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The Schott Foundation for Public Education is an organization whose mission is “To develop and strengthen a broad-based and representative movement to achieve fully resourced, quality pre-K-12 public education,” recently published some heart-rending findings on the state of Black males in public education. The report, Yes We Can: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males 2010 reveals states, districts, and public schools that are statistically making academic gains toward closing the achievement gap (i.e., graduation rates and scores on state standardized examinations) between Black males and their counterparts. For example, the report affirms that the top ten best performing states in regard to decreasing the graduation gap between Black and White males are Maine, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Vermont, Idaho, Montana, Utah, South Dakota, New Jersey, and Iowa respectively. The ten best performing districts in this regard are Newark (NJ), Fort Bend (IN), Baltimore County (MD), Montgomery County (MD), Gwinnett County (GA), Prince George’s County (MD), Cumberland County (NC), East Baton Rouge Parish (LA), and Guilford County (NC). In my opinion, the report would make a stronger argument and cause readers to give a heavy pause when looking at the data when it was combined with an explanation as to why these states and districts are showing an improvement in the graduation rates.
On the other hand, the report announces that the ten worst performing states for Black males in regard to decreasing the graduation gap between them and White males are respectively Georgia, Alabama, Indiana, District of Columbia, Ohio, Nebraska, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and New York. Moreover, the ten worst performing districts are Jefferson Parish (LA), New York (NY), Dade County (FL), Cleveland (OH), Detroit (MI), Buffalo (NY), Charleston County (SC), Duval County (FL), Palm Beach County (FL), and Pinellas County (FL). Within the document, it was noted that out of the 48 states that reported Black males are likely to graduate reasonably from only 15 of the states. In addition, Black males were seen to be more prone to severe punishment for school infractions than their White peers and have less opportunity to gain access to higher-level academic classes. Finally, by the time these students reach 8th grade in middle school, many were seen not be proficient readers and thus lose academic grounding as they proceed to high school.
In terms of these districts, what the report does not state is that for example, places like Jefferson Parish have recently been found to have to have high unemployment rates and a “drug incarceration rate of 186 per 100,000 people in 2002, ranking it seventh out of 198 counties or parishes with populations greater than 250,000.” Poverty in the United States, published by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2002, stated that Cleveland, Ohio has the highest poverty rate. Specifically, in 2004, children were indicated to be half of those living in poverty in Cleveland. Poverty has been shown in numerous studies to affect the academic and social outcomes of children. I have always said that if economic or social plights are affecting Whites heavily, these same concerns are being felt threefold by people of color. So, it is no surprise to me that the ten worst states and districts have high numbers of Black males not graduating or excelling on standardized examinations.
What the report does not state is the psychological trauma this failure has on the students. Many of them become disenchanted with their apparent lack of skills and at times begin to act out in disruptive manners. Teachers begin to label them “special education, emotionally disturbed, difficult,” etc. All of these labels and perceptions of the students’ potential fuel the need to isolate them within alternative educational facilities that are many times encased with frustrated White teachers who do not have the experience or knowledge of Black culture–or have their own racial biases toward people of color. In my own experiences within public schools, the curricula within these settings are sub-par and filled with worksheet after worksheet that presents nothing academically substantial to the students. In fact, their designated work is simply a tactic to occupy a population many have given up on or refuse to hear due to their inability to voice the futility of their situation. Many of these Black males end up dropping out and having some association with the criminal justice system.
The schools that do seem to work outside of the traditional paradigm and attempt to meet the academic and social needs of Black males are few and in between. Sometimes these programs are taken to task and/or dismantled due to outside pressures and perception that specific programs tailored for boys is not necessary or warranted. For example, in Prince George County (MD), a system that serves mostly Blacks, an initiative was started to help in regards to meeting the academic and social needs of Black males within the area. A year after showing promise, the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights felt it discriminated against females and was dismantled. In 1996, the city of New York proclaimed the success of the establishment of the East Harlem Young Women’s Leadership School that catered to mostly Black females. When the New York Times urged school administrators to start a school similar for boys, the School Chancellor said in response, “This is a case where the existence of the all-girls school makes an important statement about the viable education of girls…Presumably the statement would lose its force and point if an all-boys school were allowed to exist alongside (page. 39.” These are just a few of the anti-boy climates that exist within public education.
Who shall carry the cross and burden of the plight of Black males? The current plight could only be directed at Blacks, right? We have a Black president for God sake. Cosby was correct when he pointed that Jell-O pudding-pop-encrusted finger at the Black community, right?
