Authorities removed protesters Saturday evening from an abandoned school in downtown Washington that had been entered by members or sympathizers of the Occupy D.C. movement…. Earlier, it appeared that about a dozen people went into the three-story building, unfurling a large black banner from the roof of the three-story building, and vowing to stay inside the school until it is converted for community use.

One protester elaborates:

City officials have said they hope to have the building privately developed. Protesters said it should be kept for the public, perhaps to reopen as a homeless shelter.

“This building is not surplus, and we won’t allow the city to give it away or turn it into a boutique hotel,” said Abigail DeRoberts, a member of Free Franklin.

For those unfamiliar with D.C. geography, this is a little like demanding that a soup kitchen using only solid gold utensils be opened on Park Avenue. This is a huge property overlooking a park in the middle of D.C.’s downtown business district, and it’s not especially surprising that the city’s elected representatives think it maybe makes more sense to sell or lease it, reap a continuous stream of tax revenue, and use those funds to support social services—including homeless shelters elsewhere in the city. Maybe there are strong arguments against this, and if “occupation” is a short-term stunt to draw attention to the issue so that the public can be more engaged in further deliberation, fine, that’s how protest works. If “we won’t allow the city” means “we’ll exert political pressure by mobilizing opposition and advancing arguments,” fantastic.

But if that’s a “won’t allow” in the sense of actually trying to seize the space for the use your group thinks is best, I find myself again thinking: Wait, who elected you? There are cases where even a formally democratic decision might be so invasive of fundamental liberties that people are justified in attempting to just directly block implementation of that decision. But choices about how to use a public building don’t really seem to fall in that category. This is a decision involving a whole bunch of stakeholders—including those dozens of community activists and various folks who hate boutique hotels, but also developers and business owners and their employees and customers, surrounding businesses that might benefit from a hotel, beneficiaries of other programs that rely on tax revenue, and a broader taxpaying base (most of whom are unlikely to personally invest a whole lot of time and thought on this particular question).  I’m familiar enough with D.C. local government not to be excessively sanguine about their making the right call, but they’re the ones actually elected to balance all those interests.  So when a few dozen—or even a few hundred—people say “no, we won’t allow it” on the premise that they speak for “the community,” I think it’s fair to say: “Wait, no, you don’t.” And again, I get worried when a group is so convinced that it represents the authentic voice of the people that it thinks it has a mandate to override, as inherently illegitimate, any political decision it doesn’t like.

I’ve always had a similar reaction to that hoary protest chant: “Whose Streets? Our Streets! Whose Park? Our Park!” Here we’re supposed to understand that “our” means “the people” as a whole. But protesters—even when they call themselves “The 99%”—comprise a pretty minuscule fraction of a percent of the population of a city the size of New York.  In practice, “our” means “this particular group of people,” even if they aspire to represent a much larger group. We don’t put expressive rights to a vote, fortunately, but it does seem like a whole bunch of democratically elected city officials are under the impression that their constituents want their parks to remain usable for traditionally park-ish purposes. Maybe they’re wrong, of course, or maybe that’s a pretext offered to squelch a threat to their corporate paymasters. But it always seems presumptuous when soi-disant populist movements, left and right, declare that “we the people” want this or that.

For most of human history, we’ve spent our whole lives in social clusters of a few hundred people—we’re basically hardwired for groups of that size. That makes it easy to look at a throng of a few thousand out at a rally and tell yourself, as another familiar chant has it: “This is what democracy looks like.” 

Except, of course, it isn’t really. Or at any rate, it’s only a tiny part of what democracy looks like. 

A small group of people self-selected for their commitment to some set of shared goals and values may be able to pick a set of slogans to chant in unison, or resolve their limited disagreements by consensus process.  But real democracy in a pluralist society involves deep and often ineradicable disagreement—and not just on the optimal uses of public parks and other commons. It’s true, of course, that concentrated and wealthy interests routinely capture the apparatus of government, and use it to serve ends inimical to the general good. But a frame that sets up an opposition between “the 99%” and “the 1%” —or, if you prefer, between “Washington/media elites” and “Real America”—suggests a vain hope that profound political differences are, at least in some spheres, an illusion manufactured by some small minority.

