Bush is right on the substance, wrong on what to do next.

NO, NO NO... This time it's some Jewish groups trying to use France's free-speech-unfriendly laws to suppress a novel they don't like. (Some Muslim groups tried something similar earlier this fall.) I'm especially dismayed that Americans, working for an organization that is overwhelmingly funded by American Jewry, are considering the suppression of speech overseas, showing little commitment to the values of the First Amendment.* (Yes, I understand that the U.S. Constitution doesn't bind France; my point is that I kind of hope that Americans think the First Amendment is correct, and that they therefore wouldn't promote censorship in other places even in places where they might get away with it.)

*Shimon Samuels, director for international liaison for the
Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he and
other Jewish representatives were considering the possibility
of seeking a court order to ban the book, for which no sales
figures were yet available in France.

I quite like Kieran Healey's quip about the OxBloggers pinch-hitting for the Volokh Conspirators:

Even in the blogosphere, when the Prof is out of town, the grad students teach the class.

(I suspect that this is the harbinger of things to come. Given a) the time demands involved in blogging and b) the time demands involved in following multiple blogs, group-blogs-- Corner, Hit & Run, OxBlog, Conspiracy, etc-- seem to have a real advantage over individually-authored blogs: more content-per-effort for writers and readers alike. And now the group blogs are collaborating with each other to make sure that their posting frequency doesn't fall! Conspiracy, indeed... )

The window is closing. If no Republican Senator has broken ranks by Friday; if Republican Senators don't hear enough from angry constituents (especially Republican constituents!) by the end of the week; then we're going to be stuck with Confederatista Lott for two more years. Attention Republicans: even if you think that Lott's apology has been adequate, it is not in your party's interest to keep this wounded, tainted figure as one of its most prominent spokesmen, to create such an obvious (and IMO legitimate!) target for charges of GOP racism. See David Frum, Deroy Murdock, Robert George, Dan Drezner. (See also Josh Marshall on the lies Lott is telling at this point, or Michelle Cottle's sketch of Lott's history, in case you actually do think Lott is repentant and are tempted to accept his pseudo-apology at face value.)

Find your Republican Senator's e-mail address and let 'em know-- civilly but firmly and clearly!-- that Lott as Majority Leader is unacceptable.

I'm intrigued and persuaded by Andrew Sullivan's take on the generation gap here, on the degree of anger among young conservatives and libertarians at what some older Republicans still think is acceptable... though there's something, too, to Tapped's condescending observation:

In a way, this all makes Tapped feel bad for younger conservatives,
especially the cosmopolitan-intellectual types who talk a good game
about the virtues of Red America but live in places like Washington,
New York and Cape Cod. Guys like McCain [not the Senator-- JTL]
and Lott are throwbacks, a dying breed, and clearly it legitimately
pains the younger guys that they have to play on the same team as
these jackasses. It's tough being the Blue-state intellectual arm of
an Old South-led political movement.

This is a big part of why I'm more skeptical of the GOP than are many other blue-state libertarians my age. (Of course, the constant betrayals on trade, taxes, and spending don't help either.) A show of Republican spine in getting rid of Lott would certainly help to allay my worries that the troglodytes have a stranglehold on the party's conscience.

Dan Drezner floods the zone on Lott.

Those of us who live in states with Republican Senators should start suggesting to them that they not re-elect Lott as Majority Leader. I'm writing to Peter Fitzgerald...

Update: Written, as follows.

Dear Senator Fitzgerald:

I'm writing to urge you in the strongest possible terms not to support Trent Lott's re-election as Majority Leader, and to ask you to urge him to step down as soon as possible. His deeply inappopriate comments last week about Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat presidential campaign in 1948; his inability to grasp how seriously inappropriate those comments were; his repeated pattern of statements in support of the Confederate cause; and his apparently longstanding conviction that the country would have been better off with a Thurmond win (as evidenced by the news that he made an almost-identical statement in 1980) leave him hopelessly tainted. For the good of the Republican Party, for the good of the Senate, and for the good of race relations in the country, he ought to step down. His supposed apology was utterly inadequate, given the seriousness of what he said.

You represent the Party of Lincoln from Lincoln's own state. Lott, by his own repeated statements, stands for the legacy of Jefferson Davis and Strom Thurmond circa 1948 (who was, after all, not the Republican candidate!), not for the legacy of Lincoln. Please do the right thing, and do your part to remove Lott as majority leader, by persuasion or with your vote.