In contrast to the historic racial barriers that are evident within the history of the United States in regards to economic and social growth of people of color, specifically Black males, President Barrack Obama is a beacon; a symbol that the Black male have the potential to break through the proverbal glass ceiling to the highest position afforded to an U.S. citizen. A large number of people here and aboard have joined in the celebration of his election as an end to the historic caste system that has hindered the progress of Blacks since the beginning of the nation.
In fact this celebration is nothing but a distraction that serves as a curtain to hide the underlying racial realities that affect Blacks, particularity Black males within the lower SES brackets. The gains that many discuss are in fact by primarily middle and upper class Blacks. The racial caste system that has been rooted since the founding of the country is still in full operation and witnessed within the workings of public schools. Since Blacks were first forced into slavery, regardless of the efforts of many in within the civil rights and equal rights legislation struggles, they have never moved from a caste system that deems them as inferior and treated as such within all facets of the country. In fact, being a part of the minority caste comes with it a negative ideology that dictates a set of behavior, actions, procedures, and policies directed by non-Blacks to Blacks within the major institutions; such as public and higher education setting. The modes of oppression and control that are imprinted within the foundation of education are incited into the psyche of Black American children in public schools in overt and covert fashions. The attempts to oppress and control are nothing but a continuation of the targeting seen within the early U.S. colonies with the institutionalization of the White racial frame. Therefore, I would argue that public schools are an equal partner in the plight of Black males. Therefore, the effects of systemic institutional racism and the existence of a caste system that are witnessed in the treatment of these children increase the likelihood of their internalizing the oppressive conditions and controlling the state of their environment through socialization, which in turn leads them to view themselves as unworthy in comparisons to their counterparts. The system within public education is not totally equal for females of color. But, simply, Black males have it worse. Many may be upset with this statement, but I am aligned with scholars such as bell hooks who states, that, “[d]espite all the advances in civil rights in our nation, feminist movement, sexual liberation, when the spotlight is on black males the message is usually that they have managed to stay stuck, that as a group they have not evolved with the times” (ix). Many scholars like hooks (2004), and often Black men themselves, believe that society is “fearful to acknowledge the truth – America has no compassion for black males” (p. Ix).
It will be virtually impossible for this country to meet the President’s mission to place the U.S. as a global leader in “post-credential attainment” if this trend continues. Schools are currently not moving beyond the paradigm of seeing the problem existing within the child–and are at the same time discounting other contributing factors within the school setting, such as the teacher to student relationship, and assumptions teachers have in terms of race and cultural differences. In my current position, I have many interactions with schools that implement the latest and greatest academic programs, instruments, and curriculum to combat graduation and standardized examination gaps. They also have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars by introducing new social and behavioral modification techniques that have warm, but empowering titles that claim to decrease behavioral issues among “difficult” students (code for Black and Latino) while enabling the entire school to simultaneously sing “Kum Bah Yah” as they march toward academic excellence. I have seen administrators shell out ten thousands of dollars for a motivational speaker (usually they are Black and have come from some difficult situations to preach to teachers that if they can do it, so can the students) to come for one-shot deals that leave fleeting positive words and emotions. Schools need to stop creating or looking for the holy grail that will help them elevate Black scores and graduation rates and learn that what is needed for females is not necessarily the same thing needed for males. Due to the fact that Black females are graduating at a higher rate and entering into college and graduate school more than Black males, schools are in need of analyzing the plight of Black males while separating from all others. What schools refuse to acknowledge is that you can dress up a pig, but it’ll still be a pig. No amount of money will transform a system that is meant to oppress a group while propelling another until the system is revamped, thus a revolution is needed. Until we realize the depths of the White racial frame and the existence of an operating caste system, I may one day look to up from the struggle for justice and see that I am alone.
Race, Racism & the Internet: 10 Things Sociologists Should Be Researching
Posted by: | CommentsThere was exactly one session on “Race and New Media” among the hundreds of panels at the recent American Sociological Association meetings last week in Atlanta. The panel was interesting, thought-provoking and presented by a diverse group of sociologists, and I’m not just saying that because I organized it. I think there should be lots more research like this.
One of the main points I make in my book Cyber Racism is that white supremacy has entered the digital era, and that means it’s changing, morphing into new forms. Some of those centuries-old components continue to exist, but now they exist alongside new forms of racism, such as cloaked websites. This is true not only of the extremist groups I’ve studied, it’s also true of lots of other dimensions of race and racism. This seems like an arena ripe for sociological investigation, yet I continue to be puzzled by the fact that there’s not more research in this area.