Against that background, it’s instructive that so many OWS organizers have cited Tahrir Square as an inspiration. In much of the Arab world, after all, the problem isn’t so much resolving democratic disagreement as getting to the point where there are regular, free elections whose results are respected. However broken our system might be, we’ve at least gotten that far. In that context, though, once protest has successfully drawn public attention to an issue, it seems like the next step should be to get on with the messy and prosaic business of debating and deliberating on concrete reforms with those who have different views. If the people all (or nearly all) want the same thing, but an oppressive authority refuses to act on that shared desire, debate and deliberation are beside the point: There’s nothing to do but throw your bodies on the gears until the rulers have no choice but to comply.  My sense is that many of the OWS folks think that’s more or less the situation we are in. Spend a few weeks in a self-selected community, and perhaps it becomes possible to believe that 99% of us really are all on the same page—or at least, would be if we weren’t brainwashed by the 1%. This has long been a major strain in conservative thinking: Everyone would see that our views are just simple common sense—obviously correct!—if not for a liberal media cabal systematically lying to people all day. Dark as this sounds, it’s utopian in one sense: It implies we’d all agree but for the malign influence of this or that small but powerful group.

I’m neither cynical enough to believe that our deeply flawed democracy is a complete sham, nor optimistic enough to hope the appearance of fundamental political conflict is a stage production masking an underlying harmony. But if disagreement is real—if large numbers of my fellow citizens sincerely hold very different views about what policy is best—then protest, however vital as a consciousness raising tool,  can only be a preparation for the more humdrum enterprise of convincing your neighbors with sustained arguments (or being convinced yourself), electing candidates, and all the rest. To imagine protest not as prologue to politics, but as a substitute for it, suggests a denial of the reality of pluralism, and an unwillingness to find out what democracy actually looks like.

Now,  Brad Plumer reports, there’s research suggesting that online review sites like Yelp are cutting into chains’ bottom line by providing an alternative solution to the information problem. The combination of peer-produced online reviews (which cover local diners along with the big-city restaurants) and mobile, location-aware Internet devices has made it incredibly easy  to figure out where you can find the nearest restaurants with good reputations, wherever you might be. Under conditions of uncertainty, the chain represents a rational maximin strategy. As ubiquitous connectivity and peer-production of information reduce that uncertainty, the chain becomes an unnecessary hedge.

Yet it’s not just chain restaurants that have thrived by using standardization and branding to solve a consumer information problem: Branding and marketing generally often serve much the same function. Frequently, generic or store-branded products (soda, cereal, ibuprofen) are literally chemically identical to the more recognizable name-brand product, and only cheaper because they haven’t been saddled with the overhead of a costly marketing campaign designed to signal quality. (Think of the traditional argument for the evolution of peacock feathers: To survive while paying the high overhead cost of such a gaudy display signals genetic fitness.)

Imagine, then, what effect it might have if, five or ten years hence, augmented reality using sophisticated image recognition were as ubiquitous as Internet-enabled phones are becoming in the developed world. Imagine that, for nearly any product consumers encountered, some kind of aggregate rating—based on whatever criteria the individual has determined are most important—would simply appear, with minimal effort. Simply looking at an aisle of products—or even passing shops on the street—I might effortlessly learn which were deemed most satisfactory by people with tastes similar to mine. My incentive to take the time to rank products would be provided by my desire to give the system a basis for determining which other user’s rankings were most likely to be relevant for me. (Think here of Netflix recommendations or other type of social filtering, where contributing ratings enables the system to make better predictions about what I am likely to enjoy.)

With such information more directly available, marketing would become far less relevant to the buyer—and a far less worthwhile investment for the producer. Products, of course, would still need to be distinguished in some way, but a seller with a superior product would be far better able to compete without investing in a costly national marketing campaign. Advertising might be initially important in raising awareness about a new product and building an initial pool of reviews, but its salience would rapidly diminish.

That’s one way things might go, at least. The picture is a bit complicated because today we often “consume” the brand, and not just the product itself. That is a company like Nike might invest a great deal in slick marketing partly in order to create a series of public associations with their logo, so that part of what I’m buying when I purchase their sneakers is what (I hope) the Swoosh signals about the sort of person I am—or how I see myself, at any rate. But this seems like a major consideration in a relatively limited number of product areas, such as clothing (precisely because it’s displayed on the person). If that’s right, the “Yelp Effect” in world where augmented reality technology has been widely adopted could dramatically diminish the broader cultural prominence of corporate logos and brands.

