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Should Musician’s Intent Matter to Political Campaigns?

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.


One should never underestimate Donald Trump’s taste for showmanship. Long synonymous with his brand, the candidate’s tendency towards spectacle was on display throughout the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last week. Seasoned politicians like Paul Ryan shared stage space with sports stars and soap opera celebrities. Highly stylized film trailer-esque clips emphasized the nominee’s expertise in a variety of areas. And, when Trump made his first appearance, he walked onstage to blinding lights and fog, a podium rising from the floor in front of him. In the background, Queen’s “We Are the Champions” sounded throughout the convention floor.

For a convention with no shortage of controversies, music choice probably seemed unassuming at the time. Yet observers were quick to note the irony of a candidate with strong conservative support using a song by an openly gay man who supported progressive social causes. Television host John Oliver, for instance, devoted a segment on Last Week Tonight to lampooning the campaign’s poor music choices throughout the convention – choices that also included playing The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as the nominee and his family took the stage. And as Queen released a statement condemning the campaign’s unauthorized use of the song, it became clear that the seemingly innocuous choice had become a controversy of its own.

While Trump’s use of Queen’s music drew scorn from many commentators, his campaign is hardly the first to breach the norms of unauthorized song use. In recent years, prominent candidates like Mitt Romney, John McCain and Paul Ryan have all used or referenced music in a manner that ran afoul of the works’ creators. Perhaps most famously, Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign attempted to embrace Bruce Springsteen and his song, “Born In The U.S.A,” despite the lyrics’ blatantly anti-government themes. Springsteen himself disavowed Reagan’s fondness for his music, noting that he strongly opposed the economic policies that the campaign juxtaposed with the song. In this context, it seems that controversies over music choice have practically become a perennial issue for political campaigns, especially when the music’s creators disagree with the politicians walking onstage to their songs.

But was Trump’s campaign wrong to appropriate Queen’s music for their own ends? Your answer probably depends on how you read literature.

Legally, of course, the practice of using music in political campaigns without permission has its own problems. The permissions needed to play a song at a rally vary depending on the specific use and the publisher’s policy, a fact that has not stopped some politicians – including Trump – from using unauthorized music regardless.

Legal issues aside, however, the question of music at political campaigns speaks to a greater context in which we view creative works. And while examples like Reagan’s use of “Born In The U.S.A.” are no doubt relevant, misunderstanding of lyrics alone is not always at the heart of the issue. Of particular note is the ideological divide undergirding tensions between musicians and the politicians who use their songs. Contemporary examples – Paul Ryan citing Rage Against the Machine, Donald Trump walking out to Queen – make clear that the use of this music is controversial not because of its lyrical content, but of the context created by author’s intent. As musical guests put it during Oliver’s segment, misinterpretation of a song is another matter; at the heart of the issue is whether “you used it wrong,” as one of his guests sang. And as another artist in the segment put it, “we didn’t write these songs to make your campaign stops seem cool.”

Clearly, then, the debate around campaign use of songs is about more than licensing or misinterpretation. Author’s intent and the musicians’ own political views also matter; indeed, both are used to condemn the  politicians who ran afoul of musicians hostile to their policies. Using musician’s intent in this manner might seem like second nature. Yet, when other forms of media are examined, the role of creator’s intent is not so easily parsed.

Take literature, for example, where it is commonly argued that a work should be considered irrespective of author’s intent. While the author’s intentions traditionally have held some sway in literary analysis, some argue that consideration of a work should be partitioned from such considerations. According to this viewpoint, literary works are “boundless “texts,” to which no fixed or final meaning could be assigned,” as put in The New York Times. Writers and philosophers alike continue to argue whether the notion is accurate, but the issue of author’s intent continues to provoke controversy. For example, J.K. Rowling’s 2007 reveal that she wrote Albus Dumbledore as a gay character sparked debate around to what degree the revelation should play into readings of the Harry Potter books. Even in literature, then, such ideas are hardly settled. Yet applying such questions to campaign music choices reveals how much the debate is influenced by authorship itself.

Introducing the comparative lens of literature to understand unauthorized use of music also reveals how differently we treat the art form compared to other media. With music, lyrics are generally thought to be understood or misunderstood, not interpreted. There is usually a recognized and largely fixed meaning to many popular songs. And musician’s intent, unlike that of the author in literature, is seen as paramount in decoding what a piece of music might mean. Certainly, there is flexibility in this regard, especially in certain genres of music. Yet the boundaries for interpretation seem to be narrower for songs than literary works, explaining why the unauthorized use of music by politicians has proven so controversial.

