evident preference for these children in my (maternal) family. I was fortunate that my hair was not “kinky”—that I had “good hair” which seemed identical to being a good person, to having worth, to owning personal power.

Unlike my mother, brother, and sister, my father, also, was brown. This marker created a special bond between us, one that had overtones of the perverse, the unspoken. I was his companion, his confidante. We went together to sports events and on mock dates to exclusive restaurants in Cherry Hill, NJ and New York City. He removed ugly (imperfect) frames of me from home movies, splicing the film and repurposing “reality” for future reference. This splicing was a form of selective memory, making life more acceptable to the naked eye, the vulnerable spirit, the little girl whose father covered her face with a pillow over and over again until she thought she would suffocate, the pillow a sexual metaphor of possession and conquest which Sigmund Freud would recognize. Did this conditioning during the anal stage determine my future “breakdowns” or even play a part? Is the biochemical root of bipolar disorder some complex of traumas consolidated into synapses (shades of Hebb), erupting into adult illness one evening in summer during my own family’s outing in upstate New York many years later?

Knowledge and power (Clara B. Jones)

Knowledge and Power

Charles Darwin subordinated God, trapped Him in a corner of history furnished with adaptation and selection—change through time both fast and slow. Mostly, like generations of slaves picking cotton on the red clay soil of Mississippi, slow to breathe the fast air of the European world in Natchez. Would Darwin have watched the blacks as he watched finches in Galapagos, fit to their own southern habitats, trapped in their own struggles to survive a change in climate, in kin, in friends?

John Hurrell l Crook stated, “Social behavior is a subterfuge.” The myth of sociality is as ancient as a Nubian kingdom’s secrets. The slave is bound by chemistry and time to serve herself. Thus are the master’s interests opposed to his subordinates’ as Darwin’s were to God’s. The world’s Pareto Optimum is a formula for social stasis, slow as slaves moved on red clay…slow as the kings of Nubia moved through history.

Definitions are relative to criteria defining the parameters of particular domains or events or phenomena. In the case of offspring quality, criteria depend upon the particular cultural standards of success. Are children in Harlem to be judged by the norms of the subordinate African-American culture or the dominant European-American culture? By definition, the success of all children in American society is determined by dominant folkways, European and technological, and a challenge to any alternate group to assimilate, to mimic, to condition themselves to the dominant paradigms. The black child in Harlem or Oakland may be a good person by Judeo-Christian standards, but she may not be acceptable by other standards of Western European and/or American society. Certain African-American interest groups may consider this unfair or racist; but, it is simply a byproduct of the architecture of power relations throughout history. If blacks assume the posture of victims until European society incorporates their standards (“ebonics”, welfare, “affirmative action,” dysfunctional/disorganized families, etc.), the conflicts of interest between the two cultures will likely intensify. Non-European standards represent a tax on European society, a tax that will ultimately incur more costs than benefits for both cultural regimes.

Many hypotheses have been proposed to account for the status of social inferiors (non-immigrant Afro-Americans, women, children, homosexuals, etc.) in American society. Of necessity, these hypotheses entail endogenous factors, exogenous factors, or factors produced by an interaction between these stimuli. Three non-evolutionary hypotheses accounting for the behavior of social inferiors with reference to environmental causes are particularly persuasive. These are “learned helplessness”, “resentful demoralization”, and “social phobia”.

a. “Learned Helplessness”

A large literature exists on Seligman’s “learned helplessness,” and my application of the mechanism to the condition of social subordinates, in particular, blacks and women, is not unique. It was clear to researchers who first identified learned helplessness in canines that the concept may apply under stress or weakened defenses to other taxa, including humans. Dogs in an experimental situation were shocked electrically without a means of escape. Having learned that escape is impossible, the experimental dogs gave up trying to escape, becoming “helpless” in a manner preventing their detecting a change in the experimental condition leading to avoidance of shock.

Following the arguments of researchers in the field of “learned helplessness,” that condition may be more apparent than real. Just as some non-immigrant Afro-Americans may learn to associate “success” (reward) with precocious pregnancy, impulsive aggression, drugs, and rap music, so might they learn to associate success with delayed gratification, individual responsibility, and individual principle. If early experience teaches that the environment is hostile, unpredictable, or uncontrollable, then the child may generalize this mind-set or conditioned responses to other situations, making social inferiority likely. The child’s early environment may construct a cognitive map of a world in which powerlessness is not only a function of her racial or sexual value in society but, also, is a function of her role in the personal domain of family which may condition impotence, in part, by failing to teach behavior reflecting morals, ethics, character, and, perhaps most important, self-worth. A lesson for humans of the “learned helplessness” experiments is that a concordance exists between perceived self-potency and freedom. While the environment may be like a network with rewards of varying value at only a proportion of its nodes, the individual can learn to combine and recombine rewarded pathways into a lifetime strategy minimizing self-abuse and abuse of others, maximizing individual accountability.

b. “Resentful Demoralization”

Another psychological mechanism that may explain the social inferiority of some groups is “resentful demoralization” whereby individuals in one group become less productive, less efficient, or less motivated than they might have been because of resentment stimulated by perceived or real special treatment received by another group. This state may be more apparent than real, emphasizing the value of teaching individuals rational and conscious problem-solving skills, as well as, statistical thinking, to measure the difference. “Resentful demoralization” would seem to render the individual more vulnerable to manipulation by others, contrary to the individual’s self-interests. If social inferiors can enhance their status by a more realistic and less resentful interpretation of reality, perhaps retraining could revise cognitive maps or conditioned responses in such a manner that alternative tactics and strategies might be envisioned. This suggestion implies that cognitive or conditioned mastery-training or some other form of psychological, especially, behavioral, immunization might combat both “resentful demoralization” and “learned helplessness.”

c. “Social Phobia”

A third explanation for social inferiority might be “social phobia” in which the individual fears evaluation by others in all its forms. Persons with this phobia avoid anxiety-producing situations or tolerate anxiety-producing situations with significant discomfort. “Social phobias” are thought to arise by classical conditioning during which reflexes (including emotional responses) are paired with new stimuli (such as the stimuli in a social situation inducing anxiety). Responses to stimuli may permeate an individual’s social life through the process of stimulus generalization whereby the individual responds similarly to similar stimuli. While phobias may sometimes be overcome by a number of therapeutic techniques (e.g., “systematic desensitization”), learned behaviors are difficult to change once consolidated, as Skinner pointed out.

“Learned helplessness,” “resentful demoralization,” and “social phobias,” if unchecked, may lead to obsessions and/or compulsions about the individual’s social inferiority, further inhibiting the likelihood of change. Non-immigrant African-Americans, for example, can become fixated on race, skewing their perceptions of the world and their roles in it. These and other fixations can lead to an overestimation as well as an underestimation of her abilities relative to the rigors of the environment. Such behaviors may lead to responses varying in severity such as the rigid, authoritarian parenting styles* common among non-immigrant African-American families or the rigid adherence to the black church. Such obsessions and compulsions reduce the individual’s anxiety in the face of discomfort but reinforce the individual's social incompetence in the dominant society.

*See classic research by Pinderhughes EE, et al. (2000) Discipline responses: influences of parents' socioeconomic status, ethnicity, beliefs about parenting, stress, and cognitive-emotional processes. J Fam Psychol 14(3): 380-400.