Lucky White Girl

How Precious reinforces white racism

I didn't get around to seeing Precious. 

I read the book and thought it was interesting and complicated and painful.  But the movie, simply by fact of being intended for a mass audience, I knew was going to be complicated in a different way. 

I knew it would require a lot of work on my part, lots of thought and analysis and a long blog post in response, and to be honest for the past couple of months I've been in "play" mode (meaning I've been devoting a lot of time to personal issues) and haven't felt like undertaking such a huge task.  (FYI: to the extent that I've blogged much at all lately, it's been for posts I could write in under half an hour, quick responses to current events and I don't know for how much longer this trend will continue but it will for the foreseeable future with the exception of occasional longer posts like this).

So to put the following essay in context, know that I still haven't seen the movie but I did read this Op-ed piece in the New York Times and thought it was not only worth passing along but also worth a response from my own standpoint (that of a white middle-class female) because I feel it's important that we not leave it up to people of color to do all the difficult work of talking about racism.  It's important that white people talk about racism too and that's what I've tried to do all these years with this blog.  I speak about the issue from a specific position within the dominant class of a society that still is still extremely polarized around issues of race and class.  Racism is our problem; not just theirs and it's our responsibility to talk about it too.

Proponents of the film argue that the movie is trying to shed light on important social problems which society should not ignore and it just so happens that in this case the story centers around a black family.  We should be able to see this as just another film about a dysfunctional family. 

I agree.  We should be able to see it that way, theoretically, but we can't.  At least white people can't.  Our society still primarily categorizes people according to social constructs such "race" and "gender".  (if you're not sure what I mean by "social constructs", click here to read a student's paper on this subject).  Precious is not just a girl, she's a black girl.  White people can't NOT see her non-whiteness.

Am I saying that how you see this film depends on what color your skin is?

Yes, pretty much.

Why?  There is a phenomena known as "social isolation" in which any given majority group in a society doesn't really have to have much interaction with members of a minority group if they don't want to.  Members of the minority group don't get this option.  Most of them have to interact with the dominant society at some level every day, if not in person then in representations on TV, in movies, on the news: white characters interacting primarily with other white characters in white society.  White leaders, white politicians, white teachers, white actors.  White is the default such that when non-white appears it's noticeable.

I don't normally walk into a room and think "hey! everyone in here is white!" (well, I do actually now, because I've thought about this) but if I walk into a room filled with non-white people I am inevitably going to think "hey! not everyone here is white!"

Ok to a certain extent this is just human.  We notice difference.  We don't notice sameness.  But when you combine the dominant group's lack of knowledge or familiarity with the culture(s) of a minority group with past negative stereotypes of that group, then you get a problematic situation.

That's what happens with white people watching the movie Precious.

We already have a zillion negative stereotypes about black people, black culture, black families.  When you combine that with the reality that most white people have such limited interactions with black people, you reinforce white stereotypes and do nothing to improve race relations in this country.

Reed says that the film also caters to a popular white belief (see Feagin's, Vera's and Batur's discussion of "sincere fictions" in their classic book White Racism) of the "merciful slave master".  In this narrative, white characters are kind, compassionate, wanting to help the poor, disadvantaged black characters.  Rarely acknowledged is the white person's historical role in creating a harmful, oppressive white-supremacist society and the legacy we still carry with us from that shameful past.

If there's one over-arching theme to this blog it's this: white people have still not yet come to terms with our own racism and personal prejudice, with the racist culture and society we have constructed and with the legacy that our past actions have given us today. 

We still live in a segregated society (though it's getting better) and this social isolation allows race-based stereotypes to continue even though we should be "past all that".  We have not been pro-active about righting these historical injustices and making sincere, honest efforts at reconciling ourselves with our fellow human beings (indeed we're still perpetuating racism against other segments of the human population in other areas of the world now).

What that means is that it's almost impossible for white society to see a film like Precious as simply a story of a tragically dysfunctional family.  For us, it is so much more complicated.

Thanksgiving: Day of Thanks, Day of Mourning

Today, in the U.S., we celebrate what is possibly the most conflicted holiday on our calendar.  Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving has a pretty horrible history.  It was originally the celebration of one massacre that became part of a larger genocide that came with the colonialization of this country.   It's morphed into a day to spend with friends and family and "give thanks for all our blessings".  That's its contemporary more "P.C. version" if you will, but the roots are pretty bloody.

I live in DC and this year, like last, I went to the National Museum of the American Indian on the mall.  I didn't intend this to be a major political statement or anything.  (If I did, I might not choose NMAI; the place is good but I know some believe it's too cautious/conservative; its emphasis is on celebrating contemporary and past Native American cultures and not-so-much on memorializing a tragedy of unspeakable proportions; compare it to the Holocaust Museum also in DC).  I go mostly because the cafe  there (the only museum cafe to be Zagat-rated) is really good and I like their exhibits.  Also on some level, knowing what we did to native peoples here, I suppose I just feel it's an appropriate place to be on a "Day of Mourning".

