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Are the Racist Incidents on Campus Done by “Outliers”?
Posted by: | CommentsA yahoo news piece summarizes the many racist incidents in and around our “liberal” California campuses—and student reactions to them–this way:
At UC Irvine, about 250 people gathered for a “student solidarity speakout” to condemn the recent spate of racist incidents at UC San Diego that targeted black students and another incident last month at UC Davis, which targeted a Jewish student with a swastika carved on her door . . . . The protests came on the same day UC San Diego announced the discovery of a white pillowcase fashioned into a KKK-style hood — the third racist incident around the campus in as many weeks — and a day after UC Santa Cruz officials found an image of a noose scribbled on the inside of a bathroom door.
There was also a noose found on the San Diego campus, for which a student of color (not black) apologized anonymously in a letter in the campus newspaper. We have blogged on these in some detail recently. Other campuses have had their racist incidents in recent years too:
Although UCLA students said no racial incidents had occurred recently on their campus, in 2007, a fraternity held a “Tijuana Sunrise” party that mocked Mexican-Americans with stereotyped images, they said.
Sadly, the story and a scholar seem to want to view these incidents as the work of a few oddball racists and “outliers”:
The incidents are disturbing and most likely the work of “outliers” using offensive and outrageous behavior to gain notoriety, said Brian Levin, director of California State University’s Center for Study of Hate and Extremism in San Bernardino. He said surveys show young people are less prejudiced than ever, but “these things touch a nerve, and these folks know it.”
If this is a correct quote, then even experts like this fellow seem uninformed on the substantial field data showing that our white college students are not the paragons of white virtue such statements indicate. Do not they realize that in this social correctness era that many whites lie to survey researchers and pollsters? That they still operate frequently and in large numbers out of the white racial framing of Americans of color? That there are an estimated billion or so racist incidents participated in or observed just by white college students in their everyday lives each year?
The article goes on to say a few campuses are considering requiring an ethnic studies course, some mentoring, an African American Resource Center, and more funds for university diversity offices. Too little and too late, as the old cliche goes. And this very tepid and far from adequate reaction is indeed in the year 2010, some 50 years now after the civil rights revolution.
Useful Sites for Students: The Covenant with Black America website
Posted by: | CommentsSince the 1980s black leaders have held several State of the Black Union overview conferences. In 2006 a document, “The Covenant with Black America,” was presented to eight thousand attendees at the seventh conference in Houston, a book-length statement of strong recommendations to policymakers that would improve the lives of African Americans. In addition to suggesting action options for African Americans with regard to issues such as renewal of voting rights legislation and boycotting discriminatory companies, these conferences have generated renewed interest in an array of political campaigns accenting issues of concern to black communities.
Subsequent black conferences have confirmed these goals, and the book version of the Covenant became a New York Times best-seller. A third book in the Covenant series is now out, and is described on the website thus:
Accountable is the the yardstick that will determine whether we, the people—both political leaders and citizens—have lived up to the aspirations enshrined in The Covenant and operationalized in THE COVENANT In Action. It offers a pragmatic model for holding our new president and political leaders accountable for what they have promised and must deliver. It also holds us accountable both as individuals and as a community for our actions or inactions in keeping our agenda on track. Because the stakes have never been higher, Accountable teaches American citizens how to be driven by “the cause and not the candidate,” and how to sustain the new political dialogue in which “our votes cannot be separated from our voices.”
The Covenant with Black America website has some very useful interactive maps (from http://www.blackstat.com) dealing with important statistical data by state on Health, Education, Justice, Democracy, Environment, Digital Divide, and Rural America.
There is also a good link to race, poverty, and related news events.
U.S. Census Data, Boycotts, and Empowering Voices of Color
Posted by: | CommentsI am a Latina sociologist- and activist-in training who has spent substantial time with scholars and activists studying U.S. Latina/o communities from both professional and personal viewpoints. Some of my colleagues and I want to understand the complex experiences of Latina/os through data in order to enact and empower social change. It is well known that U.S. Decennial Census is the mother-ship of all demographic databases regarding domestic population information; as such, social scientists, activists, and politicians are all eagerly anticipating the collection and release of updated data as 2010 approaches.
