The recent Supreme Court decision in favor of white New Haven fire fighters continues to percolate in the blogosphere:
- A. Serwer (subbing for Ta-Nehisi Coates) at The Atlantic has a thorough analysis of color-blindness, racism and disparate impact.
- Larry Roberts at Scoop4 takes on the charge of ‘reverse racism’ and points out that this rhetoric is deployed by those who misunderstand the nation’s history.
As does the Senate’s apology for slavery:
- Senator Brownback got credit for Senate apology, this blog details what happened in the backstage, where Brownback worked against reparations and added the anti-reparations disclaimer to the “apology” Was it an apology, really?
The Pew Research Foundation continues to be a valuable resource for survey data:
- A survey (2006) reveals the generally positive views Black Americans have on immigrants, even though many people write as though they should be angry, as they lose jobs to them. These findings highlight the humanity and human rights framing in the black community, generally.
- A more recent PEW survey shows public thinks women are more empathetic than men. Relevant to debates on Sotomayor, who comes up soon for grilling: “A Pew Research Center survey taken last year found that 80% of Americans believe that women, generally speaking, are more compassionate than men, while just 5% say men are the more compassionate sex. Empathy and compassion aren’t synonymous, but they’re close cousins. The dictionary defines the former as ‘an ability to share in another’s feelings’ and the latter as “sorrow for the troubles of another, accompanied by an urge to help.”
Michael Jackson’s Death + BET + white flight in social media:
- R. L’Heureux Lewis, a CUNY colleague and fellow blogger, has a heartfelt memorial post to Jackson and his legacy of social justice at his blog Uptown Notes.
- In honor of Jackson’s passing, the BET Awards morphed into a quasi-memorial to the King of Pop, and set Twitter off with trending topics that trended black. That led to a lot of white people leaving Twitter in a racist huff.
- And, speaking of BET, Elon James White has a funny /not funny take on the network here, in “BET Doesn’t Care about Black People.”
- Danah Boyd points to a similar ‘white flight’ in the use social networking sites; according to her talk this week at the Personal Democracy Forum, she reports that U.S. teens now regard MySpace as “ghetto” and Facebook as “more upscale,” code language for race and class.
The World Beyond the U.S.:
- The U.S. is not the only white-dominated country with a racism problem. We get little news on Australia, but here is a major survey suggesting white Australians may be more aware than white Americans? “Some 85 percent of Australians believe the country has a problem with racism, new research has shown following renewed ethnic tensions in recent weeks. The study, led by University of Sydney social science professor Kevin Dunn, found one-in-five had experienced racial abuse while one-in-10 had been excluded from activities on the basis of race.”
Transracial Parenting:
- The Anti-Racist Parent has good discussions for white parents of children of color. Clearly, not every white parent is reading here.
- Frank Lombard, white man employed by Duke University, has been sentenced to two years for offering his adopted African American five-year-old son over the internet to be raped. This story is beyond horrific, and there are more details at Resist Racism, if you’ve got the stomach for it.
Fighting Racism, Hate:
- Rinku Sen offers her analysis of “How Racism Works” at TPM Cafe.
- Crusader has an in-depth analysis of “How We Can Conquer Hate” at his blog.
Happy Friday!
White Woman’s Burden
There are a small number of blogs now, by women from the West in the process of getting married to, or already with, an Indian husband. Interestingly many of these blogs call out to themselves in “skin color” terms: “WHITE Indian housewife” or “GORI girl”. Perhaps I am overly sensitive, but there seems to be a mild air of prejudiced condecension in the subtext of these blog titles.
‘Look at me, I am white but I am trying to make it with a “colored” man in very difficult circumstances. I am liberated and don’t care about race (what about those color references as the defining characteristic of the blog titles?) but look at my husband’s family and country — caste system, higher fees at parks for foreigners, they shit and spit in the street, mom-in-law looks at my “blonde” hair and “fair” skin in envy — so much of a white woman’s burden (sigh!).’
Methinks there is an externalization of collective prejudice perhaps? When 9/11 happened, Sikhs got murdered in Phoenix, AZ, coz some European-Americans couldn’t be bothered with the difference between them and Al-Qaeda! Sikhs and Muslims thrown into the same category because they have turbans and beards is the ultimate irony! And speakin’ of Australia — well, lets examine the immigration policies from a few years ago or how “aborigines” have been treated…..the less said the better! Australia, South Africa, and the US are examples of institutionalized prejudice in European-dominant societies, in the same way as one might think of the caste system in India. There is unfortunately no racial monopoly when it comes to prejudice, although the evidence points to greater violence related to institutional prejudice in “white” societies.
Another important point about these (mis)conceptions is the equating of race with skin or eye color. Any decent anthropologist or evolutionary biologist will tell you that human beings are essentially all racial hybrids and are genetically indistinguishable from each other racially compared to other species, say, apes or mice. Indians and Europeans are actually all caucasians who even share a common original language called proto-Indo-European — read Max Mueller!! This is what really gets me: that these women/men think they actually have married into a different race because of differences in skin color. It never occurs to them in their ignorance that they should question the prejudices they grew up with in their own societies/families. The externalization of ignorance is the the very essence of prejudice.So skin color is just a political manifestation of “racial” self-identity in institutionally prejuduced societies: us vs. the aborigines, us vs. the “blacks”, us vs. the injuns, us vs. the japs we put in the internment camps, us vs. the wetbacks, us vs. the curry-smelling brown guys, us vs. the shudras, etc., etc. I have never actually seen a WHITE-skinned person, they are mottled pink or cream, or yellow, or brown, or whatever. White is the color of the printer paper next to your PC — its an invention of convenience to define separateness in very superficial terms.
So, I might ask, are Westerners like that only, but I may be accused of generalizing to an entire group or race or set of countries, and that wouldn’t be right, now, would it?
glad the supreme court made the right decision in the firefighter case. enough is enough with this racism.
I’m curious to see more on that survey from Australia, and if the results are similar to those taken in the U.S., Netherlands, and other countries; specifically if the whites claiming to see or experience racism is from a color-blind approach who claim to suffer “reverse racism.”
JDF, could you do a little research on this for us?