I was wondering though about this new ritual of mine when a friend who heard about it seemed disturbed by the idea.  She suggested it might not be appropriate to be "celebrating" while being literally surrounded by the historical context.  Maybe I should do my celebrating of Thanksgiving at home and focus on the contemporary meaning of the holiday: "being grateful, "counting our blessings" etc. 

Maybe so.  Does being in the museum bring together things that shouldn't be brought together: celebration with tragic history?  Perhaps, but obviously I'm not celebrating genocide any more than you sitting at home are.  If anything, being at the museum makes that history more present for me. And that counts. A lot.

We could try to distance Thanksgiving from having anything at all to do with Native Americans in order to avoid that tragic history but I think we don't gain anything by forgetting or glossing over the past, even and especially if that past is painful.  Over the past five years I've written tons of stuff on this blog about taking responsibility for our actions, not just as individuals but as groups too.  Owning up to our history in order to create a better future.  Europeans, as a whole, committed terrible crimes against humanity when they colonized the Americas. We brought stolen people from one part of the world over to our stolen lands in another. We set in place economic, social and political systems that benefited ourselves at the expense of non-Europeans who paid dearly with their lives, their freedom and their dignity.  The legacy of those actions are still with us today.  The past matters.

I didn't used to think this excursion to the museum on Thanksgiving was anything more than ever-so-slightly political, but thinking about my friends' reaction to it, made me realize it really is.  Going to the Native American museum on Thanksgiving Day is an act that so clearly connects two dots that we don't have want to connect: genocide and gratitude.  And we realize that the holiday really is historically about something we don't want it to be about: Gratitude for genocide.  Going to the Native American museum on Thanksgiving Day makes the hypocrisy and history of the holiday inescapable, which makes us uncomfortable.  Like lots of things from our ancestors its meaning is deeply offensive and "in poor taste".  But I think it's the holiday that's in poor taste, not my pointing it out by going to the museum.

I could be wrong, but I think there's no getting around the bloody history of the holiday.  Given the scope of the crime against humanity that European Americans committed back then, maybe it's time to bury Thanksgiving at Wounded Knee, along with Dee Brown's heart and have a National Day of Mourning instead.

The world welcomes back its prodigal son

The Prodigal Son

In awarding President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, the world, represented through the Nobel Committee, made a strong statement today, not about Obama or his accomplishments, but about the nature of international relations in the 21st century.

Last November the people of this country made an historic statement themselves, about what they believe this country is about and what it can do.  It was a complicated message having many different themes, some of which bubbled below the surface, lest they hit the raw nerve of racism, but what people didn’t speak about, everyone knew was there.  We felt it that night as total strangers hugged each other in the street.  We saw it in each other’s eyes as we witnessed the birth of a new nation, one that would be very different from the racist, dominating, bullying country of the past.

To the rest of the world, I think the message they heard last November was this: "We're sorry for the last eight years of ruthless terror we’ve rained down. The attacks of 9/11 scared us and we didn't know what to do; we lashed out.  But America is more than George Bush and Dick Cheney. It's more than Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.  We are a good people and we really do believe in peace and international cooperation.  We're ready to get back to that now."

I was really and truly proud of my country that night last fall.  I didn't think I would ever feel anything like that again.  I thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime event.  Today I found I was wrong.

The world responded.

They said YES! and embraced us again as that idealistic country where everyone has a dream. We are the prodigal son returning home, once again part of the global community, welcomed back with open arms.
 
I know we're not there yet.  I know we’ve still got huge messes to clean up. But it’s not about what we or Obama has done; it’s about where we’re going.

One day we'll look back on this time and see it as a significant turning point.  There was a world of difference between the way late 19th century diplomats saw the world and the way the people who created first the flawed League of Nations and then the (still flawed but much better and improving) United Nations.  The former saw competing nation-states, little self-contained empires that struggled ruthlessly and self-interestedly for dominance over each other.  The latter saw, for the first time in history, the possibility (even the necessity of) "global community" and international law.  That was the first step that marked the 20th century.  This (the election and now the world's response to it) is the next step and it will mark the 21st.  Neither step is perfect (e.g. the League of Nations, e.g. Afghanistan) and neither step is complete.  But they are monumental shifts in international relations.

America is America again.  We’ve come home.

The anger of the right

The teabaggers were here on Saturday.  They marched, they rallied and they were really, really angry. 

My roommate and I walked over to the Capitol to check them out.  Our estimate was that there were between ten and twenty thousand people there.  They had signs with Obama as Hitler, calling him a "Muslim - Marxist" (I wish!) and bemoaning our government's descent into --horror of horrors-- socialism!  Besides their wild exaggerated misinformed claims, what stuck out to me was their anger and their homogenity.  They were really angry and they were almost entirely older and white.  

