it's not up to me

The applications are complete.

I've done all that I can do for the grad school apps. It's now in the hands of the registrars who are forwarding my transcripts and my professors who are writing letters of recommendation.

I have yet to finalize the law school applications for Penn and Tulane. Or take the LSAT; that fateful experience is slated to occur on 12/5. But that's okay, because my deadlines for those applications are not immediately upon me.

And so the waiting begins. My future is in the hands of the various admissions committees.

Acceptance decisions aren't usually made until Spring, so I'm in for a long dark winter of uncertainty.

flappers of color

I recently read Flapper, by Josh Zeitz, for my American History class, and came to the realization that the lives of flappers of color is a topic that is ripe for dissertation-type research.

While I find this incredibly interesting, I'm not immediately drawn to it as a research topic for myself because I haven't yet found a connection to the law.

Unless it would be the relative freedom that women of color had to embrace a flapper lifestyle because they were not bound to the virtue of white womanhood... but is this a real legal freedom or simply a cultural freedom?

That's the initial research question, I suppose.

miscegenation

I want to research the sticky situation of mixed race children in America. I've done this in the past, with a focus on slavery times, but without a specific, coherent research strategy. (It was, in fact, the first upper-level research paper I authored!) Next time I aim to do it better.

The thing is that the existence of mixed race children in a racially stratified society is an affront to the power hierarchy of that society, and I'm curious to better learn how America has dealt with this problem.

I know from my previous research that antebellum America's solution -- assigning the status, slave or free, of a child based on that of its mother -- did not solve the problems that arose because of miscegenation.

What I'd like to research next is the legal status of mulatto bastards during Reconstruction and up to the Great Depression. I wonder what legal recourse did the mothers - black and white - have to seek financial support from the putative fathers? And in an era before genetic testing, what was the legal standard for proving paternity? How did this impact the lives of these children?

manufacturing the desire to consume

Thanks to Mark Bernhardt I've been able to recognize advertising as another socio-cultural innovation that wields great power in society. Unlike race, gender, and the rule of law, however, advertising is wholly of the modern age.

I'll have to gather my thoughts about this before I can write at length, but I wanted to pen blog the idea while it was still fresh.

At this point though it seems so obvious that advertising is indeed a socio-cultural innovation that I'm ashamed I didn't recognize it as such sooner.

Note to self: elaborating on how advertising is a socio-cultural innovation will help me in my quest for a working definition of socio-cultural technologies, i.e., stating the ways that it functions as such will help me identify the crucial criteria...

of politics and white privilege

This is a great oped piece which provides solid examples of the oft-overlooked and illunderstood phenomenon of White Privilege: This is Your Nation on White Privilege. You should read it.

Here's a highlight:

White privilege is being able to dump your first wife after she’s disfigured in a car crash so you can take up with a multi-millionaire beauty queen (who you go on to call the c-word in public) and still be thought of as a man of strong family values, while if you’re black and married for nearly twenty years to the same woman, your family is viewed as un-American and your gestures of affection for each other are called “terrorist fist bumps”

And if you aren't familiar with White Privilege in the first place, you should read Peggy McIntosh's essay, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, in which she sets out to define the phenomenon:

As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage. I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege.

As a white girl who has attended an HBCU for several years, and lived in one of the most racist states in the nation for almost a decade, I've become all too aware of the privileges bestowed upon me by virtue of my pale skin, so for me this is interesting stuff.

gender: a primordial socio-cultural innovation

Gender constructs constitute one of the most fundamental organizational mechanisms of human society. This has been almost universally true throughout time and space. The practical implications and the real consequences of this fact have profoundly impacted the course of human history. For this reason the phenomenon of gender, as opposed to the existence of two biological sexes, demands extensive inquiry. I could dedicate my life to pursuing myriad avenues of research into the varying application of gender constructs in human society and the resulting influences on world events.

As a bit of an aside:
Likewise, technology - from the plow to the cellular telephone - has profoundly influenced the course of human history. Technological innovations that allow for changes to human society deserve investigation, particularly those which directly and indirectly engage socio-cultural innovations.

technological dependence

It seems to me that even a cursory perusal and/or casually inquiring glimpse of the history of humanity indicates an intimate relationship between the domination of humankind over the rest of the planet and our technological innovations. Just think of how obsessively humanity has created tools and made the very best possible use of them throughout time. This begs the question: does the evidence really support humanity's seeming dependence on technology as the sole mechanism of progress?