Within sociology there’s a gap between researchers who critically study race and those who study the Internet. I talked with several prominent sociologists who study Internet and society at the meetings, and they concurred with my assessment of the field. As one scholar told me when I mentioned the few submissions I received for the “Race and New Media” panel: “That’s because no one studies that.” Another prominent scholar suggested that the problem is that the critical race folks just don’t know the Internet research and vice versa. I tend to agree. I talk to people who know the Internet and the research about it, and they generally don’t know much about critical race scholarship. And, the people I talk to who are critical race scholars, generally don’t know much about the Internet.
In many ways, the study of race and the Internet has been ceded by sociologists to scholars working in other fields such as history, psychology, communications, cultural studies, and political science. There’s good work going on in those fields, most notably Lisa Nakamura’s work, which I admire and have mentioned here before. One of the things I enjoy about the growing field of Internet-related research is that it’s interdisciplinary, so maybe it’s not worth raising these intra-sociology disciplinary issues, but it strikes me as a missed opportunity for the field. Part of the problem here is that the Internet changes quickly, and sociology is just slow. One of my graduate professors used to refer to sociology as “slow journalism”. If journalism is the first draft of history, sociology is the re-draft of history in many ways. I think that sociologists have something valuable to offer in terms of our understanding of how the Internet is transforming patterns of human social behavior. While lots of sociologists who study race are using the Internet as a tool for their research (everything from Google Scholar to analyzing messages on email listservs), only a very few are considering the Internet as an object of study, and exploring the ways it’s changing the production of and resistance to race and racism.
So, in an attempt to suggest ways to bridge this gap, I’ve sketched out 10 areas I think sociologists should be researching:
- infrastructure / design – How computers and the “graphic user interface” (GUI) – like web browsers are designed affects how people use the Internet. In 2008, I wrote about the development of a custom browser, Blackbird, designed for use by African Americans, that cause some uproar. How does the way that interfaces are designed affect the way people use the Internet and how is race implicated in this? There’s terrific research on user-centered design being done by sociologist Nalini Kotamraju and some on open source software by Jon Smajda which highlight the useful bridge between a deep knowledge of infrastructure and software design. Michelle White (cultural studies) has done some interesting work on this (why is that little hand always white?), and of course, Nakamura’s relevant here again. I don’t know of any one in sociology doing research like this on race and interface design.
- industry - The leading tech firms in Silicon Valley are dominated by white men and a few white women, yet the manual labor of putting together circuit boards that run computers is largely done by immigrant and global south women. How does the predominantly white tech industry located in the global north and the immigrant / global south labor that powers the Internet say about race and technology? (See, J. Shih, Circumventing Discrimination: Gender and Ethnic Strategies in Silicon Valley, Gender & Society, 2006, 20; (2): 177-206).
- gaming - Literally millions of people are playing online games, and meeting in person at gaming conferences, yet this social phenomenon is going largely unremarked upon by sociologists. Lori Kendall’s Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub (UCPress, 2002) looks at the reproduction of race and gender in one of these game spaces, but I see little other work on this important topic by sociologists.
- popular culture / fandom – There are huge – again in the millions – of online groups for everything from tennis to celebrities to popular fiction. How is being a “fan” shaped by race, and how is online “fandom” in popular culture shaped by race and racism? Sociologist Sarah Gatson has explored some of this in her work and is seeking papers [pdf] for a special issue of a journal about this.
- mobile technology – It’s been a few years since Howard Rheingold (whom I think of as an honorary sociologist) wrote his groundbreaking book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, and I’ve yet to see anyone extend that work to look at mobile technology and race. There’s research by the Pew Internet & American Life Project documenting that African Americans and Latinos are more likely to access the Internet through mobile devices. What does this suggest for all that talk of the “digital divide” among sociologists a few years ago?
- identity + community - In the early days of the Internet, lots of people thought that we would go online to “experiment” with identity, to engage in “identity tourism” to use Nakamura’s phrase. Yet, that’s not turned out to be the case. In fact, the way people use the Internet most often is to reaffirm their offline identities. Sociologist Emily Ignacio’s excellent book Building Diaspora: Filipino Community Formation on the Internet (Rutgers UP, 2005) is an example of this type of work and there should be more.