On the victim’s side, even a teen who is conscious of being the victim of bullying might feel ashamed to admit it. But it’s actually more complicated than that, because once we move out of the realm of bullying as simple physical assault, the difference between psychological bullying and more innocuous types of ribbing or reciprocal verbal aggression ultimately comes down to how the teens themselves feel about it. So a teen who denies being “bullied” and appears to shrug off various kinds of social animosity as just “drama” is not necessarily in denial about the independent, objective fact that they really are being bullied. Rather, insisting on adopting the attitude that they’re on equal footing with their aggressors (and so not bullied) may be a primary determinant of whether or not this is, in fact, the case. We all know, of course, that there’s often a sharp disconnect between internal feeling and external performance: We pretend to be unruffled by remarks that, in reality, cut deep. But we also know that these are hardly totally separate domains: Telling yourself that you don’t care what those jerks say about you is often part of the process of actually ceasing to care what those jerks say about you—or at least, ceasing to care much. On the victim’s side, then, psychological bullying is hard to quantify, because “bullying” is not always an observer-independent natural fact: Denying that you are being bullied is sometimes a means of making it true that you are not (successfully) bullied—though when that gambit fails, it may prevent some students from seeking necessary help from adults. Call this the Bullying Heisenberg Effect.

On the aggressor side, as boyd observes, part of the problem is that nobody likes to think of themselves as a bully, and so the teens who are dishing it out find other descriptions that minimize the harm they do. More than that, however, because bullying is so often a social phenomenon, it may literally be impossible to evaluate whether “bullying” is happening at the level of the individual agent—even for the bullies themselves!

As regular readers know, I’m fond of invoking a thought experiment from philosopher Derek Parfit called “The Harmless Torturers.” Parfit imagines one scenario in which 10,000 torturers each torture one of 10,000 victims using an electrocution machine. Each torturer clearly inflicts terrible agony on an individual victim. In Parfit’s second scenario, each torturer’s machine is configured so as to deliver one-ten-thousandth of the same voltage—a quantity so small as to be utterly imperceptible to the victim by itself—to all of the victims who were individually electrified in the first scenario. In the aggregate, the torturers inflict exactly the same amount of pain on exactly the same number of people. But in this second scenario, each torturer can—with some justice—claim that his actions are “harmless.” Each, in other words, can claim: “If I stayed home, there is not one of those 10,000 victims who would feel any difference.”

As applied to physical torture, the scenario is fanciful. As applied to psychological torture, it describes the norm. Only a few really horrid people commit themselves to relentlessly harassing and abusing a single individual. But many teens—and not a few nominal adults—will make a handful of snarky and cutting remarks to numerous different individuals over the course of an ordinary day. It would often be overblown to characterize any particular remark as bullying: In isolation, all but the most fragile of us would shrug it off. In the aggregate, they may be intolerable to even the most self-assured.

One reason “cyberbullying” may present special problems is that the Internet and social networks dramatically increase the realistic number of people who can pile on a single victim in a short period of time. Each aggressor might rationalize their own part in the distributed bullying as just one or two comments, though the victim perceives an overwhelming assault when these are all combined. For an analogy in the physical world, we can look to street harassment, which is enabled by the high volume of anonymous, brief public interactions characteristic of urban environments. Some men, of course, engage in vulgar and intimidating speech that anyone would consider harassing in itself. But often, the harassment is a distributed phenomenon. Many of us would not particularly mind a single stranger yelling out “Hi, gorgeous” or “You look good today!” once every other month—and I’ve seen men (inexcusably obtuse, to be sure, but not obviously malicious) react with genuine surprise when such remarks are not welcomed as compliments, not realizing they’re the tenth person in as many blocks to volunteer a similar comment to the same woman.

It may be hard to stamp out bullying, then, not just because victims are often unwilling apply the label to their own experience, but because individual aggressors can plausibly—even if somewhat disingenuously—deny that their individual actions qualify. Insofar as it may be counterproductive to encourage the victims of psychological bullying—cyber or otherwise—to consciously identify themselves as such, the more fruitful strategy may be encouraging teens on the aggressor side to be better Kantians, as it were—to imagine whether each mean offhand remark would qualify as “bullying” if it were multiplied by a dozen daily interactions, day after day, week after week.