Update again: Josh Chafetz has (independently) done the same. He made a specific recommendation for who should replace Lott, which I didn't do. YMMV.

See Josh Marshall on "safety-net entrepreneurs" in the Bush Administration.

Interesting tidbit: in today's article about conservative opposition to Stephen Friedman's selection as director of the NEC, the NYT says "White House officials lashed out at critics... including [NRO and Cato regular] Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth... They said Mr. Moore had no credibility with the administration." What's the story behind that?

Today's NYT subhed: "Conservatives Join Call [for Lott] to Quite Leadership." Later says that "Some calls [to step down] came from conservatives... Much of the criticism came from members of the Congressional Black Caucus." (Emphasis added.)

Umm... excuse me?

The good news, I suppose, is that if the CBC is angry then maybe the NYT will start giving this Augusta-level coverage... whereas if the Times believed that conservatives had been attacking Lott earliest and oftenest, then it might feel compelled to come to his defense.

[This is cranky and grumpy on my part, I know. But it's pretty annoying on the NYT's part as well.]

Another in the depressing string of stories about the Bush administration alienating those who want to be our genuine friends in the world. Avoiding European goo-goo multilateralism is one thing. An inability to conduct diplomacy is another. The administration spares almost no effort in sucking up to China, Saudi Arabia, and usually Russia. Australia, Canada, Mexico, India, and Israel get no such consideration-- to say nothing of Brazil, Argentina, Pakistan, democratic states and movements in Africa... I don't believe that the U.S.' power forces it into being an arrogant hyperpower, and I don't believe that a rejection of Kyoto makes it one. But an utter disdain for friends and allies does.

This Washington Post comparison (via Mark Kleiman) of DiIulio's retraction to show-trial self-denunciations is spot-on. Thought for the day: DiIulio said his father taught him to apologize "on your knees, or not at all. In other words, whether completely culpable or not, and whether there are complicated mitigating if not exonerating motivations and circumstances or not, you do not express honest, heartfelt remorse for wrong by quibbling over how the wronged person or persons characterize it." DiIulio's father was a wise man-- though I don't think that facially absurd over-the-top apologies are what he had in mind. (You do not express honest, heartfelt remorse by coming across as if you're mocking those demanding an apology. One of the British papers did something like this not long ago; they repeated, verbatim, the demand for an apology that some offended celeb had included in the settlement of a libel suit, and it came across as so absurd as to be obviously insincere. Was covered in The Economist.)

But let's read that over again:

In other words, whether completely culpable or not, and whether there are complicated mitigating if not exonerating motivations and circumstances or not, you do not express honest, heartfelt remorse for wrong by quibbling over how the wronged person or persons characterize it.

Are you listening, Trent?

Mark Levin asks, in effect, why people are piling on poor Trent Lott who didn't give Bill Clinton a hard time for honoring William Fulbright.

Answer: People aren't piling on Lott for honoring Thurmond. We're not complaining about the fact that he appeared at the cryogenic old lecher's birthday party, or that he gave a speech lauding his accomplishments. We're complaining about the fact that he expressed regret that Thurmond didn't win the presidency in 1948 on a platform of explicit racism, and that he suggested that the fifty years that followed would have been better if Thurmond had won and been able to block anti-lynching legislation, civil rights legislation, and so on.

The analogous behavior for Clinton would have been endorsing the Southern Manifesto. This, he did not do.

Good for Emily Yoffe and OxBlog's David Adesnik for responding to the NYT's Rhodes story.

The flying monkeys are very good on Lott today. See Robert George (the journo, not the prof) and David Frum. As it happens, I think it's especially important that National Review-- the conservative magazine founded on the expulsion of the "troglodytes" from the conservative movement-- weigh in on this; it means more coming from them than it does coming from the libertarian blogosphere. See also continuing coverage by Instapundit, Virginia Postrel, Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall,and so on. The Weekly Standard has chimed in, too. But Tapped, bizarrely, says "Good for Lott for apologizing." [Update: Tapped later recognized that "maybe we let Lott off too easy." But then later still Tapped writes "It's amazing to Tapped that this story almost went away," without acknowledging that Tapped was almost alone in the blogosphere in being willing to let it go away. Tapped also seems to consider it a clever and surprising insight that Taki, who is backing the new Pat Buchanan magazine, has said anti-Semitic things in public. I thought that "Taki is an anti-Semite" long ago passed from being an open secret to being the conventional wisdom-- so much so that when the new magazine debuted, Kristol was quoted as saying, in effect, that even Pat Buchanan should be embarrassed to be associated with him.]
Where's Jack Kemp?