- social movements : I mentioned my book on racist social movements, and I’d like to see more done on progressive social movements around race, such as the march organized around the Jena6, which was mobilized primarily through young, African American bloggers. One of the strategies I used in my research was to examine movement discourse pre-Internet and post-Internet, and this is another angle that could be pursued by those interested in race and the offline mobilization of social movements around race.
- racist framing in Facebook, MySpace, Twitter – Social media is framed by racist language, and within a larger white racial frame, yet there’s very little sociology that looks at this. Stephanie Laudone (graduate student at Fordham) is at work on a dissertation that takes up some of these issues in Facebook.
- health/science - Internet users increasingly look for health and scientific knowledge online. Victoria Pitts (a CUNY colleague) has written about these issues as they relate to gender, (see Illness and Internet empowerment: writing and reading breast cancer in cyberspace, Health, 2004, Vol 8 (1):33-60), but I don’t know of any similar research that looks critically at race and health.
- surveillance culture – We live in what some have called a ‘surveillance culture.’ Sociologist Simone Brown is writing about some of these surveillance technologies as they relate to border crossings (fascinating work), and there are implications of this surveillance culture for understanding race and the Internet. As just one example, given the millions of Black and Latino men locked up in the U.S., what are the implications of the “inmate locator” websites run by state and federal governments? How do systems of incarceration work together with online registries and databases of Black/Latino men to shape racial inequality in the digital era?
Of course, this is just a back-of-the-envelope sketch of what I think are the promising areas of investigation for sociologists. Where I know about people’s work in these areas, I’ve included it (let me know if I left your work out and i’ll add it). So, what did I miss? What are some other areas of research?
Sociology Meetings in Atlanta
Posted by: | CommentsI’m posting this from Atlanta where I’ll be attending a variety of meetings with assorted flavors of sociologists that go by a bundle of acronyms (SSSI, SSSP, ASA, SWS, ABS). I’ve organized a few sessions at one set of meetings and am presenting on a panel at another, so feel obliged to promote those a bit. If you’re in Atlanta and can drop by any of these sessions, I’d be delighted to see a friendly face or two.
Here’s the line up:
Race and New Media (ASA) Marriott Marquis
Sun, Aug 15 – 8:30am – 10:10am
Blogs and Belonging: Online Representations of Harlem
*Danielle M. Jackson (City University of New York – The Graduate Center)
Describing the Process of The Mexican Cyber-Moral Panic in The United States
*Nadia Yamel Flores (Texas A&M University), Guadalupe Vidales (University of Wisconsin, Parkside), April Plemons (Texas A&M University)
Facebook: A “Raced” Space or “Post-Racial”?
*Stephanie Marie Laudone (Fordham University)
Reviewing Whiteness: The White Savior Film and the Online Film Reviewers
*Matthew W. Hughey (Mississippi State University)
Networking and Building Coverage of Your Research, (aka, Blogging + Twitter for Scholars) – SWS
Sun, Aug 15 – 10:30am-12noon
Crystal Jackson, Theta Pavis, Jessie Daniels
Internet and Society (ASA) Marriott Marquis
Sun, Aug 15 – 12:30pm – 2:10pm
Open Source and the Moral Field of Computing
*Jon M. Smajda (University of Minnesota)
Reconceptualizing the Public/Private Distinction in the Age of Information Technology
*Sarah M. Ford (University of Massachusetts-Amherst)
The Young in São Paulo: Media Use and Global Participation
*Heloisa Pait (Universidade Estadual Paulista-São Paulo State University)
Internet and Society (ASA) Marriott Marquis
Mon, Aug 16 – 8:30am – 10:10am
Bottom-up Internet Political Activities with General Internet Intermediaries
*Ho Young Yoon (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Gender Authenticity in MMORPGs: Heralding Solid-to-Virtual World Consistency
*Zek Cypress Valkyrie (University of Colorado at Boulder)
Meeting Online: The Rise of the Internet as a Social Intermediary
*Michael J. Rosenfeld (Stanford University)
The Tension between User-centered Design (UCD) and E-government
*Nalini P. Kotamraju (University of Twente)
Cheers, sociology friends!
New Education Report: High Levels of Racial Inequality, Again
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The National Center for Education Statistics has just released a very interesting and revealing 2010 statistical report– Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups–on children and parents, with a main emphasis on educational issues. Here are just a few of their findings:
photo credit: Steve Snodgrass
The percentages of children who were living in poverty were higher for Blacks (34 percent), American Indians/Alaska Natives (33 percent), Hispanics (27 percent), and Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders (26 percent), than for children of two or more races (18 percent), Asians (11 percent) and Whites (10 percent).