So, for instance, maybe I’m having a beer with a couple neighbors on my porch, a bunch of other folks are across town where a BBQ I plan to swing by later is getting into gear, and another friend is stuck in a hotel room in the Midwest on a reporting trip and doesn’t want to totally miss out. Most of us are probably talking to our co-located people, but the experience is shared without anyone having to retreat from socialization to tap at their phones. If I want to know when a critical mass of folks I know have arrived at the BBQ, there’s no need to keep checking Twitter, and no need for them to go out of their way to announce their arrival—I just notice out of the corner of my eye that folks are there and, hey, maybe it’s time to hop a bus over. Our friend in the hotel can do his work, but also perhaps welcome the occasional distraction as a friend walk by the Stargate and checks in. Could be a short-lived fad, but I think it could also be as socially normal, in the relatively near future, to have social gatherings connected by virtual windows as it is to text friends about what you’re doing.

(2) The feature most immediately likely to be useful is huddle, which facilitates more conventional text/IM style communication with a select group in a kind of mobile-friendly chat room—handy when you’re trying to coordinate plans with a dozen people.

I note though, that there may be some interesting side effects of integrating virtual social networks more closely into actual socialization. With social circles—as opposed to Circles—the boundaries are fuzzy and ad-hoc. Even among a somewhat well-defined group of friends, it’s always somewhat a matter of happenstance which particular subsets of people end up communicating and making plans on any given day. A person may gradually drift out of touch with once circle and into another in a gradual and almost imperceptible way, ideally with no hard feelings on either side.

Making it technologically easy to communicate with groups means that, for activities involving more than a relative handful of people, that technology becomes more likely to be the default mechanism of interaction. Individuals will define their own Circles, but there will be a tendency toward convergence. But these aren’t fuzzy-bordered circles, they’re Circles in which membership is really an either-or. I wonder if we won’t find ourselves feeling the need to make uncomfortably explicit, conscious decisions about who’s in the “folks I meet for drinks after work” or “always invited to parties” group—which seems rather more freighted than the question of who happened to get asked to come out for a specific round of drinks or a particular party.. People, of course, don’t see which circles anyone else has included them in, but to the extent they’re the basis of actual group interaction, it should be readily apparent to everyone quickly enough who is and isn’t part of the conversation. I’m guessing this sets up some potential awkwardness as people figure out how to navigate all that.

(3) Finally, as Mike Masnick observes, some people are already worrying about a potential privacy “loophole” in G+: Items shared with one “circle” can, by default, easily be RE-shared by the members of that circle. I agree with Mike that it’s weird to treat this as some kind of disturbing privacy violation on Google’s part: After all, in general, everything we share with one set of friends might be shared by them with others. Something you say in conversation might be repeated; a photo you e-mail can be forwarded. Normally, the solution is to ensure that your friends know when you don’t want a specific bit of informatoin shouted to the four winds.

That said, a lot of privacy has more to do with ease of information sharing than whether it’spossible, and more to do with the clarity of norms than explicit prohibitions. Someone could copy the contents of a private e-mail (or, by hand, the contents of a private letter) and forward it to hundreds of friends. But that would be both effortful and rude. If I share a photo with my “Friends” circle, I realize they could save and reupload it if there’s not sharing functionality built in… but they’d have to be big jerks (and ergo probably not “Friends”) to make the effort to do so, in particular if I’ve signaled via my settings that I don’t expect these pictures to be more widely circulated.

It’s not a question of Google “violating my privacy,” which is the unhelpful frame of stories about social networks much of the time. But what Google can do is facilitate social signalling about the information norms we expect friends, peers, and colleagues to respect. On most Twitter clients, for instance, while you can always copy-and-paste text into a retweet, the one-click retweet button is inactive for tweets from locked accounts. Obviously, that doesn’t literally prevent anyone from sharing a message on a private feed—it just means it’s hard to do it thoughtlessly, and the very fact that you’ve got to take the unusual extra step of doing it manually reminds you that, hey, your friend doesn’t actually expect this stuff to be more widely distributed. Increasingly, I think, having “good privacy practices” as a social networking site isn’t going to be so much about what the site does with your information (important as that is), or even about the literal control they give you—since “control” over information in any really strong sense is always pretty chimerical—but how fluidly and organically they allow us to establish norms and articulate expectations about how our peers will use the information they have access to.