That said, chills flew up my spine as I read two articles focusing on a Latina/o boycott of the 2010 Decennial Census. The Wall Street Journal and Christianity Today both published articles highlighting an effort, led by a few Latino clergy-members, to increase the number of those committed to the boycott in order to persuade the current Administration and Congress to act toward comprehensive immigration reform and “injustices toward undocumented members of the Latino community.” The estimated number of people committed to the boycott is apparently one million and growing.
I respect the right to boycott and I absolutely agree that comprehensive immigration reform and unjust acts toward the Latina/o community need to be addressed at the federal level. However, this particular boycott has the potential for dire consequences against the same Latina/o and immigrant community the boycott’s organizers intend to empower.
Following are three key reasons why the Latina/o population should participate in the Decennial Census:
Participation in the U.S. Census can provide a voice for the “voice-less.” The Decennial Census provides the most accurate pictorial snapshot of the United States’ demographic composition since everyone living within the country’s borders is constitutionally mandated to participate. Though the federal government’s relationship with people of color has both a historical and contemporary stain, the U.S. Census Bureau has only one interest: to count the population. Participation in the Census provides an opportunity for all individuals to be represented as part of the population. If someone chooses not to participate in the Decennial Census, they are both violating a constitutional mandate and are eluding an opportunity – perhaps their only “official” one – to represent their voice as an individual within our borders.
Anyone can use U.S. Census data … and the numbers are important! While the government uses Decennial Census data to, for example, align congressional districts and appropriate budgets, countless entities outside of the government also use the data. Non-profits, corporations, think-tanks, research institutes, universities, media outlets, and activists all rely on U.S. Census data to understand the population-groups within which and/or for whom they work. For example, the following questions could each be addressed using U.S. Census data regarding Latina/o populations: Where are such populations from? What is the average number of people living in a household? What is the average education-level for this population? How many people within this population live in poverty? Without U.S. Census information to answer such important questions – and many others – knowledge and activities of social scientists and activists may be stunted, aseducators, policy makers, and organizers each tap into their resources. For example, nonprofits such as Sojourners consistently use U.S. Census data to understand the population demographics in the communities in which they educate, create policy, and organize constituencies.
The U.S. Census only comes around every 10 years. Though the U.S. Census Bureau has adapted the American Community Survey as an instrument to collect data in-between Decennial Censuses, the actual enumeration of the U.S. population only takes place every ten years. In short, the opportunity to participate in the Decennial Census only comes around a handful of times over a life-course. As we know all too well, anything can happen in ten years – especially in politics; therefore, participation in this Census is essential to understanding the U.S. immigrant and Latina/o population at this one moment in time.
As an activist-in-training, I definitely respect everyone’s right to boycott. However, I find this boycott to ultimately be more detrimental than beneficial. If we in the Latina/o community want to strengthen our voice, then we need to participate in the official “voice-collector” while continuing our struggle through other peaceful and productive means. I, for one, am looking forward to being counted as a Mexican American living within the United States, knowing full well that scholars, politicians, and activists will study my identity as it resides within the communal whole of our nation.
[Note: This commentary is cross-posted at Sojourners.]
Something Seems Strangely Familiar Here: Town Hall “Protests”
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1. Déjà vu, in Psychology–The illusion of having already experienced something actually being experienced for the first time. 2. An impression of having seen or experienced something before: Old-timers watched the stock-market crash with a distinct sense of déjà vu.
Dull familiarity; monotony: the déjà vu of the tabloid headlines.