Forty-eight percent of public school 4th-graders were eligible for free or reduced- price lunches in 2009, including 77 percent of Hispanic, 74 percent of Black, 68 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native, 34 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander, and 29 percent of White 4th-graders.
These revealing data show extreme poverty levels for major groups of color, with very high levels qualifying for reduced-price or free lunches. Among other things the data demonstrate huge problems of structural inequality and racism that seem to be off the white-controlled policy agenda for the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”
In 2008, some 44 percent of White 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in colleges and universities, while in 1980 some 28 percent were enrolled. In addition, approximately 32 percent of Black 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in colleges or universities (an increase of 12 percentage points from 1980) and 26 percent of Hispanic 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled (an increase of 10 percentage points from 1980).
Inequality and structural racism at lower grades contribute substantially to inequalities up the line at college. Here, again, very substantial differentials. Some other data also tell us something significant about current immigration and demographic patterns:
In 2008, a higher percentage of Asian children (51 percent) had a mother with at least a bachelor’s degree than did White children (36 percent), children of two or more races (31 percent), Black children (17 percent), American Indian/Alaska Native children (16 percent), and Hispanic children (11 percent).
The Asian children are more likely to be the children of documented immigrants, who have come in under a biased U.S. immigration system that increasingly tends to “cream off” the world’s middle and upper middle classes. Thus, many documented immigrants come in with college degrees and some social or economic capital that facilitates socioeconomic their and their children’s mobility in the U.S. Other children of color are no so fortunate, including those who are the children of undocumented Latino immigrants. Other data are also revealing:
In 2007, a higher percentage of White (18 percent) children ages 12 to 17 reported drinking alcohol in the past month than did their Hispanic (15 percent) peers, peers of two or more races (13 percent), and Black (10 percent) and Asian (8 percent) peers.
I wonder why we do not have white leaders and politicians talking a lot about the “white problem” of drug (alcohol) use among white youth in the U.S.
And like other studies they also show the trend toward an more diverse society where whites are gradually becoming a statistical minority, especially among children:
Between 1980 and 2008, the racial/ethnic composition of the United States shifted— the White population declined from 80 percent of the total population to 66 percent; the Hispanic population increased from 6 percent of the total to 15 percent; the Black population remained at about 12 percent; and the Asian/Pacific Islander population increased from less than 2 percent of the total population to 4 percent. In 2008, American Indians/Alaska Natives made up about 1 percent and people of two or more races made up about 1 percent of the population.
And these demographic changes continue at a fast pace today.
No Post-Racial America: Racial Inequalities in US Medicine
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Over at diversityinc.com, Gail Zoppo has an important post—“Is There a Black, Latino Doctor in the House?”– on the huge problem of lack of people of color in U.S. medical schools and professions. Racial inequality remains central in the medical professions and facilities in this “post-racial America.” We still have relatively few black, Latino, and Native American medical students across the country. Zoppo underscores the slow pace of improvement, noting that three years these groups made up only 15 percent of the 40,000 applicants to U.S. medical schools, even as they make up a third of the U.S. population in their typical age range. (She does not discuss data on Asian Americans in her post.) This is a key result from this longterm reality:
That same year, only 8.7 percent of doctors were from these underrepresented groups, according to a study published in the Journal of Academic Medicine.
She then discusses where we are at in the recent American Association of Medical Colleges data, just slight changes since 2006:
Among the 42,269 med-school applicants in 2009, only 16 percent were Black, Latino or American Indian.
Other medical professions are also characterized by a lack of black, Latino, and Native American personnel:
… a mere 6.9 percent of people from underrepresented groups ended up as dentists in 2007, only 9.9 percent were pharmacists and just 6.2 percent were registered nurses.
One national issue is also that white medical personnel are much less likely to work in undeserved communities of color:
Black, Latino and American Indian/Pacific Islander physicians are nearly three to four times more likely than whites to practice in underserved communities, reports the AAMC.
On the positive side, Zoppo does discuss some important attempts to deal with this underrepresentation in medical schools and professions, such as the Rutgers University Office for Diversity and Academic Success in the Sciences (ODASIS)
England’s Smartest Family is Black
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Rollingout.com has a nice personal interest story, with a very important point. The story is about the Imafidon family, a black-British family, and its very-very-high-achieving children. First there are the two nine-year-old twins, Peter and Paula, who are the youngest to
ever pass the University of Cambridge’s advanced mathematics exam. That’s on top of the fact they have set world records when they passed the A/AS-level math papers.