What sort of sociological phenomena are we witnessing here?  What could be motivating these people to come out and apparently without shame hold up signs with wild and outrageous claims about bogeymen in Washington out to kill their grandmas?  The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Department of Homeland Security are documenting a rise hate group activity since Obama's election.  Angry protestors are waving Any Rand books and shouting about the government taking away their guns. The philosophy behind this movement is utterly revolting.  Why in the world would any grown up in this day and age embrace it? 

Bernie Sanders was on MSNBC last night offering one explanation.  He said simply, people are angry.  They have a right to be angry.  The economy is in shambles and they're hurting financially.  I think Sanders is on to something.   I think they're lashing out at thing they've been conditioned to hate: the government and black people.

After eight years of the Bush Administration's costly and unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are in debt as never before.  As a result of many more years of deregulations of the financial markets and unbrindled capitalism, the economy has nearly collapased.  Obama has turned out to not own a magic wand and has not been able to clean everything up in 8 months and our country is still a mess.  Unemployment is still high (though no longer increasing) and many, many families are suffering.  Of course people are angry.

The problem is not that people are angry; the problem is that their justifiable anger about the state of the country is being exploited by powerful special interest groups, namely the insurance industry and right-wing elitists.  Most of the people at Saturday's rally haven't actually read Ayn Rand and I think they would be revolted by Objectivism if they knew anything at all about it. They don't know much about the health care debate either beyond a couple soundbites from Glen Beck.  They just know they're angry.

The thing is right now that anger has coalesced around two things that this particular audience is prone to distrust.  But for the most part, this is not the USA of George Wallace and despite this vocal minority Ayn Rand has never had a very large following here.  As a whole, we're better than that.  This is a country that yes, is flawed and has been hugely, tragically, immensely wrong in the past but, in the end I believe, we're a good people and we're getting better and right now we're blessed with a wise leader.  Despite the rally of hate on Saturday, this is still the country that united as never before on January 20th to celebrate the inauguration not only of our first black president but of a great statesman, plain and simple.  

These are tough times.  There's going to be ugliness.  There's going to be anger.  There's going to be racism.  It's part of our baggage as a country.  But it's not what defines us.  And for all their noise on Saturday, the angry tea-baggers waving racist signs and threatening armed revolution are not representative where this country is at today.  They're just not.

EDIT: for more of a sense of the march on Saturday, watch this video:

Sotomayor's standpoint: A view from outside the dominant paradigm

Finally someone hits the nail on the head on the so-called controversy about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's comments in a speech she made once to students/academic types.  (The one in which she talks about how her experiences as a Latina have given her a unique and valuable way of understanding the world and has helped her be a better judge.)  Eugene Robinson's column today asks why it's acceptable for white men to recognize their heritage/socio-economic position but anyone else who does so is accused of being racist/subjective/biased. 

"The whole point of Sotomayor's much-maligned "wise Latina" speech was that everyone has a unique personal history -- and that this history has to be acknowledged before it can be overcome. Denying the fact of identity makes us vulnerable to its most pernicious effects. This seems self-evident...

Being white and male is seen ... as a neutral condition, the natural order of things. Any "identity" -- black, brown, female, gay, whatever -- has to be judged against this supposedly "objective" standard."

Knowledge that comes from the dominant position (white/male/straight/able-bodied etc.) is assumed to be universal and objective (i.e. "factual").  Knowledge that comes from anywhere else is assumed to be particular and subjective (i.e. "opinion").  We've been duped into thinking that the dominant knowledge is the more correct, more "objective" and therefore more valuable knowledge.  This is not only a fallacious inaccurate picture of reality, it simultaneously reinforces the dominant paradigm.

This is why feminist epistemology is so important.  It turns this fallacy (that there exists universal Absolute truth) on its head. ALL knowledge is located within a particular time and place.  Our view and understanding of the world depends on where we're looking at it from.  As a Latina woman, Sotomayor has a different understanding the world than does say, Samuel Alito.  Is it a better understanding?  Yes, actually, it is when it comes to understanding certain aspects of this world, such as male-dominance or white supremacy.  In those cases, a Latina standpoint (or any other non-dominant standpoint) is an advantage because someone with such a standpoint is better positioned to understand the system of dominance of which one has direct personal, lived experience.

This is what standpoint feminism is all about and it's yet another example of how Marx's philosophy still shapes the way we understand the world around us.  It may not always be presented in such detail, but this idea generally is not at all uncommon in any grad-school level theory class.  It's controversial only to very old-school academics who have stubbornly resisted post-18th century philosophies and want to remain in the comfortable, secure illusion that an objective view of the world is possible and that there is One Absolute Truth out there floating around somewhere in space removed from any messy human complicatedness such as social and class relationships and if we only ignore such things we can achieve such god-like knowledge.