Lott's non-apology apology isn't even close to adequate for reasons already described by all of the above commentators. Get rid of him.

Sheesh! Dan Drezner's post on Krugman has hit the big-leagues: Kaus mentioned it, but made a minor mistake, prompting this bit of nastiness from Krugman and a response from Kaus. Hey, Dan: You might want to leave Paul off your list of possible reviewers come tenure-time...

Department of self-parody: This New York Times article says

Women Who Lead Colleges See Slower Growth in Ranks

"[T]he number of women tapped to become college presidents has leveled
off in recent years, after increasing steeply from the mid-1980's through the late 1990's,
according to a survey of more than 2,500 two- and four-year institutions.

"The survey, by the American Council on Education, found that from
1986 to 2001, the percentage of college presidents who were women
jumped to 21.1, from 9.5 percent. From 1998 to 2001, the increase
was only 1.8 percentage points.

"Similar shifts in hiring occurred among minorities, whose ranks among
college presidents increased to 12.8 percent in 2001 from 8.1 percent
in 1986. Since 1998, however, the share of minorities running institutions
of higher education rose by just 1.5 percentage points. If historically black
and Latino institutions are not counted, only one in 10 colleges or universities
is run by a minority."


Women first: From 1986 to 2001, there was an average increase of .733 percentage points per year in women's share of college and university presidencies. From 1998 until 2001, that racing growth screeched to a halt... of merely .6 percentage points per year.
To put the ACE's and the NYT's point more effectively, don't compare 1986-2001 with 1998-2001; compare instead 1986-1998 with 1998-2001. Then we get (21.5-9.5-1.8)/12, or an average increase of .85 percentage points per year over those twelve years, compared with the same average increase of .6 points per year over the final three years. A decline? Sure. A "levelling off after increasing steeply?" Seems like a heck of a stretch to me. (For a graphic representation, click here.)

It's worse for the story's treatment of minorities: An increase of .267 percentage points per year 1986-1998; an increase of .5 percentage points per year 1998-2001. In other words, the pace of minority hiring for presidencies has picked up over the last three years-- by nearly as much as the pace has decreased for women; not at all a "similar shift" to the purported levelling off among women presidents. And the analysis in the rest of the article, concerning the alleged increased conservatism among boards of trustees, proceeds as if for women and minorities alike there has been a dramatic slowdown (or even an outright reversal) in the assumption of college presidencies.

(Note: it has occured to me as a possibility that the numbers reported for 2001 were supposed to be attributed to 1998. That would have made for a genuine levelling off in both cases. But I can't find any sign in the ACE press release that there has been such a mistake.)

To reiterate: The levelling off in the hiring of women is tiny, and the pace of minority hiring has increased not decreased (though by a similarly tiny margin). If not for the fact that this appears to be an ACE problem rather than an NYT problem in the first instance, this article would perfectly fulfill the old "World Ends: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit" joke about the Times. On the other hand, the fact that the NYT ran this article at all (as opposed to articles based on the thousands of other press releases it receives each day), and that no one stopped to check the arithmetic, might qualify the piece as a fulfillment of the joke after all.

UPDATE: Readers Paul Cashman and Bob Perera object that I should have used compound growth rates. Mr. Cashman writes:

Typically when we deal in growth rates or percentages, the key figure is CAGR -- compound annual growth rate, or the constant percentage by which some amount grows over a period of time. For example, when the statement is made that the stock market has returned an average of 8% since 1929, or inflation averaged 3.2% between 1980-2000, it's the CAGR that's being referred to. When businesspeople do return on investment analysis, they're looking for the constant rate of growth of some investment over a period. Mathematically, we have:

ending_amount = starting_amount * (1 + CAGR) ** years

which becomes:

CAGR = ((ending_amount/starting_amount) ** (1/years)) -1

Applying this analysis to the Times story, we see:

CAGR for women presidents, 1986-1998 is 6.1%
CAGR for women presidents, 1998-2001 is 3.0%
CAGR for minority presidents, 1986 -1998 is 2.8%
CAGR for minority presidents, 1998-2001 is 4.2%

So the growth in women presidents in the recent period is half of what is was in the earlier period, while in the recent period minorities are being hired as college presidents at a rate 50% higher than they were in the earlier period.