Nine years old! But these two children are not alone, because their sister Anne-Marie
holds the world record as the youngest girl to pass the A-level computing, when she was just 13. She is now studying at . . . Johns Hopkins University …. Sister Christina, 17, is the youngest student to ever get accepted and study at an undergraduate institution at any British university at the tender age of 11. And Samantha, now age 12, had passed two rigorous high school-level mathematics and statistics exams at the age of 6…
The father immigrated to London from Nigeria three decades back, and he makes a key point about why these working class children have done well in England:
….. he denies there is some “genius gene” in his family. Instead, he credits his children’s success to the Excellence in Education program for disadvantaged inner-city children. “Every child is a genius,” he told British reporters. “Once you identify the talent of a child and put them in the environment that will nurture that talent, then the sky is the limit. Look at Tiger Woods or the Williams sisters … they were nurtured.”
Doubtless, he is underplaying parental efforts here, but still his point is dramatic.
So, of course, in the U.S. we starve and re-Jim-Crow our inner-city educational programs for decades, then when the Bush Depression kicks in, our governments’ solutions include giving a trillion dollars in aid to Wall Street’s white-collar, low-intelligence deviants, but cutting back on many local educational and other social support programs that develop young talent in areas where we need it.
Perhaps we need to send our (mostly white) politicians to study with this savvy father and his very talented kids. Maybe they can get their “low IQs” up a little?
Racial Bias and the Ability to Feel Others’ Pain
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Hernan Vera and I have written about the importance of the break down of empathy as part of the creation of racist systems, including discrimination and its racial framing. Discover magazine’s blog has reported recently on research study by the Italian scientist Alessio Avenanti, who
recruited white and black Italian volunteers and asked them to watch videos of a stranger’s hand being poked. When people watch such scenes, it’s actually possible to measure their brain’s empathic tendencies. By simulating how the prick would feel, the brain activates the neurons of the observer’s hand in roughly the same place. These neurons become less excitable in the future. By checking their sensitivity, Avenanti could measure the effect that the video had on his recruits …. most interestingly of all, he found that the recruits (both white and black) only responded empathetically when they saw hands that were the same skin tone as their own. If the hands belonged to a different ethnic group, the volunteers were unmoved by the pain they saw.
Interestingly, like we have argued,
Avenanti actually thinks that empathy is the default state, which only later gets disrupted by racial biases. He repeated his experiment using brightly coloured violet hands, which clearly didn’t belong to any known ethnic group. Despite the hands’ weird hues, when they were poked with needles, the recruits all showed a strong empathic response, reacting as they would to hands of their own skin tone. … strong evidence that the lack of empathy from the first experiment stems not from mere novelty, but from racial biases.
He also gave the recruits the Implicit Association Test
which looks for hidden biases by measuring how easily people make positive or negative connections between different ethnic groups. For example, white Italians are typically quicker to associate positive words with the term “Italian” and negative ones with the term “African”. And the faster they make those connections, the greater the differences in their responses to the stabbed black and white hands. … All in all, Avenanti says when we see pain befall a person from our own racial group, it immediately triggers resonant activity in our own nervous system. When we see the same event happening to someone of a different race, these simulations are weaker and take longer to form.
These anti-empathetic reactions are most serious for those who have the greatest power to oppress others, to cause great, routine, and recurring pain in racialized others, which is typically whites in Europe and the United States.
In the U.S. case whites’ recurring discriminatory actions targeting Americans of color require a breakdown of normal human empathy. Most social theorists have missed the importance of the fact that all human life begins in empathetic networks–the dyad of mother and child. Usually central to these first networks is basic human empathy, a desire and ability to understand the feelings of others. Without empathy on the part of mothers and other relatives, no child would survive. As it develops, racial oppression severely distorts human relationships and desensitizes the minds of those oppressing others.
Oppression requires in oppressors a lack of recognition of the full humanity of racialized others. Psychiatrists use the term alexithymia to people unable to understand the emotions of, and empathize with, others. Hernan Vera and I have suggested going beyond this individualistic interpretation to a concept of social alexithymia. Essential to being an oppressor is a significantly reduced ability to understand or relate to the emotions, such as recurring pain, of those targeted by oppression. Social alexithymia thus seems essential to the creation and maintenance of a racist society.
What needs most to be explained is not the reality of human empathy and solidarity—the problem often stated by western philosophers–but rather how this empathy for others gets destroyed and how human beings develop anti-empathetic inclinations essential to racial oppression.