There is no One Absolute Truth.  Such knowledge is not possible.  Samuel Alito is as influenced by his experiences as a white male as Sonia Sotomayor is influenced by her experiences as a Latina.  Pretending that the former is more accurate and universally applicable than the latter is just plain dumb.

Giant (1956)

At work I've been doing a series of interviews with people who grew up in families that migrated and did agricultural work for a living, and who then went on to march with great labor leaders like Cesar Chavez  and dedicate their lives to fighting for farmworkers' rights. 

Two of those people --both of whom grew up in Texas and migrated in the Western migrant stream-- mentioned to me a 1956 movie called "Giant".  They said it was a particularly accurate depiction of the kind of racism they encountered when they were young.  I rented it and watched it tonight and thought I'd share some thoughts

Giant is clearly intended to be, at least partly, an anti-racist film.  It's the story of a young woman (Elizabeth Taylor) who marries a wealthy Texas cattleman (Rock Hudson) and moves from the East out to his sprawling half-million acre ranch.  She soon learns of her husband's unattractive views of the Mexicans who work on his ranch.  Her do-gooder patronizing ways towards the Mexican workers is a foil to his outright hostility.  There's also a young white man working for them (played by James Dean) who falls in love with the lady of the house.  When he strikes it rich (via oil) he becomes the family's arch rival.  Drama ensues when none of the children of the family do what's expected of them by their parents and one even takes up with the arch rival.

Despite the romance and drama of family and rival lovers, the relationship between the white people and the brown people in the story is at least a major theme  It's not just background music.  Multiple scenes depict discrimination and outright hatred towards Mexican Americans.

But it goes beyond being simply an accurate portrayal of a particular kind of racism in a particular time and place.  Without giving away the ending, I'll just say that the message of the film is clearly that this racist reality is ugly/mistaken/wrong.  It sends this message in a somewhat cheezy, crude way but hey, it's the 50s.  The fact that it's an anti-racism film at all goes a long way.  That's not to say that the film couldn't be better if it weren't so contrived in parts, but maybe you can't have it all.

One odd thing about the movie is the god-awful makeup job on the "brown" people.  At first I thought they must be white actors made up to look Mexican (which was common back then but would've led to an interesting question: why would a director making a film about racism, not feel able to use non-white actors?).  But they did apparently use Latino actors.  Sal Mineo was in the cast (he was a sort of 1950s latin heartthrob so I hear, even though he was actually Sicilian).  Sal's character didn't look as bad as the others but the actress who played Juana is an actress named Elsa Cardenas who was born in Tijuana.  Why the need for mud-colored makeup then, you think?  Maybe they didn't look Mexican enough?  Here's a photo of her to the right.

Did they feel they had to uphold white people's stereotypes of what Mexicans should look like by making their skin darker?  Maybe they had only white makeup artists on the set who only knew how to do one shade of makeup ("ivory") and were completly flabbergasted when confronted with a larger palette?  Who knows?  It is interesting though, how a film so clearly conscious of race could still, also be so affected by it.  For a contemporary parallel perhaps consider the 2004 film Crash.

White History Year

Love this: Now that Black History Month is over, we now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

A nation of cowards

I was reading in the paper today that the U.S. is pulling out of the World Summit Against Racism because of the declaration's condemnation of Israel's occupation of Palestine and also some language about reparations that we didn't like.  I mentioned this to a friend of mine and let's just say that the conversation (if you could call it that) didn't really go well.

The issue of reparations hits closer to home for most people in this country than does the Israel-Palestine controversy and the idea that perhaps the enslavement of millions of black people by white people was so horrible, so inhuman, so utterly degrading and insidious that its legacy still remains with us two hundred years later and perhaps it's time to make amends --that idea is just so explosive that even friends --two white friends even-- cannot have a productive dialogue about it without getting angry and defensive. 

Last week, you may have heard, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder, issued a call for a national dialogue on race relations:

'To make progress . . . we must feel comfortable enough with one another -- and tolerant enough of each other -- to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.'"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards," Holder said in a speech marking Black History Month to hundreds of Justice Department employees. "It is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation's history, this is in some ways understandable. And yet if we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another -- and tolerant enough of each other -- to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us."

He did NOT call for reparations.  He just called for a conversation (and by the way, I am so proud that those words came out of the mouth of a U.S. Attorney General! We've had a few cool Attorney Generals before so it's not unprecedented for one to speak so openly and honestly, but I'm not sure how common it is that they do so while still in office). 

I'm interested in the reparations question.   I can see why some (most?) white people don't like the idea, but I'd like to explore it.  I'm open to changing my mind on it, but if I do, it won't be because of the fallacious "slavery is ancient history" argument.  I lean towards reparations because I know that forgiveness is about more than just saying "I'm sorry".  It's about taking action to reverse the damage done to the injured party.