Here's part of what I wrote back:

I'll note your dissent online; but I had considered the issue you raise before
writing my post. (I carefully wrote in terms of percentage point increases,
not percentage increases, for just that reason.)

What the cases you refer to have in common with each other, and not with this
case, is compounding. That is, next year I'll earn interest on the interest I
earned this year. Next year inflation will increase even this year's inflated
prices. I just can't see the relevance of compounding to the case at hand.

To put it a different way: The NYT made it sound like the first derivative of
women-presidents-over-time had dramatically fallen. It hasn't. You correctly
argue that the second derivative has fallen dramatically. But I can't make out
the substantive interest of that fact. The number of women presidents, their
share of the total, has continued to rise at a nearly-steady rate. The rate
of increase in the number of women presidents has slowed, as you say. But,
well, so what?

The way Mr. Perera puts it:
Dr. Levy's conclusions still more or less hold but using linear (as he does)
instead of compound growth puts most of the percentage gains into early years,
which could be valid (I have no data) but is probably wrong.



It seems to me that compounding can't be relevant in the same way when the underlying variable is has an upper boundary-- which both number of presidencies and share of presidencies do. In a variable with that characteristic, the compounded growth rate must eventually fall over time. And in this particular variable it seems perfectly plausible and uninteresting to me that the year-on-year percentage gains weremuch higher in earlier years (Mr. Perera's point). Wouldn't they have to be? When initial values are tiny, but increases can only happen in whole numbers (i.e. from 1 woman president we can't go to 1.05 but must go to 2), then the percentage gains early on are huge. But if we keep hiring one net new woman president per year, then the number of women presidents and women's share of presidencies both rise steadily over time (hiring doesn't "level off") even though the compound annual growth rate falls dramatically (from 100% in the first year to 50% in the second year to 33% in the third year...)

But I might be wrong about this. If I am, then the substantive interpretation changes as follows: there still hasn't been a "similar shift" in the hiring of minority presidents; indeed, the dissimilarity becomes even more dramatic. A shift from a CAGR of 6.1% to 3% in the hiring of women presidents still seems to me pretty different from the image created by "leveled off" vs. "increasing steeply" (for a graphic representation using those figures click here) but it's admittedly closer to that than is .85 percentage points per year vs. .6 percentage points per year. If CAGR is the correct measurement then I have some egg on my face; but the NYT's substantive interpretation still looks like nonsense. With a CAGR of 3%, it's not the case that Boards of Trustees are increasingly conservative (even assuming an equation between "conservative" and "not hiring women presidents during times of uncertainty.") It's just the case that the rate at which they are becoming less conservative has slowed.

One more point: if I was wrong in my initial post, the blame lies on me; please don't harass Andrew Sullivan for linking to my post...

See Brink Lindsey's newest essay on non-interventionism and libertarianism.

It's always been unclear at best whether Trent Lott had fully come to terms with the results of the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. Turns out that the answer is: no. This is vile. Get rid of him.

UPDATE: If you're here, you've almost certainly already seen InstaPundit's coverage, which I won't try to top. But let me second Virginia Postrel's call to the press not to let this go. All sorts of silly things have prompted saturation of some public person or would-be-public-person (Cabinet nominees, for example) until he or she was driven from the scene. We know the press knows how to do this sort of thing. Now's the time.

University of Chicago e-mail crashed days ago and still isn't back up. If you've tried to contact me (or Dan Drezner), please forgive the delay in responding; and it couldn't hurt to send your message again, in case the server has lost some of the incoming messages altogether.

I had been doing all right on the whole waiting-for-Two-Towers-to-come-out thing. But the Flying Monkeys have now seen it, and that makes it much less okay. Two weeks and counting...