It would seem, then, that the morality of using certain songs in political campaigns largely depends on one’s view of authorship. On one hand, it seems ironic that a politician as mainstream as the current Speaker of the House can espouse support for a decidedly anti-government group like Rage Against the Machine. So too would it be unethical to represent the interests of the two as one and the same, a point central to the view that juxtaposing certain songs with political campaigns is ethically suspect.

However, if debates around author’s intent from other media are taken into account, politicians’ use of certain songs could reasonably seen as a reflection of the disconnect between the creator and her work. Legal issues aside, if author’s intent is no longer central in interpreting a work, could the use of music in political campaigns be seen as justified? Or should the style of interpretation of music be considered, allowing musician’s intent to guide use of a work?

Diversity in Children’s Books: A White Author’s Quandary (Part II)

This post originally appeared September 29, 2015.

In Part One of this two-part post on the moral importance of providing children with diverse books, I concluded that white authors need to write about non-white characters, or else they gravely falsify the “reality” presented in their stories. We don’t live in an all-white world. We don’t have all-white readers. Our non-white readers need to see themselves in our stories; our white readers need not to see themselves, exclusively, in every single story.

But how do we do this? As so often happens, the “how” can be even more ethically challenging than the “what” or the “why.”

Assume I’m creating a classroom scene (my specialty as an author is school stories). How do I let readers know the racial or ethnic identity of my characters? For starters, I need to give my characters names that suggest a wide range of national origins, even as sometimes this feels self-conscious, evidence that I’m trying too hard for cheerful “Sesame Street” multiculturalism. But how else can I convey to readers the racial or ethnic identity of the kids in the class?

Two approaches here seem equally problematic. One is to come right out and label characters by race or ethnicity: “Jenny, an African-American girl in the front row, raised her hand to answer Ms. Singh’s question.” This would work, in my view, only if we called attention to the race and ethnicity of every character in the same way: “Sam, a Caucasian boy of Swedish ancestry, raised his hand. . .” That this falls in such a startling way on our ears makes clear the extent to which authors treat “white” as the default setting, where characters are understood to be white unless otherwise specified.

To avoid this, authors often use other markers for race, such as describing a character’s skin tones as “creamy café au lait” or “rich chocolate mousse.” But this is clearly as racially heavy-handed as the first option. We don’t describe white characters by comparing their complexions to food, remarking that her skin was “like pink lemonade” or “like vanilla pudding.” Sometimes diversity can be suggested in other ways: by mentioning a character’s long blond curls, or tight black braids, or by a cultural reference to a favorite food or family holiday celebrated. Oh, but it can feel so blatantly earnest!

Because my books are often illustrated, I have an easy – or cowardly? – way of avoiding this dilemma: rely on the pictures to do deftly what words can do only clumsily. Illustrators can’t escape depicting characters as having skin tones, facial features, or hair that indicate ethnicity, unless (which many do!) they draw anthropomorphized animals instead. But this means that sometimes I am surprised to find that I have created diverse characters without consciously setting out to do so.

My Franklin School Friends chapter book series presents a trio of best friends. Kelsey stars in Kelsey Green, Reading Queen; Annika stars in Annika Riz, Math Whiz; and Izzy stars in Izzy Barr, Running Star, the third book in the series. The illustrations show Izzy as Black, perhaps triggered by my description of her short tight braids. I’m pleased about this. I like the idea of best-friendship across racial lines that is celebrated in these books. But . . . I’m nervous that my star reader is white, my star math student is white, and my star athlete is Black. Doesn’t this perpetuate stereotypes that whites excel academically while African Americans excel in sports?

Perhaps. But in my Gus and Grandpa easy reader series, while Gus and Grandpa are white, the other child character who appears in almost every book is Ryan Mason: the perfect, high-achieving neighbor boy, the kid who has the fanciest bike and the scientifically dazzling show-and-tell projects. The illustrations show Ryan as Black. So this works against the cultural expectations arguably reinforced by Izzy.

This leads me to conclude that, while we certainly don’t want our stories to perpetuate stereotypes, we also don’t want to be so paralyzed by fear (is my character too stereotypically Asian? or too carefully constructed to refute stereotype?) that white authors give up on including diverse characters at all. What we need is not fewer characters of color in our stories, but more. I have now created a Black kid who loves to run and one who is an enviably perfect next-door neighbor. In other books I have an Asian American girl who knits sweaters for homeless shelter dogs and a Latino kid who is doing a science fair experiment that involves trying to explode a pickle.