Well then, what about the Jews, you ask? Don't they deserve reparations for the Holocaust?  Yes, I think they do and Germany paid them.  (The controversy back then was that Israel accepting the money was the equivalent of forgiving the Nazis for their crimes). 

The point is not that money --any amount of it-- can make up for anything as horrible as slavery or genocide or the Holocaust.  Obviously it doesn't and it can't.  The point is this: when two communities engage each other in honest dialogue about a painful past, they begin to understand each other perhaps for the first time, and that empathy, that understanding is a powerful thing.  Then and only then can we truly feel sorry.  And then we want to not only say we're sorry, we want to act on it.  Forgiveness is not just saying "I'm sorry"; it always involves making amends, taking some kind of action to heal the relationship.

It took us (the U.S.) more than 200 years just to say we're sorry, we're officially sorry for slavery and even that was controversial.

None of this means I don't believe we haven't made progress in race relations.  That argument is a cop-out.  Nothing I've said denies how far we have come.  But it is true that Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour of the week and I know from personal experience that white people still have a hard time talking openly and honestly about racism and race relations.  We can never go forward, as a country or as individuals, as long as that's the case.

Putting on the historical blinders

Well, McCain has finally agreed to tone down the screeching rhetoric of his campaign and return to substantive issues (wonder if Sarah Palin will get that memo?). 

He's even gone so far as to correct some white people at his "town hall meetings" railing against that "Muslim" and shouting "kill him, kill him".  This is a long overdue and definitely welcome change in tone from the Republican side. 

I'm glad that Representative John Lewis (D-GA) spoke out over the weekend and warned, in his wise way, about the dangers of inflammatory rhetoric.  The man knows what he's talking about; his political consciousness was forged in the fire of the civil rights movement.  What amazes me is that he got criticized for drawing on the lessons of that era (the right is saying that by doing so he compared McCain to George Wallace-- another man who used powerful rhetoric to incite people's basest instincts).  That criticism irked me.  Attacking Mr Lewis is a classic case of attacking the messenger.  Why else were they quicker to jump on Lewis for calling McCain out on his inflammatory rhetoric than they were to criticize McCain or his supporters for the undercurrent of racism running through their campaign? 

Furthermore, the premise of their criticism is itself problematic.  Criticize someone for making a historical comparison?  Here's why that bothers me: it's a denial of the old saying about those who don't learn from history being doomed to repeat it.  It's true and that's why conservatives avoid encouraging people to draw historical connections. 

Spin usually can only last so long.  It might be socially acceptable to hate X group of people today but 20 years from now?  There's no controlling the rationality and perspective that comes with the passage of time.  Eventually even people who couldn't see the ugliness of historical events as they happen, can usually see it decades later (which is why we so often erect monuments to past mistakes while contemporaneously committing the same mistake).  Given that, the only thing they can hope for is to get you to see absolutely no connection between contemporary events and anything that ever happened in our past.  Everything is isolated and has no connection with anything else.  Only if you can look at the world in this way, does the conservative viewpoint make any sense at all. 

All I can say is well, good luck with that.  I'll keep looking at the big picture.

A concise history of black-white race relations in the U.S. by Ampersand

Sorry it's been awhile.  I've been in a funk.  Just found this cartoon though by a blog friend, Ampersand (Barry), whose group blog (Alas, a Blog) is probably blogrolled down there in the list (and if not it should be). Click image to enlarge.

 

Reality TV

I don't usually write about TV because I don't get to see much of it.  Most of the time I don't have a TV in the house and when I do (like now) we don't have cable, which limits the options so much the only thing I watch is old reruns of The Simpsons. 

But I know there is a lot of good non-junky television with good stories and complicated, intriguing characters. 

The Sci-Fi channel's Dr. Who is impressive.  Grey's Anatomy has a realistically diverse cast of characters that doesn't leave you wondering where all the non-white people are (just where all the non-supermodel people are!).  Monk is cute and quirky and light without being unconvincingly shallow.  And then there's the AMC's Mad Men which has been getting rave reviews and is opening its second season tonight.  There's something irresistible about Mad Men.

Mad Men, if you haven't seen it, is about a certain kind of life for a certain kind of people during the 60s.  Set in the high-stakes world of the advertising industry of New York City, it doesn't just do its duty to include the realities of sexism and racism of the times, it goes out of its way to luxuriate in them.

Compare this to so many movies and TV shows about times past that apply a more evolved 21st century consciousness to gloss over the problematic aspects of previous eras and make sure that a contemporary audience will feel comfortable with it.  This is understandable.  We want to see images of people in this country during previous decades NOT acting in ways that would make us cringe today, just as we want to see images of the good Germans who resisted the hateful antisemitism of the Nazis.

But the hard truth is that most people back then didn't.

And ultimately the lie that these sorts of movies promote is that it's easy to resist the pull of racism and sexism of the society you're surrounded with if you just have a good moral character.