Glenn Reynolds and Stephen Chapman are quite right to take on the charge that Lord of the Rings is some sort of racist allegory. But, as I've blogged before, the movie adaptations (which, so far, I adore) are shifting the plot and themes of the book in a disturbingly racialized direction-- having to do with Middle Earth races, not our-earth races.

Huh? Emily Bazelon says that the flurry of state supreme court decisions finding that state constitutions require government funding abortions aren't getting much attention, because conservatives and pro-lifers aren't making a big deal out of them. She then closes with:

There's a nice irony here: Conservatives, who usually argue
for state-based solutions, and liberals, who usually argue for
federal ones, find themselves switching sides. It's an odd swap
of strategy (and principle) that's at least somewhat reminiscent
of the upside-down notions of federalism that pervaded the arguments
in Bush v. Gore. It takes some sleight of hand on the part of conservatives
to go from lauding the states as incubators of democratic innovation to
blasting them for daring to disagree with their federal betters—although
it's no more astonishing than hearing liberals importuning state courts to
save them from the mistakes of the federal Constitution. Maybe consistency
is too much to ask for here. But the lurking question in these abortion cases
is whether, all the yammering about federalism notwithstanding, "states' rights"
is anything more than a label of convenience to be grabbed by whomever the
grabbing is good for.

But she's just finished telling us that, with very few exceptions, conservatives aren't making a big deal out of these cases. And she hasn't quoted any conservatives who are doing anything like complaining that the state judges are "disagreeing with their federal betters." No one, for example, has appealed one of these decisions to the Supreme Court. (There would be no legal grounds to do so; but that's part of the point.) State supreme courts may interpret even state constitutional clauses identical to ones in the federal constitution very differently from how the federal courts interpret the latter, and state constitutions differ from the federal one in all sorts of interesting ways. I'm willing to bet that no legal scholar who has an even remotely federalist bent (i.e. no fair using Hadley Arkes as the counterexample) has disputed any of this, even in the context of decisions he or she thinks were a) wrong as a matter of state law or b) morally repugnant. If I'm right about that, then the quoted paragraph is a cheap shot, and a gratuitous Bush v Gore invocation where it doesn't actually make any sense.

Now some conservatives (who mostly aren't libertarians) have a majoritarian bent, and a preference for judicial minimalism. They're skeptics about amy judiciary overriding any legislature on other-than-very-compelling grounds. And those democratic-conservatives are often federalists because they think that democratic self-government is best served by governments smaller in scale than the central one. Those conservatives can, with perfect consistency, prefer state legislative outcomes to Congressional outcomes, and prefer state legislative outcomes to state judicial outcomes. Seeing the states as "incubators of democratic innovation" is entirely compatible with thinking that state legislatures (the, y'know, democratically elected branch) should have priority over state judiciaries. And so those conservatives who are much exercised by "judicial activism" can critique it at the state as well as the federal level, at no cost to their federalist principles.

(Note: The Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas opinion in Bush v Gore-- the one not joined by O'Connor and Kennedy-- depended in large part on an argument related to this, haing to do with the relative priority of the Florida legislature and the Florida Supreme Court. It's the other opinion, the equal protection one that either O'Connor or Kennedy or both wanted instead, that justifies accusations of federalism-hypocrisy.)

Virginia's back!

Dan Simonthinks that Eugene Volokh, InstaPundit, and I are missing something important in our various commentaries regarding free speech on campus. I think he's mistaken.

"In fact, too much free expression has sometimes threatened the academic health of universities as seriously as too little of it. Thuggish behavior on campus--shouting down of speakers, destruction of leaflets or newspapers, even physically threatening behavior--often masquerades as "protest", with its perpetrators demanding absolute protection from punishment in the name of "free speech"."

In case I've ever been remotely unclear on this: I do not consider the suppression of the speech of others to be protected expression. But I'm pretty sure that I haven't been unclear on this, and neither have Eugene or Glenn. This is a red herring.


' "[T]he regulation of merely offensive speech in classroom settings is an utterly noxious idea," writes Levy,
and the rest resoundingly agree. I admit to being a trifle confused; my understanding was that the whole point
of universities is that a student whose speech--in classroom presentations, on exam papers, in course
assignments--is not even offensive but merely insufficiently scholarly can face penalties as severe as
expulsion. Have things changed that much since I went to school?'