Just to be crystal clear in advance: I assume that bin Laden was indeed shot and killed in the course of the Abbotabad raid as we’ve been told. That said, I don’t think someone who harbors doubts on this front is on par with people who spin wild fantasies about Obama’s Kenyan birth or George Bush’s role in the 9/11 attacks. Suppose Osama bin Laden had been captured alive and was being interrogated. It would be pretty much impossible to conceal the fact that the raid had occurred—at least from other high-ranking Al Qaeda operatives. But it might be desirable to conceal for as long as possible the fact that he had become a potential source of intelligence. The easiest way to do this would be to announce that he’d been killed in the raid—assuming that when the truth was ultimately revealed, most Americans would forgive a necessary deception. Again, I don’t think this is what happened. But in contrast with the Birther and Truther conspiracies, this hypothesis doesn’t require one to cling to a fantastic speculation, in the face of mountains of evidence and everything we know about human motivation.

I say all this only because it’s worth bearing in mind that there are sectors of the government whose legitimate function is to engage in, for lack of a better word, conspiracies. Probably this one is as false as the others, but it is worth resisting the suggestion that all doubts about official government narratives are equally nutty. There’s plenty of stuff in the Church Committee reports that sounds like the paranoid delusions of a tinfoil-hat wearer, except for the fact that it happened.

That said, I was mulling reasons for the difference, and one obvious possibility is that sexism is likely to be more thoroughly culturally embedded, and to at least some extent domesticated as a result. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, coexistence of men and women is a permanent feature of every culture, so the norms and beliefs and institutions that bear on gender are going to be tightly bound up with the norms, beliefs, and institutions broader culture, often going back many centuries. That means, to the extent that those norms are sexist, that they’ll be deeply entrenched and difficult to change rapidly. But in contrast to racist norms that are more likely to be relatively peripheral, applying to interfaces between cultures, they’re also likely to be constrained to some extent by the demands of long-term coexistence. However repressive or violence-enabling some elements of a culture’s gender norms are, it’s fairly difficult and unpleasant to mediate cooperation for stuff like childrearing and household management exclusively by means of violence and repression, so there are likely to be elements that at least appear to offer enough benefit to women that many are at least somewhat willing participants. And that’s much less necessary when you’re talking about interactions with the society next door, or an insular and segregated minority within that society—the cultural “bargain” can be rather harder.

The big obvious example here is codes of chivalry, which are so effective at perpetuating a larger ideology that infantilizes and subordinates women precisely because they operate by providing a series of minor but real benefits—”ladies first” or what have you. Gender theorists talk about the “patriarchal bargain” offered to women who fit a culture’s ideal of beauty: Become complicit in your own objectification and win fabulous prizes! The superstructure is bad for women as a whole, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t elements of it that offer some genuine reward to particular women—and, indeed, it’s precisely by doing so that a generally subordinating social order stabilizes itself. It is very hard to think of racist ideologies that function in a similar way.

None of this—I emphasize because I think I was unclear on this last time—is meant to imply a judgment that “sexism” is, on net, “less bad” than “racism,” as I doubt comparisons at that level are possible or useful. You might as well ask: “Which is better, fiction or music?” It just means that gender norms are likely to be far more organically bound up in a whole complex of other norms that are more culturally central, some of which at least appear to provide some kind of compensating benefits.

I think this shows up in how we often react to, in particular, older males who express sexist attitudes, at least up to a point. “Oh, well, he’s just an old-fashioned Spanish man, what can you do?” we might say with an eye-roll, maybe even finding it a little charming, because at the very least old-fashioned Spanish culture is not an unmixed horror, and it’s hard to pry apart the objectionably sexist elements from the larger complex. The gender norms are part of the cultural kernel, whereas the norms touching on race are more likely to be a kind of patch or peripheral. From a memetic perspective, then, we shouldn’t be surprised that sexism seems tougher to eradicate in some ways, because it’s had a long time to develop adaptive survival strategies and defense mechanisms. To the extent we’re gentler or more nuanced about critiquing sexism, it may be because we’re trying to avoid triggering the formidable immune systems of those larger cultural complexes with which the sexist norms exist in a kind of symbiosis.

A: Wow, what conservative X said sure was racially offensive/ignorant/insensitive.
B: Are you calling him a racist? You just called him a racist! You’re saying he’s exactly like a klansman!
A: Well, look, the problem with what he said…
B: Don’t you understand the deep pain a slur like “racist” inflicts on white people? Why are you such a bigot?
A: [INCREDULOUS STARE]

It’s a weird bit of judo that seeks to leverage the social consensus that racism is beyond the pale by parsing criticism of an idea or statement as an attribution of this binary, all-or-nothing property—”racist”—to a person or group. The focus then shifts from the propriety of the idea or statement to whether the deployment of this rhetorical nuclear option is justified. (Even if, as in this case, it hasn’t actually been deployed in so many words, except in the imaginations of conservatives.)