It doesn't work that way.  Resistance doesn't just happen and it doesn't just come out of the blue.  It always has a context. 

I'm not saying that EVERY story of times past has to show characters that surrender to the forces of the society around them because it's more honest.  Some of my favorite stories are about characters who do that (e.g. Ursula Hegi's Stones from the River about a young woman in 1930s Germany who resisted the moral decay that surrounded her).  But I am saying that this shouldn't be presented as the norm.  Because it wasn't.  To suggest that it was is to underestimate or under-represent the power of the human capacity for evil. 

Mad Men is so alluring because it doesn't do that.  It doesn't indulge or coddle us.  If you were white and middle to upper class during the 1960s, this was your world.  And if you were part of that world you were almost invariably white and middle to upper class.  And it's a very accurate description of what that world was like back then.  You didn't see people of color.  Men really were patronizing and condescending towards women.  Sexual harrassment at work was painfully common and accepted.

Yes it makes a 21st century audience cringe.  Thank goodness it does.

Rich on "The All-White Elephant in the Room"

Here's an even better column on the controversial issue of candidates and their loud-mouth preachers.  Frank Rich says

... it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.

...which means all these white Republicans seeking out endorsements from racist bigots like the Rev. John Hagee, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell better think twice about throwing stones at Obama.  What's more,

...the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house.

Thanks for the perspective, Mr. Rich!

CBS story on racial disparities in media coverage of missing/abused women

I was pleasantly surprised to see this is a CBS story:

Murdered Pregnant Women: The Racial Divide:

"Cases of maternal homicide involving minority women are underreported and underpublicized"

And by the way, that link goes to a blog called Black and Missing!! which is linked to down there under Tamika Huston's picture (whose link is dead by the way, I'll have to fix that.  The site that was dedicated to publicizing her disappearance later reported on her death and had lots of resources on taking action to change this.  Now the domain name's up for sale.)

Could this be a sign we're having an influence on mainstream media?  That they've started taking these stories seriously I think is thanks to the work of all the great bloggers out there who've repeatedly put stories like this in the spotlight.  Many of them are listed in my blogroll.  Check them out!

 

"Playing" Race

Wow, there is a really interesting story this morning about a new play that deals with the complicated questions of race and racial identity and what it means for us to play these race-based roles in everyday life.  It's called Yellowface by David Hwang.  This NYTimes review doesn't nearly do it justice, but man, I'd love to see this!  If anyone knows anything about it, please let me know!

Racial tension hits home, marchers take anti-racism message to DC

I was really sad to see this story in the Gainesville paper (yeah I still check in on what's happening in my hometown!). Bradford County is largely rural and small-town-ish.

Yesterday here in DC, in response to the increasing surge of these sorts of hate crimes, there was a HUGE march to the Justice Department of folks demanding that our leaders pay attention to this trend and take it seriously. Al Sharpton was here. I only caught a tiny bit of the news coverage on CNN I think it was and it seemed surprisingly positive for a change! I was glad to see that the march was noticed and the messages of the marchers taken seriously.

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On a personal note: things are still going well for me here. I went out for drinks with a couple of my co-workers last night and we met up with one of my new roommates and her co-workers. I had a blast. It's really, really good to work in a place where there's such good repoire among everyone! The more I think about it the more it makes sense that I had to save up 8 months of luck to get this job. I am very happy!

Hey Slick! Show us that twisty logic again!

Do you remember hearing about the controversial remarks by John Tanner, the Department of Justice's Chief of Voting about how voter id laws disenfrancise white people more than people of color?  According to his logic, it's because the disparities in health care in this country mean that "minorities don't become elderly the way white people do: They die first".  "So," he says, "anything that 'disproportionately impacts the elderly, has the opposite impact on minorities".  He concludes that therefore white people are being more disenfrancised by voter id laws than are people of color.

Hmmm... stop.  Rewind.  Lemme see that move again, Slick!   You lost me there...

Mr. Tanner was trying to use a sound argument:  Namely, that white people tend to live longer than people of color because of the disparities in a white supremacist society means that white people tend to have better access to health care and such than do people of color.  (It's all about economics! says the Marxist)

but wait!  That's only half the story.  There's a sleight of hand trick here:

It's true that structural racism affects people's life spans but people aren't automatically disenfranchised by virtue of their being elderly.  They're disenfranchised by virtue of their being poor and elderly.  Poor people are less likely to have IDs and to have the documents such as birth certificates needed in order to get those IDs.  Why?  Because of racism.  People of color are more likely to be poor for exactly the same reason they're more likely to lack access to health care; because racism has very real economic consequences.   And anyway voter disenfranchisement is not something the Department of Justice should be condoning!

I applaud you for recognizing the disparities in our system, Mr. Tanner, but wow, what a way to shed some murk on the subject!