Machiavelli once said that “[w]hoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.” So as I have recently flipped through the numerous self proclaimed left and right winged television shows on CNN, Fox, and etc., a chill crept through the nerves within my vertebral column. My eyes were horrified, but at the same moment, not surprised to witness fisted clinched and crocked brows on white Americans at town hall meetings where civilized debates of the proposed health care plan by the Obama administration was to be occurring. Angry rhetoric along side held high posters propagating to on lookers that our president was in essence similar to the paranoid sociopath and war criminal Adolf Hitler. With a critical lens, a psychologists may say that these people are actually guilty of transference (which is a phenomenon in psychoanalysischaracterized by unconscious redirection of feelings for one person to another).
Secondly, what was more troublesome for me were the number of people at these town hall gatherings who were strapping semi automatic side arms and even holding military grade weapons such as AR15s.
Haven’t we been here before? Has history not shown us the damage this sort of anti-social behavior and angry rhetoric can have on people and a country? I feel that the evolution of WWII and the Hitler regime is a perfect example for us to keep in the forefront of our minds. There are enough comparisons between what is happening in our country to what lead to WWII and the slaughter of millions of innocent Jews that should give us pause.
During the rise of Hitler, the economy was in a depression. Hitler’s tactic to blame the Jews for the state of Germany appealed to their emotions and not the true nature of the crisis in Germany. The propaganda that followed that was created by Hitler and Goebbels gave way to a wave of radio blitz, leaflets, movies, and posters that stoked the flames of hatred and misdirection. Are we seeing this today? Yes we are indeed.
The rallies, the nonsensical statements calling the president a racist against whites by Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh can be compared to the radio blitz by Lord Haw Haw and Axis Sally of Germany.
Moreover, the ignorance, frustration, and racism toward Jews allowed for fertile ground for the rise of the Third Reich. As the world knows, here in the U.S. we are too undergoing a scary economic crisis. This is the time of high unemployment, company bailouts, government bank takeovers, increase in spousal abuse, and etc. We have seen throughout multiple media outlets how the country blames in part our first Black president for not helping the government to recover faster. This factor on top of the already dissatisfaction of many Whites having a Black president has caused an alarm to be raised in regards to hate groups. CNN has recently noted that many whites blame President Obama for the economic crisis. Here in the U.S., groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center has noted that “[a]fter virtually disappearing from public view a decade ago, the antigovernment militia movement is surging across the country – fueled by fears of a black president, the changing demographics of the country and fringe conspiracy theories increasingly spread by mainstream figures.”
I am not declaring that another holocaust is imminent. But what is important here is for us to all take a moment and realize that if we are not careful, history could indeed repeat itself.
Police Brutality and the National Political Agenda
Posted by: | CommentsThe Root ( a 
very good source on racial issues) has a recent post by Sherrilyn Ifill, University of Maryland law professor and civil rights lawyer, on the continuing reality of police malpractice and brutality, most of it directed against men of color—most especially, black men (
photo credit: srqpix). She begins with the sad “talk”:
It’s one of the depressing ironies of black life that in the Obama era, black mothers and fathers must continue giving their teenage sons “the talk.” I’m not talking about the birds and the bees. I’m talking about the “how to act when the police stop you” talk. Rule 1. Don’t talk back to the officer. Rule 2. It doesn’t matter if you weren’t doing anything wrong. Rule 3. And this is critical, don’t reach for your wallet without asking the officer first. Supplemental rule. Carry a pink cell phone if you can. A black cell phone may look like a gun to a nervous cop.
She lists some of the many police killings in the last couple of years, such as brutal taser death of Baron Pikes in Winnfield in 2008:
Tasered nine times within 14 minutes by a 21-year-old white officer, Pikes may well have been dead – handcuffed and unresponsive in a police cruiser—when the last two 50,000-volt charges were delivered directly to his chest. The officer reportedly admitted that he began using his Taser on Pikes when the handcuffed black man responded too slowly to the officer’s demand that Pikes get up and walk to the police car.