No one character in any one book can bear the weight of representing all people of color any more than any character in any one book can bear the weight of representing all white people. We need lots of books about lots of kids, with different skin colors and various cultural backgrounds, doing a whole bunch of cool things and wrestling with a wide range of kidlike problems. We need, desperately, to foster and promote work by authors of color, but white authors can’t just write safely in an all-white bubble. We need to write out of our comfort zones. Or else, fifty years hence, the all-white world of children’s books will continue to be as all white as it is today.

Fighting Obscenity with Automation

When it comes to policing offensive content online, Facebook’s moderators often have their work cut out for them. With billions of users, filtering out offensive content ranging from pornographic images to videos promoting graphic violence and extremism is a never-ending task. And, for the most part, this job largely falls on teams of staffers who spend most of their days sifting through offensive content manually. The decisions of these staffers – which posts get deleted, which posts stay up – would be controversial in any case. Yet the politically charged context of content moderation in the digital age has left some users feeling censored over Facebook’s policies, sparking a debate on automated alternatives.

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Jupiter’s New Companion

Late on July 4th, NASA tweeted that their space probe, Juno, successfully entered Jupiter’s orbit after five years and 1.7 billion miles of travel. Juno is the first spacecraft to reach Jupiter since Galileo in 1995. The probe broke multiple records during its journey, including fastest man-made object at 165,000 miles per hour, and farthest solar-powered spacecraft from Earth. Juno more than broke the 492-million-mile record held by the Rosetta mission.

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Diversity in Children’s Books: A White Author’s Quandary (Part I)

This post originally appeared September 22, 2015.

For the first time in census history, the majority of children living in the United States are now children of color. But the vast majority of children living within the pages of American children’s books are white. According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which releases annual statistics on the number of U.S. children’s books by and about people of color, in 2014 only 8 percent of children’s book authors were nonwhite (African American, Asian American, American Indian, or Latino), and only 11 percent of characters. Little progress has been made in diversifying children’s book publishing since librarian Nancy Larrick published her famous 1965 essay, “The All-White World of Children’s Books,” fifty years ago.

Why does this matter? Rudine Sims Bishop uses the following metaphor to explain. For children of color, diverse books serve as mirrors: “When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.” For white children in a white-dominant society, diverse books serve as windows: “They need books that will help them understand the multicultural nature of the world they live in, and their place as a member of just one group, as well as their connections to all other humans. . . . If they see only reflections of themselves, they will grow up with an exaggerated sense of their own importance and value in the world.”

As a children’s book author and professor of children’s literature, I’m going to take it as ethically uncontroversial that we – all those who work in some way to produce and disseminate books for children – should strive to remedy the current situation. This means prioritizing the recruitment and retention of diverse editors and the encouraging and fostering of diverse authors. It means supporting organizations such as We Need Diverse Books, “a grassroots organization created to address the lack of diverse, non-majority narratives in children’s literature.” It means accepting the challenge posed by Prof. Michelle H. Martin, one of the speakers in last year’s Prindle Institute symposium on Race and Children’s Literature, to buy diverse books as holiday and birthday gifts for the children we love.

As a white children’s author, however, I want to focus on the thorny question of what I can do to make my own books more representative of my readers. First I need to ask the hard question of whether white authors have the ability to write convincingly about characters of color, or the cultural authority to do so.

Can white authors write about non-white characters and “get it right”? It’s hard to know what would even count as “getting it right,” as the experience of any cultural, ethnic, or racial group is not one uniform, monolithic thing, presenting a single clear comparison point against which various representations can be judged. There are as many ways of being Black as there are of being white. It’s somewhat easier, perhaps, to see what would count as getting representation of another group wrong. It would be to write in a way that relies on stereotype and cliché, especially in a way that perpetuates negative assessments and expectations. Here the judges, in my view, can only be members of the non-dominant group themselves (noting that disagreement here is to be expected). Thus, as children’s books can’t be put into the hands of young readers without prior gatekeeping by editors, booksellers, librarians, and teachers, this speaks to the importance of having a significant number of non-white persons serving in these positions.

But are white authors even entitled to write about the experience of non-white people? Do we have, as it were, the right to do so? While surely we need to reject the general principle that nobody can write outside of the confines of his or her own narrow, insular, personal experience, when white people write about people of color, we face the further issue of cultural appropriation: exploitation of members of marginalized groups by privileged members of the dominant group. White authors writing about non-white characters can seem one more example of white people taking what belongs to others: bodies, land, artifacts, and now, stories.

I myself would feel cautious about writing a book about a non-white main character that focuses centrally on that character’s experience of racism. Maybe it’s because I think I’d be bound to get it wrong, because I can’t imagine being able fully to know what it’s like to be a Black person in the United States in 2015. So maybe it’s the previous concern about accuracy of representation that is doing the work here. It just feels hubristic to think that I could tackle that experience, “whitesplain” it to others, with any confidence. Another, more imaginative writer might legitimately feel otherwise.