Rest in Peace, Mr. Bellencourt

Vernon Bellencourt, longtime leader of the American Indian Movement "respected by many, hated by some, but ... never ignored" (his famous quote describing the organization) died a few days ago.  He was 75.

Story in the Washington Post.
A Lifetime of Protest (from the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis-St.Paul)

Read blogs --you learn lots of depressing things about the world.

Just catching up on some of my blog reading and geez... while I'm a bit peevish about not hearing about this before now it just goes to show how important blogs and independent media are for keeping us informed of what's going on in the world...did you hear about this?  West Virginia rape/torture case?  And the fact that they decided that somehow it's *not* a hate crime?!!  Wow.  Unbelievable.  Reminds me of the Dunbar Village case in West Palm Beach a few months ago.  Here's an update on that by the way (you have to scroll down past weird formatting to see the article on that last link).  I have been following the Jena 6 case --lots of folks blogging about that and I'm glad the protests went so well (we had a small one here in Gainesville even) but lord all this news that goes beyond merely "bad" and is well into the "absolutely horrifying" category makes me so tired!  It's just overwhelming. The only way I have to cope is to tune out for a few weeks.  So just because I'm not blogging about some horrible news story doesn't mean I don't care about it or think it's not important; it's just because I can't do this all the time.  Really I've barely been hanging on as a blogger lately.  I just don't have the energy anymore. Anyone have any advice for not getting overwhelmed?

Some good blogs who keep plugging away at these issues:

Brownfemipower/Women of Color Blog
Writing is Fighting
SlantTruth
Rachel's Tavern

Obviously not an exhaustive list, so please feel free to leave links to others you know of, if you like.

Okay to hate X group of people?

A friend of a friend of mine who is a retired priest has often said that sex offenders are the modern world's lepers --the people that decent people (e.g. not psycho killers) believe it's okay to hate: the people who are society's outcasts, the scorned, the rejects.  In Biblical times people with leprosy, a highly contagious skin disease, were the lowest of the low.  People spit on them and ignored them and were not embarrassed by the disgust towards them that festered in their hearts.  It was just the socially-sanctioned thing to do and feel: one did not talk to, look at, touch or in any way associate with lepers.  Period.  (On the other hand Lot, who slept with his own daughters, was a pillar of ancient Hebrew society.  Go figure.)  No one cared about lepers; they were non-humans.  (Well Jesus did.  He'd walk right up, sit down and have a conversation.  He'd even touch them without gloves on!  The radical!  No wonder they crucified the guy!)

But I don't want to talk about Jesus in this post.  I want to talk about the phenomena of socially-sanctioned hate-- when it's socially acceptable to hate an entire group of people.  Who are today's lepers?  Why is it that still today we have people that otherwise decent, compassionate individuals are not ashamed to admit they detest.  This quote comes from a story in today's local paper:

"She said people don't want to [go to this place] because of all the ________  people there."

What kind of people do you think she's talking about?  Lepers?  Sex offenders?  People of color?  Which group of people is it okay to publically admit that you hate?  Thirty years ago a woman like this might have said without hesitation that, "[her kind of] people don't want to go to [the place she's referring to] because of all the black people there".  The racism of thirty years ago was socially sanctioned.  She's not now (and wouldn't have been then) mortified to be quoted in the daily paper saying something like this. 

In this case, the people's she's talking about are homeless.

Since she's not at all ashamed of her prejudice, I'll print her name here to be attached to her words.  Her name is Linda McGurn.   She's a rich downtown developer and she is proud to be a paragon of one of the worst characteristics of human nature: that part of us that fears and despises and dehumanizes large segments of the human population based on random biases within our culture.  Ms. McGurn, when your life is over and you lie looking back on all you've accomplished rest assured of one thing: No one will ever confuse you with a big-hearted person.

Who's Indian?

There's been a lot written about white people who want to shed their identity and "discover" that they're really something else.  While it's hard for most whites to suddenly claim to have African ancestry, it's somewhat easier to claim Native American ancestry.  The popularity of New Age spirituality in the 90s further increased the trend and the decade saw many white people attending pow-wows and partaking in sweats after having suddenly discovered a "Cherokee grandmother" in their closet.

The case of the Lumbees, however, seems different.  Their claims to "Indian-ness" go way beyond the 90s fad era.  Congress recognized them fifty years ago but they're not granted the full rights as a Native American tribe.  It's an interesting, complicated story with a lot of money from a finite pie of federal assistance funds at stake.  Here's a link to the NPR story.  Give it a listen.  It gives a whole new spin on the concept of identity and what identity means, doesn't it?  When the answer to the question, who are you? has a monetary influence, how does that reflect on our personal concepts of self-worth?

No more Chief Illiniwek

I forgot to blog about this.  I'm doing it now only because I've written so much about the racist mascot issue in the past.  Good for them --those who struggled for twenty years to get the university to drop this shameful Native Americans as fierce fighting animal imagery.  It's about time.  Welcome to the 21st century: where people are people and animals are team mascots.