Unlearning Racism: Lecture from Bettina Aptheker
Posted by: | CommentsBelow is a link to a lecture by Bettina Aptheker, professor at University of California-Santa Cruz. The lecture is long (over an hour) but it’s a holiday weekend and I figure people have some time on their hands.
The lecture’s worth listening to for a variety of reasons. For the truly geeky sociologists among us (myself included), there are a couple of stories about Aptheker’s connections to W.E.B. DuBois and Angela Davis near the front that are gems. Readers interested in more of those gems may want to read Aptheker’s recent memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Seal Press, 2006). Aptheker’s lecture is also a good primer for a lot of the concepts we discuss here. And, finally, I like the fact that this lecture from within the ‘ivory tower’ can be liberated online – a little bit of hacking the academy, if you will.
The producers of the video podcast have disabled the embedding feature (which would allow me to post the video here), so I just have to post it at this link (it takes a minute to load, so be patient). Updated: Lots of people have been reporting trouble with that link so here’s another link to try:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/uc-santa-cruz-podcasts/id110693429
Happy long weekend!
Professor Soto’s Speech, from a Listener: More on Arizona Whites Hostility to Immigrants
Posted by: | CommentsJosé Cobas encountered the internet uproar over the graduation speech by Prof. Sandra Soto at the University of Arizona on May 14, and asked me what I thought. Here is my response, with a few clarifying notes.
The clarifying notes: The occasion was the graduation ceremony held by the college of social and behavioral sciences, held separately from the main commencement so that all the SBS students can get individual recognition. The ceremony is held in a huge arena at the Tucson convention center. Students are seated on the floor of the arena, and family members and other guests are in the tiers of seats all around this floor. Faculty, department heads, and deans who are participating in honoring the graduates attend in academic regalia and are seated on a platform at the front of the floor of the arena. I was there to “hood” a new Ph.D. whose thesis I had directed, and the dean’s office asked me to join Sandy Soto and two other faculty members as a “name reader,” reading out the names of the graduates as they crossed the platform. Sandy and I were seated right behind the podium so we could change places quickly. Sandy was selected as graduation speaker. I’m not sure how the selection process works (I’m actually retired from the university), but I’m sure it was partly because she is a very well-regarded teacher. My email to José Cobas:
Hi, José
As it happens, I was sitting right next to Sandy on the podium and so right behind her when she made her speech. The booing was frightening. It was NOT coming from the students, seated on the floor of the arena. It was coming from families in the seats all around us. People tried to applaud to counter it but the booing just got louder. Sandy had to stop a couple of times because it was clear her words would not be heard if she continued. The booing finally died down when Dean Jones stepped to the microphone and urged the crowd to permit a “civil discourse”. After her talk Sandy was a “name reader” as each of the graduates came to the podium to be acknowledged, and she got warm smiles from students and at least one took a second (this was all very choreographed and went very fast since on the order of 1000 names were read) to thank her for the speech.
There were many, many Spanish-language surnames and first names in the list of those graduating (I was the reader who followed Sandy). If you read her talk you will observe that it is very carefully worded and very honest. She urges the graduates to use their education to think critically about these issues, and she inserts the “human” side, her own feelings, and those of the Tucson High School students she had met with earlier that week who are under attack for their support of Mexican-American studies courses. I do not think that she expected the kind of response she got, the talk was very judicious, in my view — nothing but facts and her thoughts about what the recent burst of anti-Hispanic legislation felt like to her as a person, no name calling at all. However, people were not listening.
I had the very strong sense from the booing that the tone was not just, “We disagree with you”, but something like, “Who does that greaser bitch think she is?” (I hope you will forgive me the vulgar language). I was surprised that even a couple of my own colleagues that I spoke to after the ceremony, while agreeing with the message, felt that it was an “inappropriate topic” for a graduation speech, which I guess is supposed to be nothing but the blandest platitudes for fear a “captive audience” would be offended. So much for the highest goals of the university … It does seem clear to me that many, many White people in Arizona are not ready to engage in dialogue of any kind. Their minds are made up, they dread the slightest loss of power, they utterly reject even the most thoughtful challenges to their ideas, they give lip service to “critical thinking” and “honest dialogue” but are not ready to in fact participate in that. It was not a happy experience. Since I was obviously a very senior person, all robed and draped in several kinds of medals, I made a conspicuous show of shaking Sandy’s hand as she sat down. I’ve realized watching the video clips that we were behind the banners and the podium so that probably didn’t make any difference at all. Anyway obviously Sandy should be very proud of what she said and the way she comported herself at the time and since, with great dignity.