That said, I’m no longer willing – ethically willing – to write an all-white world into creation in my books. Children need and deserve diverse books. I have to do what I can, within these limits, to provide books that reflect the classrooms and families of the real world in which my readers live.

In the next post, I look at the ethical challenges that arise in trying to do this.

Social Media Vigils and Mass Shootings

In the wake of the largest mass shooting in the United States to date, Facebook and other social media sites have been flooded with posts honoring the victims in Orlando. Many such posts include the faces of the victims, rainbow banners and “share if you’re praying for Orlando” posts. Although there is nothing particularly harmful about sharing encouraging thoughts through social media, opinions are surfacing that it might do more harm than good.

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Supreme Court Strikes Down Texas Abortion Law

On June 27th, the Supreme Court decided on the hotly debated case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, which dealt with access to abortion clinics in Texas. In 2013, Texas proposed a law requiring that all abortion clinics in the state hire only doctors that have “admitting privileges at local hospitals and meet outpatient surgical center standards.” This law would have shut down nearly 30 of Texas’ 40 abortion clinics, a state home to 5.4 million women in the reproductive age range.

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A Libertarian Perspective On Gendered Bathroom Segregation

Recently in the United States, bathroom usage rights for transgender people have come to the political fore. As a part of Title IX protections against gender discrimination in federally funded educational institutions, the Obama administration has recently ordered public schools to allow students to use whichever bathrooms they please. This should free transgender students from the unpleasantness of using what they perceive to be the wrong bathroom, or being asked to use single-user facilities (unlike and apart from their classmates).

This development is the culmination of a debate that first brewed on various college campuses across the country and later issued in various state-level “bathroom bills” that would require people to use the bathrooms that correspond with their birth certificate gender. But now that even President Obama himself is involved, this issue is unlikely to dissipate quietly and without additional relevant legislative and/or judicial action.

It’s not too difficult to see why bathrooms have historically been a focal point during times of social change. Before bathrooms became a pressure point in figuring out how transgender people should be included and accommodated publicly, they served as a literal and metaphorical site of racial tensions during the Civil Rights movement and of sexist tensions as women increasingly worked and ventured outside the home.

Hypothetically in a robustly free country, businesses and organizations would be left alone to determine their own bathroom policies, while customers would be free to visit whichever locations they like. This means in theory that businesses could choose to offer bathrooms segregated along any conceivable dimension. However, establishments with odious bathroom (and other) policies would likely fail fast.

The only places likely to thrive with such practices in place would be, for instance, small ideological clubs/foundations and houses of worship. And the existence of self-contained islands of social dissent do not threaten the liberal order. On the contrary, the protection of peaceful freedom of association is an essential feature of liberalism.

But starting from the quite non-libertarian status quo, things are much more complicated. The provision of bathrooms is already heavily regulated. For instance, overlapping and even conflicting bathroom regulations in New York City mean it’s often unclear whether a restaurant or coffee shop is in compliance with bathroom code, which depends on the number of seats, age of the building and business, and other factors.

The already-regulated status quo means that when the government declines to further regulate bathrooms, that refusal bears greater symbolic value than if public bathrooms remained a generally extra-legal issue (as in the ideal libertarian state of affairs). If it was appropriate to legally protect bathroom access for people of color and later people with disabilities, refusing to do so for transgender people suggests by implication that their status is somehow less important.

That being said, state-level bathroom laws will probably have fairly little effect in practice. It would be incredibly burdensome to actively check that bathroom visitors at any given venue were choosing the right door, regardless of whether they were supposed to use the facility corresponding to their birth gender, current legal gender, apparent gender, or personally professed gender.

Of course, acts of voyeurism and sexual assault are already criminal, so police are already empowered to prevent and investigate them whether or not they are also empowered to act as gender enforcers. Perhaps a few would-be bathroom criminals would be deterred by the prospect of getting hit with an extra charge for simply having used the wrong bathroom, but criminal penalties for sex crimes should be enough already.

Finally, we should remember that it is ok to personally disagree with the law. Even more importantly, a liberal society requires us merely to tolerate peaceful others, not to eagerly approve of everything about them in our hearts. Social conservatives have been losing the culture wars for some time and are not incorrect to feel like their ethical ideals are waning. It will take time and experience to show those uneasy with changes in bathrooms that those changes are really a non-issue. Top-down action, like that of the Obama administration, can change policies but it doesn’t necessarily win hearts and minds, and may even provoke political backlash.