  Interestingly, we don’t really seem to have this problem to the same extent with “sexist.”  We can point out sexist remarks or attitudes without getting derailed by pointless discussion of whether a particular person “is a sexist.” It even sounds a bit weird to pose the question as though it were a simple matter of “yes” or “no,” with the world neatly divided into sexists and non-sexists. Rather, we all get that, the culture being what it is, basically decent people—and occasionally even level-seven gender studies Jedi—will have imbibed unexamined sexist presuppositions or adopted mistaken empirical beliefs about gender differences. 

This is, presumably, because for all that our society may have historically denied women full equality, even at its worst it stopped short of denying their humanity. “Racism” is associated, in its practical consequences, with a system of violence and repression so irredeemably evil that we want to think of it not as a species of error, but as something so monstrously “other” that it creates a chasm between those contaminated by it and those free of its influence. This is understandable, in a way, but ends up being awfully convenient in practice: “I’m no Klansman, so clearly I have no need subject my tacit attitudes and beliefs about race to critical scrutiny.”

We’d probably have more productive conversations if we just agreed that its not hugely useful to ask whether someone like Haley Barbour “is” a “racist,” or to reflexively read that accusation into every criticism involving race. Then we could focus more narrowly on what ought to be a relatively uncontroversial proposition: That his misguidedly sanguine view of the Citizen’s Councils reflects a lamentable (and perhaps self-serving) ignorance of the uglier aspects of his own state’s history, and that we should expect our elected officials to be better informed.

Update: A handy video guide (via Alan Pyke):

The theory that Americans are better than everybody else is endorsed by an overwhelming majority of U.S. voters and approximately 100 percent of all U.S. politicians, although there is less and less evidence to support it. A recent Yahoo poll (and I resist the obvious joke here) found that 75 percent of Americans believe that the United States is “the greatest country in the world.” Does any other electorate demand such constant reassurance about how wonderful it is — and how wise?

You can gin up bogus reasons why it might matter from a policy perspective when the president says something that can be construed as “apologizing for America,” or doesn’t engage in a lot of symbolism that’s supposed to signal commitment to “American values”—but none of them have ever made much sense. The conventional take is that it’s really about markers of tribal affinity, but we can go a step further: Maybe it’s more precisely that people want high-status figures to invest in building the brand of their shared identity—a sort of status redistribution as noblese oblige.

Update: Lest I I be thought to be making any claim to originality here, South Bend Seven notes that the basic idea here should be familiar enough from readers of the likes of Eric Hoffer:

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

— The True Believer, Section 9

But I wonder if this intuitive view doesn’t hinge on a mistaken essentialism about race. We know, after all, that conventional racial categories are social constructs rather than simple biological facts—and that, for instance, whether an Italian American is considered “white” is a culturally contingent question that’s been answered in different ways at different times. What that means, though, is that the question of whether someone “is” black, white, Aboriginal, Hispanic, or whatever, can’t be answered by reference to any simple natural fact about (say) ancestry or biology. It will depend on the social purpose for which you’re asking, and the context in which you’re asking. For many purposes, “being” black or Latino just is a matter of being socially perceived as belonging to the relevant group—and who someone’s grandparents were or what genotype is hiding behind that phenotype are just irrelevant, except insofar as they determine perception. Those perceptions, of course, may differ from group to group, or context to context—and the individual’s own sense of identity may be something else again.

So return to the specifics of the case. Apparently the job in question involved manning a booth, and the motive for preferring personnel of indigenous heritage was the belief that the program’s targets would be more likely to approach a booth if they perceived it, at a distance, as being staffed by at least one other indigenous person. If you grant that as a legitimate rationale for a hiring preference, then whether Betterridge “really is” indigenous isn’t relevant. What matters is whether she’d be perceived that way from across the room by another indigenous person, a question that has nothing to do with whether she is “any less a person of the Wiradjuri nation.” Because, of course, being “a person of the Wiradjuri nation” is itself nothing more than being recognized as such by other people. Nobody outside that community, of course, can tell Betterridge whether she “really is” Wiradjuri, but for the limited purpose of this hiring decision, it’s not clear that it matters either way.