Sweden: No Longer the Exception to Western Racist Rule

May 27, 2013 • Tobias and Lory • Europe, people of color, police, political parties, poverty, protests, racial segregation, urban revolts, violence, white elites, whites

Authored by Tobias Hübinette and L. Janelle Dance

Since May 20, 2013, mass vandalism, material damage and outbursts of rioting in the poor and non-white suburbs of Greater Stockholm have dominated Swedish and international news media. This civil unrest was sparked when, on May 12, the police shot and killed a 69-year-old man from Husby, one of the marginalized suburban communities of metropolitan Stockholm. The shooting is still under investigation. The burning of cars, other types of arsons, and attacks on the police erupted in Husby on the evening of May 19th and quickly spread to many other similar suburbs of Greater Stockholm such as Fittja, Tensta, Flemingsberg, Hjulsta, Jakobsberg, Hagsätra, Rågsved, Skärholmen and Skogås. As we write this post, after six nights of uninterrupted suburban unrest, the vandalism and the violence have also spread to other Swedish cities like Gothenburg, Örebro and Linköping. Although the US and UK embassy warnings to keep out from such districts are clearly exaggerated—the scale of the unrest cannot be compared to similar previous waves of riots in for example the US, the UK or France—a feeling of a serious social crisis is gaining ground in the political debate as leading government officials and the Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt urge a stop to the material damage.

This is not the first time that Sweden is experiencing a series of riots; the last time was between 2008-09. However, it is arguably the first time when voices from the suburbs are entering the public debate as a new nascent social movement. At the helm of this movement, which has gained the spotlight in recent years, are teens and young adults who are also usually born and raised in Sweden (the so-called second generation). More than ever before, these youth are denouncing police harassment, the declining social welfare services in the suburbs and the dramatically increasing disparities between rich and poor—a development which is heavily racialized as the proportion of poor white Swedes is below 5% while the proportion of poor Swedes of color hovers around 35-45%. Representatives from this movement have, for example, alerted the media to the use of racial slurs among the police who patrol the suburbs, and above all they have been able to express an unprecedented analysis of a New Sweden, which is becoming heavily polarized along racial lines.

For decades Sweden has proudly viewed itself as the most progressive country in the world, as “the conscience of the world”. Furthermore, Sweden’s antiracist image and radical anti-discrimination, migration and integration legislation are well known all over the world. However, recently Sweden has also become the OECD country showing the highest difference in unemployment between foreign-born and native-born Swedes, while its big- and mid-size cities are characterized by one of the most extreme ethno-racial residential segregation patterns in the Western world. Thus, it is not in the context of the old Sweden of exceptionalism but in the wake of the New Sweden of exclusion that we must understand the frustration, the desperation and the rage that can be found particularly among young people in the suburbs. This second generation has grown up in Sweden but due to stigmatized postal addresses and “non-Swedish” appearances they are not accepted within the majority society at large, without taking into account these worrying statistical correlations.

There are also other political groups that are exploiting the current suburban unrest. A fact overlooked by the media is that these other groups do not live in the suburbs yet exacerbate the unrest. While ignoring these instigators, the media focuses on spectacular videos and photos of burning buildings and cars and policemen fighting with youngsters. Firstly, there are indications that white Swedish leftist activists have encouraged and participated in the riots, something that also happened in 2008-09. Their sole political agenda is to sustain and encourage even more social antagonism at the expense of an even stronger stigmatization of the poor and non-white suburbs among the white majority population. Furthermore, Swedish extreme right-wing activists are also active in the events by portraying themselves as “ordinary Swedes” who want to help the police as “citizen guards”, a popular yet loaded discourse that the media all too often buy into. Saturday night for example, around 200 Nazi activists more or less invaded Tumba in Southern Botkyrka in the southern part of Greater Stockholm, and started to hunt down and beat up any youngster who was deemed to be a “rioter”.

However for ordinary white Swedes reading and watching the news it is highly probable that all the inhabitants in the suburbs are associated with violence and rioting. In the end, the Sweden Democrats (a former Nazi party which has transformed itself into a populist anti-immigration party and which, according to opinion polls, is the fourth or the third largest party in Sweden) will maybe become the biggest political winner due to the suburban unrest. Now, the Sweden Democrats will most probably gain even more support among the voters. Of course, representatives from the party have already made use of the events by calling for stronger police interventions and the introduction of temporary state of emergency measures in certain urban districts.

Once “exceptional” Sweden is no longer the exception to the general Western rule of blaming the racialized victim. On the contrary, white Swedes are remarkably unexceptional as they behave like racist and conservative white Americans. Ordinary white Swedes, who claim to embrace antiracism, equality and social democracy, look at the riots in Stockholm and blame marginalized youths for the institutional discrimination, political marginalization, and structural racism that have become common place in the former “conscience of the world”.

Tobias Hübinette is an Associate Professor and researcher at the Multicultural Centre in Botkyrka, Sweden. L. Janelle Dance is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska and a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. Dance is currently living in Sweden.

“What in the Wide, Wide, World of Sports is going on here?” Social Control & Racism in Sports

May 24, 2013 • Dr. Terence Fitzgerald • Africa, African Americans, sports, violence, white privilege, white racial frame, whites, youth

Surprised? No. Hurt? No. I am neither bamboozled, disillusioned, flimflammed, confused, taken aback, floored, or any other adjective one would possibly use to describe their emotions pertaining to the latest public act of overt racism and idiocy which was illustrated by Spain’s top golfer Sergio Garcia. Media outlets from the Huffington Post to ESPN reported on his comments relating to Tiger Woods. In summary, this past Tuesday evening in London during the European Tour’s Players’ Awards dinner, a reporter asked the golfer if he was planning to invite his nemesis to dinner during the imminent U.S. Open. Garcia responded by saying, “We will have him round every night…”We will serve fried chicken.” After reading the story, I instantly saw my southern elderly grandmother saying, “Oooh Weee!!” But I digress. After you know what hit the you know what, Garcia issued a foreseeable apology.