Campaigning on Literacy

This is the fourth in a series about American History and the Ethics of Memory. This post originally appeared on February 9, 2016.

It was a hotly contested presidential election, and the mudslinging was fierce. There were allegations of fiscal corruption, sexual impropriety, and—perhaps most damning of all—bad writing. 

The Democratic candidate, it was rumored, spelled Congress with a K. Couldn’t construct a complete sentence. Had to hire someone to write his letters for him. Was almost entirely illiterate.

The charges went viral. They even inspired snatches of satirical poetry in the newspapers:

Then a nice writing-man I have hired for my use,

To hide the bad spelin I skrawl

And them are as says how my grammar is bad,

Don’t know nothing of it all.

The man the poem was mocking, the one supposed to be guilty of these several crimes against the English language, now appears on the $20 bill. The John Quincy Adams campaign’s efforts to smear their upstart rival’s literacy did not stop Andrew Jackson from winning the White House.

Modern scholars have actually tried to figure out, “Could Andrew Jackson Spell?” The evidence is inconclusive, but the question doesn’t seem especially important for us now. What is relevant today is what the episode suggests about how we evaluate candidates—the role ideas about literacy play in political discourse, and to what effect. Left-leaning commentators’ gleefulness over Sarah Palin’s recent display of verbal clumsiness, in her speech endorsing Donald Trump, doesn’t look very different from the hilarity that ensued among Adams supporters when they heard about a 25-line letter by Jackson that included 23 misspellings.

Spelling Congress with a K doesn’t by itself seem like a disqualifier from the presidency. An effective chief executive must be able to do many things with Congress, but spelling is lower on the list than cooperating, negotiating, persuading, and maneuvering. The general idea behind the Adams campaign’s gambit was that by portraying Jackson, born in the backwoods of Tennessee, as illiterate, they could persuade voters he lacked the aptitude to manage the complexities of the national government—as the incumbent Adams, scion of one of the founding families of the republic, obviously could.

Arguably there was some truth to this. By all appearances, Jackson failed to comprehend the function and importance of the Bank of the U.S. when, with devastating economic results, he effectively destroyed it in the 1830s (one of the reasons many people would like to see an American woman replacing Jackson on the $20 bill, rather than Alexander Hamilton on the $10). But this may have been a coincidence. People who did grasp the ins and outs of central banking in the 1830s probably were highly literate, but the converse isn’t necessarily true. Plenty of people who knew the correct spelling of Congress still didn’t understand what the Bank of the U.S. was good for, just as many well-read and eloquent people in 2008 had no idea what a collateralized debt obligation was.

Besides, it didn’t work. Jackson beat Adams. The election of 1828 proved to be an early installment in the long American tradition of affection for politicians who are “regular guys” (or, in the lexicon of pollsters during the election of 2000, people you’d like to have a beer with). Not for the last time, a bookish and bespectacled candidate inspired more distrust among voters than a rough-edged, inarticulate one. Never mind that the supposedly effete Bostonian went on to serve nine terms in Congress and successfully defend the Amistad rebels, while the manly frontiersman earned a reputation for exterminating American Indians. Maybe the Adams camp would have done better for their candidate, and the country, by talking more about principles than orthography.

Which may be useful to remember in our own era. The whirlwind of attention paid to Sarah Palin’s recent speech has been dominated by derision of her odd phraseology and general incoherence—which is a perfectly legitimate (and certainly amusing) subject for Saturday Night Live (“She sounds like a greeting card from a Chinese dollar store!”). But even the venerable New York Times’s coverage devolved into a listicle called “The Most Mystifying Lines of Sarah Palin’s Endorsement Speech.”

The first question about that speech or any other politician’s shouldn’t be whether or not it’s a fluid sequence of grammatical sentences (as nice as that would be) but whether or not it’s bullshit—a word I use here in its technical sense to refer to indifference to truthfulness. Misused and made-up words are great fodder for social-media mockery (refudiate! squirmishes!), but they’re less outrageous than (to choose just one example from Palin’s speech) the claim that military veterans are not “treated better than illegal immigrants are treated in this country.” And they’re far less damaging than an attitude toward political discourse that doesn’t care whether that claim, or any other, can even be backed up. Sarah Palin may be inarticulate, but there is  more important work to be done than pointing that out.

Consent to Dying: The Case of Julianne Snow

Recently, a 5-year-old child named Julianne Snow passed away from from a neurological disease known as Charcot-Marie-Tooth, causing nerves in the brain to degenerate and loss in the muscles related to chewing, swallowing, and eventually breathing. Although Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease is one of the world’s most commonly inherited neurological disorders, this story made national headlines due to Julianne’s independent decision to refuse treatment.

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