Then mentions others like this one:
In Dallas, 23-year-old Robbie Tolan, a minor league baseball player and the son of former Major League Baseball player Bobbie Tolan, was shot in his own driveway in an affluent white suburb on New Year’s Eve. White police officers, purportedly believing that the SUV driven by Tolan and his cousin was stolen, approached the young black men and ordered them to lie down on the ground. The car belonged to Tolan’s parents, and the officers reportedly did not identify themselves. When Tolan’s parents came outside to find out what was happening, one of the officers allegedly shoved Mrs. Tolan against the garage. Robbie Tolan yelled to the officer to stop pushing his mother, and that, witnesses say, is when he was shot by one of the officers.
She notes a Youtube video of
The recent case involving the cell phone video of a drunk, white, off-duty police officer in Erie, Pa., making crude jokes about a black murder victim and ridiculing the victim’s grieving mother, illustrates part of the problem.
We have discussed some of these major instances of police brutality on this blog numerous times.
In conclusion, Ifill makes this on-target comment:
The results of these incidents are depressingly predictable. Outrage. Marches. Most often no indictment. Sometimes an indictment. Always an acquittal. More marches. Next incident. The stunning lack of change suggests that our protest-oriented approach to police brutality must focus less on punishment for individual officers, and more on systemic institutional changes within our police academies and departments.
Just how systemic the police harassment and brutality is can be seen in polls and in social science research. For example, one 2001 Gallup poll found 83 percent of black respondents had experienced racial profiling in the last year. In addition, in a 2007 Gallup poll a fifth of the black respondents reported that had suffered discrimination at the hands of police officers, a proportion that has increased in recent years.
Lest some think that we are ignoring lots of white victims of police brutality here, we might note that one social science study back in the 1990s analyzed 130 police-brutality accounts in several cities across the country. In that reviews of cases, criminologist Kim Lersch discovered that the targets of this type of police malpractice are almost always black or Latino. The latter made up 97 percent of the victims of police brutality, while the overwhelming majority (93 percent) of officers involved were white. Police brutality overwhelmingly involves white-on-black or other white-on-minority violence. (See discussion in Chapter 5 here.)
Protesting the Racism of the NYPost
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Yesterday, I joined a small crowd of fellow New Yorkers fed up and outraged by the racism of the New York Post’s editorial cartoon. (The image is one that I took, you can see the full set of photos at Flickr.) As usual with any protest about racism here in New York, there were lots of black and brown folks there, and not so many white folks. Not surprising, but disappointing nevertheless. One of the most notably missing white faces in this crowd was Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who has not issued a statement about the cartoon. Governor Patterson, speaking yesterday at an event unrelated to the cartoon at the New York Academy of Medicine, did respond to questions about the racist cartoon, saying that it is incumbent upon Post editors to explain “what the cartoon was intended to portray.” Paterson added, images equating blacks with primates “do feed a kind of negative and stereotypical way that some people think,” and thus stretching the definition of “understatement.”
For its part, the editors at The New York Post have issued an apology that is a non-apology, saying:
Wednesday’s Page Six cartoon – caricaturing Monday’s police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut – has created considerable controversy. It shows two police officers standing over the chimp’s body: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” one officer says. It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill. Period. But it has been taken as something else – as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism. This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize. However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback. To them, no apology is due. Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.
Those of you who’ve been following this issue closely will recall that the previous statement from The Post referred to Rev. Sharpton as a “publicity opportunist,” so this statement is clearly directed at him and others affiliated with his National Action Network. As Rev. Al said last night when asked by Keith Olbermann about the “publicity opportunist” charge, “I’m an activist, so getting publicity is part of what I do. At least they are acknowledging that I’m good at my job.”
The official written response from the editors of The Post is consistent with what I witnessed yesterday happening in midtown just beyond the perimeter of the protest. The white office workers who came to the window at the News Corp building laughed, pointed and jeered. One of my fellow protesters said they saw someone at the windows give the one-finger salute to the crowd gathered below, but I didn’t see it. The white office workers on their lunch break that I overheard along 6th Ave. (across the street from the protest), said things like, “Wow – look at all of them! I can’t believe they got that many to come out in the middle of the day, I guess they don’t have jobs.”