Here Simon supposes that speech that "offensive" is further in the same direction as "insufficiently scholarly." It's not. I wrote "merely offensive" quite advisedly. In-class speech that fails to advance an argument or to contribute to the academic enterprise is, of course, discouraged. But whether speech is "offensive" or not is a question nearly orthogonal to the question of whether it is sufficiently scholarly.

Throughout his post Simon endorses what, in another context, would be referred to as "time, place, and manner" restrictions-- no shouting outside dorms late at night, no shouting down speakers, and so on. Such restrictions are very different from content-based restrictions, which are necessary for the regulation of merely offensive speech. In my own classes I certainly try not to give offense gratuitously. But it is difficult to fully unpack Hobbes' thought without saying some things that might well be offensive to Catholics, or ot any Christians. It's difficult to explore the tension between respecting religious pluralism and protecting the rights of women without saying something potentially offensive to Muslims or Orthodox Jews or Mormons. It's impossible to conduct an academic discussion of multiculturalism and ethnic politics if everyone is worried about triggering "hate speech" codes. Civility is of course a virtue, and it's one that I think most people try to uphold in scholarly settings. But the content of what is said might well be offensive. It could harldy be otherwise, since many people much of the time are offended when their received ideas are challenged.

To single out a student for abuse, to throw racial epithets at a particular person, to threaten with violence-- these are over the line. They're violations of professional ethics and may well warrant university intervention. But mere offensiveness isn't sufficient; and to regulate speech for being merely offensive is deeply dangerous to intellectual pursuits. Simon supposes that Eugene, Glenn, and I might be worried about the abuse of an offensive-speech policy by those with a particular agenda. Speaking for myself, I am; but that worry isn't the primary reason for my opposition to such policies. Content regulation of speech in intellectual settings (by which I mean not only classrooms but also scholarly publications, student newspapers, public lectures and debates, and the whole panoply of ways in which ideas are expressed at a university) is necessarily at odds with the mission of a university.

UPDATE: Dan Simon has posted a reply. More on it later, but please note that I didn't write the University of Chicago policy from which he quotes; it long precedes my arrival here.

Science fiction fans have an ambivalent relationship with the SciFi network that started way 'back when they decided to name the thing "SciFi" (an abbreviation little-beloved by fandom). The network has broadcast some programs that are important (The Twilight Zone, ST:TOS, the X-Files), some that have significant nostalgia value (Battlestar Galactica), some that are underappreciated (Alien Nation), and some that are enjoyable straight-to-syndication types (Highlander, Forever Knight). It's produced, among other things, a quite good adaptation of Dune, something that can outweigh a lot of demerits. On the other hand, fo rthe past few years it's been riding the despicable "Crossing Over," a show in which a fraudulent psychic purports to put people in touch with their dead relatives. Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein would not have been amused. And now the network has turned itself over for ten nights to a man who has done massive damage to the name and concept of science fiction: Steven Spielberg. After the brilliant "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Spielberg has done nothing but harm to the genre. His movies demonstrate an unconcealed hatred for science; they have ever since the nasty, scary scientists showed up in "E.T." Spielberg's imagination works in entirely magical terms... which would be fine for the creator of fantasy movies. But, because his movies have aliens and robots and genetically-recreated dinosaurs, people mistake them for science fiction, much to the latter's detriment. Now SciFi and Spielberg are indulging and exploiting the alien-abduction superstition, and Spielberg talks about it in pseudo-religious terms (higher powers, etc) in today's NYT. Bah, humbug.

Yes, I know that that ran through the X-FIles; but when that show was at its best, that streak was kept in a very careful balance with skepticism and respect for science. That's part of what made the show work so well for so long.

Last night's episode of Andy Richter Controls the Universe was one of the funniest, bravest commentaries on 90's-style American race-and-diversity talk that I've ever seen. Richter seems much too innocent and inoffensive to be a really biting satirist, and the truth is that the episode doesn't finally take a stand (it laughs at everybody) in the way that really biting and important satire does. But this episode was I-can't-believe-they're-saying-that-on-television surprising in addition to being laugh-out-loud hilarious. The expedient of making the black characters also be Irish, then conducting the discussion about race exclusively in terms of Irishness-- never again mentioning their blackness in the dialogue while leaving it fully in view, so that the audience was always aware of the contrast-- sounds like a recipe for a wimp-out, but it turned out to be inspired.