Resurgence of racial hatred

Report by Anti-Defamation League says the KKK is rebounding due to anti-immigrant bias:
CNN story
ADL Press Release

Reframing the Duke rape case

The headline of this editorial wouldn't have caught my eye if I had seen it on Znet but a friend forwarded it to me because he knew I was interested in the Duke rape case so I took the time to read the thing.  Wow.  Very thought provoking.  Basically this is a sociologist who was asked to provide commentary on a CNN program about racism and race issues surrounding the Duke Lacrosse team rape case.  I think the second half of the article is the most interesting so I excerpted it here.  The first half talks about her experience on the show.  The second half examines media portrayals of this and other stories and it is so good I want to post it here so more people will see it:

"The case is framed as a "race" issue, which for producers meant that blacks are out for revenge for past misdeeds by whites. Jumping on this bandwagon, so the story goes, was the District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was trying to curry favor with the black community in a re-election year. The consensus on the show was that if anyone is guilty here, it is the lying, immoral black stripper and the amoral, politically motivated DA. The victims here are the upstanding white men who have now had their reputations tarnished first by a stripper and then by gullible fools who believed her. And of course, within the framing of the show, I appeared as not just a gullible fool, but even worse, a gullible fool with a feminist agenda.

My anger at the way the media humanized these men as victims and dehumanized the woman as the perpetrator of a lie clearly stood out from the rest of the show. And this was, I am now convinced, the producer's goal. I was set up in the show to be an example of the problem -- white liberal elites who have taken political correctness too far. I was not brought on as a researcher or activist but as an example of how feminists "rush to judgment" in order to further their man-hating propaganda.

Virtually every email I have received blasts me as a conniving feminist who didn't even bother to know the facts of the case. These men -- yes, they all were from men -- explained to me that the facts show without question that nothing happened that night, which I would have known if I were not so busy trying to further my feminist agenda.

This is truly an example of how mass media construct reality. The so-called "facts" of the case have mainly been planted by the defense as a way to spin the case. The prosecution can't reveal all their evidence by law, but we do know, as law professor Wendy Murphy has pointed out, enough evidence was presented that "police, forensic experts, prosecutors, and a grand jury comprised of citizens, all agreed that charges should be brought." The truth is that we actually have access to very little evidence about that night, yet every man who has emailed me is convinced that all the facts are out there and only a feminist fool would believe otherwise. This is because the "facts," or lack of, speak for themselves and tell their own story in a society where racist and sexist ideology is internalized by a good percentage of the population and subsequently writ large onto a black woman's body. Let's not forget that this woman was bought and sold in the white male marketplace of sexual entertainment.

This obsessive focus on the woman is not particular to this case; routinely the media focus on the women victims, with a certain prurient interest. Instead, we should put some of the focus back on the men in this case, as we know much about their behavior that night that is not under dispute. They saw the hiring of two black women to strip as a legitimate form of male entertainment. They didn't see the commodifying and sexualizing of black women's bodies as problematic in a country that has a long and ugly history of racism.

One of the team buddies, Ryan McFadyen, sent out an email on the night of the event where he wrote "ive decided to have some strippers over and all are welcome …. I plan on killing the bitches as they walk in and proceed to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke spandex." Later that night, 911 got a call from a black college student out walking with her friends who was called "nigger" as she walked past the team's house. And to top it all, not one lacrosse player has come forward to express any regret at that night's events or offered any apology for being part of a drunken strip party that humiliated and degraded two black women.

It would seem to me that all of this undisputed information would make for a compelling CNN program. On such a show, I would be happy to share these emails calling me a bitch, whore, and cunt. That wouldn't be a rush to judgment, but instead an acknowledgement of what women know -- any one of us could be the next victim turned celebrity whore."

What Biden says about white racism

This is a pretty thoughtful analysis of the latest example of politician-foot-in-mouth disease.  And ya gotta loooove the accompanying graphic! 

I heard one of the commentators' on NPR say something like the thing about Biden is that he's a rarity amongst politicians --so candid and honest in a world of careful constructed artifice and spin and what a shame if this snafu puts a damper on that spirit of frankness that he has.  Well... okay, I can see the usefulness of that; I do like it when people are up front about their feelings.  But I wish the commentator'd gone further to say something about how Biden's honesty reveals once more how ingrained racism is in our culture that he could essentially say that people of color aren't normally so clean and smart and articulate as Barak Obama.  Anyway go read Zuky's post about narratives.  It says it much better. 

For his part, I think Obama handled it with much grace.  The dude's got class and that classiness just made Biden seem like a washed up archaic archtype.

Diversity --just plain smart.

"The very fact you have people of color in the workplace changes the way everybody in the workplace thinks" --interview with Columnist Shankar Vedantam on NPR's Morning Edition.