Clearly, we still have a lot of work to do in this putatively post-racial era. If you’d like to take some action on this particular issue, you can sign on to the letter of protest at Color of Change. If you’re in the New York City area, there’s another protest in front of the News Corp building (6th Ave., between 47th and 48th) later today, Friday, February 20th, at 4:45pm.
UPDATES (2/24/09): Lots has happened on this story since Friday. Among the highlights (or, low lights if you prefer): There are widespread reports of dissention in the ranks of The New York Post over the cartoon, ranging from an email sent by editor Sandra Guzman to reporters, saying she had “nothing to do with the cartoon,” to today, Murdoch including his own, slightly less half-hearted, apology in the paper. Michael Wolff, author of a book about Murdoch, appearing on Olbermann’s MSNBC show speculates that Murdoch is “livid” about the cartoon, and predicts that this is a career-ending decision for Col Allen, the current editor of The New York Post. Meanwhile, Benjamin Todd of the NAACP is calling for the firing of Sean Delonas, the cartoonist who drew the offensive chimp-cartoon. And, I continue to be amazed (I know, I know – I shouldn’t be) by the number of white people (and some other folks) who just don’t get the racism of this cartoon.
Immigrant Rights Protesters in Denver Last Week
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The Denver Post’s Kim Mitchell did a brief but interesting story on a march by 800 people at the Democratic National Convention last week, one that got very little other media attention. These marchers were raising very important questions about the U.S. treatment of immigrants and the failure of the Obama campaign to raise the issue from an aggressively humanitarian and human rights perspective. Mitchell reports that their press statement said (h/t: Commondreams)
“This is Germany in the 1930s all over again! . . . The past seven years of the Bush regime have seen a dramatic escalation of attacks on immigrants on many fronts.”
Yet the marchers were also critical of the Barack Obama campaign:
“Obama has made no call to reverse this whole ugly program,” the statement says. “Stop the attacks on Immigrants! Stop the ICE raids! Stop the Criminal Bush Program!”
Interviews with protesters were revealing:
“We want to build bridges and not walls between our countries,” march organizer Rudy Gonzales said. “We want pathways to citizenship. We want to decriminalize immigration.” . . . Felipe Perez . . . said he is a first-generation citizen who lays tile for work, and that several members of his family were deported, including his aunt who was pregnant…. “We didn’t know what happened to her. Something has to be done to open our borders. I still have family members who come here to make a better life,” he said.
People came from around the country to protest U.S. immigration policies:
The Rev. Ron Stief, of Washington, D.C., helped organize . . . . “There is no issue more important than how we care for immigrants,” he said. “The way that families cannot be united is a problem as well as the way people have been criminalized and end up in jail.”
Even our more liberal political candidates do not seem to be able to do an honest assessment of immigration, for fear of losing voters. The humanitarian crisis here is huge and well-documented, yet nativism seems to still be lurking over every US politician’s shoulder. Does one still have to be nativistic to win state-wide or national political office these days, as has been the case for more than a century in this country?
Operation Rescue’s Racist Ploy: Open Thread for Your Comments
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Well, it appears that most any U.S. problem is worse than racism. (H/T: ColorLines) I have heard many discussions of whether sexism or classism is worse that racism, but this seems to set a new low standard for inanity in such comparisons. At the Denver Post, Kirk Mitchell reports this story, “Abortion foes using racism to make point at DNC,” which is about planned protests at the Denver Democratic party convention next week:
Operation Rescue leaders vowed today to pass out hundreds of thousands of racist pamphlets and to stage sit-ins. . . . Handing out the pamphlets is the group’s way of spotlighting a greater evil than racism, [Randall] Terry said. “The flier is meant of offend. Do you think racism is abhorrent?” Terry asked at a news conference. . . . He said child killing is much worse. Anyone who votes for Sen. Barack Obama supports the killing of babies…. “Which is a worse crime: slavery or murder? The correct answer: murder. A slave can get free, but a murder victim cannot get ‘undead.’ “
What do you make of this kind of political and moral logic? Please add your comments below to this open thread.