I’ll also take this moment to share my own feelings about SB1070 (obviously the attack on Mexican-American studies is completely racist and ridiculous. Paolo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is some kind of threat to the United States? It’s had 50 years to do its evil work (;-)) and somehow I don’t find among the many things that are wrong with my world much that can be traced to poor Paolo Freire). Anyway, back to SB1070 — I think there has been too little attention to how spectacularly counter-productive SB1070 is in the face of a real fear, that human smuggling is coming under the control of the Mexican drug cartels and their criminal allies in the U.S. Law enforcement people (except for that grandstanding idiot Sheriff Joe) have always, always taken the position that they do NOT want to be involved in enforcement of immigration law, the responsibility of the Border Patrol and ICE, because they want people to feel that they can come to the police to report crimes and to be witnesses. SB1070 absolutely ignores decades of that policy. Immigrants who are the victims of crime under SB1070 cannot go to the police.
The only place they can (and will) go is to counter-mafias. I don’t think SB1070 will survive a constitutional challenge, but if it does, Arizona is going to be like 19th-century Sicily. My own “policy position” is that the US, Canada, Mexico, etc. — whoever the “NAFTA’ countries are, must have something like the European Schengen agreements that permit the free flow of labor. After all, if Brits can handle Polish plumbers, we can surely cope with a handy flow of Mexican roofers, brick-layers, and who knows what else — maybe some rocket scientists or some of their entrepreneurial talent too. I don’t think this is going to happen and I think the reason it’s not going to happen is racism.
White Attacks on Anti-Racist Academic in Arizona
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InsideHigherEducation describes the hostile comments and threats a Latina faculty member got for giving a short 10-minute faculty speech at the graduation convocation recently at the University of Arizona’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
The deterioration of this society’s ability to have a sensible discussion of issues, such as on immigration, has been aggressively accelerated in recent years by the right-wing propaganda machines of prominent radio talk show hosts and Fox news, where information is often less important than a far-right agenda. We are on a downhill slide in this post-post-racial America.
Professor Sandra Soto, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, turned down higher ranked universities to go where there are large Latino populations and numbers of students. She did not realize that criticizing the new authoritarian racial profiling law in Arizona and critiquing the banning of ethnic (Mexican American) studies programs in Arizona schools would get her many verbal threats, including death threats:
She was booed, jeered and heckled, with a few shouting personal comments …. Soto held her ground, and while pausing at times, finished her talk — with many applauding. Soto related her critiques of these state actions to graduation by talking about how their education should prepare them to be “better public citizens.” Since the talk, Soto said she has received a barrage of e-mail messages, many of them hateful and some of them potentially threatening. Many such messages have also been posted on YouTube and on local Web sites that covered the speech. (See links here)
She describes her feelings thus:
“My work is in Chicana cultural studies, so it’s my obligation, if I am going to be up on a stage, I feel it is my absolute responsibility to address these issues.” She said that no one who knows her could have doubted that she would speak out, and that she was prepared for some booing, but was surprised by “how vitriolic” the e-mail messages have been since the talk. She said that she will turn over to authorities those that might be threatening, such as an e-mail suggesting that the sender “hopes you don’t look both ways” while crossing the street. . . . several viewers suggested that Soto “return to El Salvador.” (She’s actually from Texas, where her family has lived since Texas was Mexico, she said, and she’s not sure why she’s been identified as being from El Salvador.)
Marisol LeBron, a Latino Ph.D. student in American studies at New York University, put it this way in a blog commentary:
Queer Chicana Professor (and all-around awesome academic) Sandra K. Soto got booed at the University of Arizona’s Social and Behavioral Sciences commencement. Professor Soto was attempting to discuss the ways that the anti-immigrant measures known as SB1070 would marginalize Latinos/as. Before she could get a sentence out the crowd jeered her. Twitter drama ensued. Most people said it was inappropriate for Professor Soto to use the event as a “political soap box” further highlighting the success of the conservative right in advancing the idea that Universities and institutions of higher education should be depoliticized places where one goes to learn objective truths. … what happened to Professor Soto is just another example of what so often occurs to queers, women, and people of color (or people who inhabit all of those identities) within the academy, they get shouted down and told that they’re advancing a narrow agenda or only telling half the story. … I applaud the stand that Soto and other educators in Arizona are taking despite the attempts to silence them.