A Conservative New York Times Gets It Wrong: There is No End to Black Politics
Posted by: | CommentsAt the “black and progressives website for Obama,” Amiri Baraka provides a good critique both of the whitewashed New York Times cover story, “Is Obama The End of Black Politics?” and also of the “people with the signs in St. Petersburg” who said to Obama “You’re undermining the (Black) Revolution.”
In his analysis Baraka points out that
Black politics will only disappear when the Black majority disappears. And even the wish fulfillment of New York Times “liberals” can never achieve this, nor the creepy self hatred of those incognegroes the Times wants to anoint as post black negroes. Still the question of Obama’s candidacy is a quite different consideration. As I have said , in print and in the flesh at many forums, no matter what is said by whoever thinks to deny this, or even what Obama says himself, the foundation of Obama’s successful candidacy is the 90% support by the Afro-American people. A fact that I’m sure he understands. Obama also understands that it is the rest of the American people he must reach out to, no matter how attempts he makes to do this are questioned, even by Black people.
This is a point the mainstream media constantly miss. If it were not for the long African American struggle for liberation from racism, indeed every phase of that nearly four centuries struggle, this country would not be nearly the democracy that it so far is. African Americans are the major carries of the deep liberty and justice frame and tradition, which has been mostly rhetoric for the white majority historically. He then critiques the “militants” who recently protested Obama. Black or white, he says, the do not
understand that the logic and strength of Obama’s candidacy is the 21st century manifestation of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements, impossible without it. Jesse Jackson’s two impressive candidacy’s were also part of that motion, not to accept both these phenomena as positive aspects and results of our collective struggle is to lack “True Self Consciousness”.
Then he asks the million dollar question about what the next major step in this long history of progressive struggle should be and lists an excellent set of planks for a “more progressive Obama campaign.” And at the same website, Maulana Karenga adds some important points about the white racism in the New York Times shoddy analysis:
But in spite of the catchy title and the lineup of rising Black political stars, the end point is always the same—definition of a deficient, divided and self-destructive community. It is an old racialist ploy of singling out and praising the few in order to better condemn the many. And the praise is never for self-determination, but rather for self-denial and self-concealment of one’s Blackness.
He adds this sharp piece about the Times arguing that the Obama campaign means we are in a post racial era where the older black politicians are increasingly irrelevant:
This racialized and irrational “reasoning” is directed towards several ends. First, it is to indict and dismiss the older generation of leaders and at the same time the legitimacy and relevance of their social justice claims, their rootedness in community, and their recognition of the centrality of multiform struggle around issues of wealth, power and status. In this regard, they are criticized both for their being /too race conscious for their people /and /not race conscious enough for a selected person/. Needless to say, no such discussion is carried on about being post-White, post-Jewish, post-Gentile or even about other ethnics of color.
Secondly, the article seeks to redefine normal generational differences into divisive ones, to provide a language of antagonism and rupture instead of one of necessary continuity and regular generational change as in every group.
In other words, the Obama campaign, win or lose, stands, not against those who led and engaged in previous black political and civil rights efforts, but on their shoulders. Obama stands on the shoulders of the many black men and women (and some white allies) who sacrificed to get all of us this far toward democracy. This is still the early stages of racial politics, indeed. No “post racial era” is anywhere in sight.
Protest Fox’s Racism in NYC Today
Posted by: | CommentsI’m traveling all day today (from Berkeley back to NYC), so won’t be able to attend this, but if you’re in the NYC-area and want to do something about the racism in the media, specifically Fox News, here’s your chance. Today, hip hop star Nas will join members of ColorOfChange.org and MoveOn.org to deliver 620,127 petition signatures demanding that FOX end its pattern of racist attacks against Black Americans including presidential candidate Barack Obama and his wife Michelle. The group will make the delivery at 2:00pm on Wednesday, July 23rd at FOX in Manhattan. More about this event here.