I apologize for any offense that may have been caused by my comment on stage during the European Tour Players’ Awards dinner. I answered a question that was clearly made towards me as a joke with a silly remark, but in no way was the comment meant in a racist manner.

To me what seemed pure and concentrated racism was in fact a harmless joke? What was I thinking? Seriously, it seems whenever well-known white politicians, sports figures, and movie stars are forced to retract hurtful comments, pertaining to non-whites, which usually only occurs due to the possible threat to their financial “Cheese,” the term “joke” is always utilized to set forth rationalization. Dr. Jane Hill, out of the University of Arizona who studies language ideologies in the reproduction of racism, would deem this behavior as an example of a “gaffe.” The supposed slip of Garcia’s tongue reproduces the white “folk-theory” while advancing the highly constructed virtue of whiteness. For the ultimate purpose of justifying white privilege, the use of gaffes permits whites to stigmatize nonwhites through the process of “reproducing racist stereotypes.” Even though many people do not truly believe all Black people are genetically drawn to eating fried chicken, Hill would argues that Garcia’s gaffe

still becomes easily accessible, become an element of automatic, unreflective action and reaction that is very difficult to notice and contest.

The media serves an excellent instrument for the accessibility of these messages.

It is important to note here the media has historically and currently function as an instrument of the white racial frame. I argue the frame itself acts as a bulwark in its attempts to maintain the deep-rooted system of oppression that ultimate seeks to gain supremacy. What is presented on within the media around the world is an unvarying spin cycle of stereotypes and demonizing imagery that at the end of the day devalues non-whites, in particular blacks. I determine that today’s media reproduces the collective images and messages that were first seen as early as the 1915 movie, “The Birth of a Nation.” The images and sounds that carry messages of the past are facilitated and directed by those in charge—White elite.

As seen in the past, the historical stereotypes associated with non-whites today are simply socially reproduced neutralizing agents utilized to secure the continuation of racial conquests. Unlike in the past, today’s acts do not include the deed of public lynching. Come on, those are socially frowned upon, right? But the utilization of racial stereotypes, such as those performed by Garcia, ultimately affects the psyche of both whites and non-whites. Moreover, they can be used as social control techniques to remind non-whites the stereotypical worthlessness of Blacks. This can be seen within others in the sports world. For example, many do not recall a popular sports commentator named, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder who worked for CBS. He was fired for his comments relating to the dominance of Blacks in sports. Moreover, in 1988 he stated Black male athletes were

bred to be the better athlete because, this goes all the way to the Civil War when … the slave owner would breed his big woman so that he would have a big black kid [CNN. Sports Illustrated. Video Almanac, 1988].

Dr. Joe Feagin would deem these noted acts as a resource needed by whites to rationalize the treatment of Blacks in order to legitimize U.S. white power and privilege, while at the same time denying the same power and privilege to non-whites.

But then again, Garcia is not an American citizen. How did a Spaniard come to utilize the white racial frame? One would be remiss to believe the legitimization of white dominance is foreign to those overseas. The power of anti-black sentiment and action are publicly demonstrated. For example, it has been documented that during soccer’s World Cup events, non-white players were spat upon, and racially mocked. At the same time spectators and even some players visibly replicated Hitler’s mustache and Nazi salute while yelling, “Heil Hitler.” Another example which gets little attention from the white dominated media can be seen within Greece. Currently due to the economic doom experienced by its people, citizens have taken up arms against non-Greek citizens. I mean literally taken up arms. Specifically, violence and racist sentiments are on the rise. The political party, Golden Dawn, which resembles the Nazi faction of the past, has gained political power and devotion though their rhetoric which expresses violence toward immigrants.

The Racist Violence Recording Network reported 154 cases of racist violence in 2012, including 25 in which the victims said the perpetrators were police. The figures were released a week after more than 30 Bangladeshi workers suffered shotgun wounds on a strawberry farm in southern Greece during a dispute with foremen over back pay.

Some have even pointed to Israel as a place of rising acts of racism which target African immigrants and asylum seekers.

Overall, in relations to the remarks of Garcia, and others who will definitely be heard in the future, are merely methods of social control and oppression. They serve as reminders of the past. Control initiated to remind whites of their power and placement upon the self-constructed hierarchical ladder. Control initiated to remind non-whites, specifically Blacks, of their placement at the bottom. The ramifications of historical enslavement, repetitive social and institutional practices of oppression, and racism itself toward non-whites is normalized through the use of false perceptions, and stereotypes. All of which are steered for all to partake in destructive thoughts and violent actions.

When Whites Attack: The Deadly Consequences of Anti-Latina/o Violence

March 16, 2013 • Frank Ortega • Americans of color, hate crime, Latinos, violence, white racial frame, whiteness

The U.S. has a long and intense history of institutionalized racial violence against Latinas/os in the form of physical assaults, beatings, and murders. The violent racialized framing of Latinas/os has been a constant narrative throughout U.S. history including, but not limited to, the U.S. – Mexican War (1846-1848), the lynching of Mexicans (1848-1928), and the Zoot Suit Riots (1943). The use of deadly force has played a central role in reproducing racial oppression, resulting in the dehumanization, marginalization, subjugation, and ultimately the countless killings of people of color. Anti-immigrant and anti-Latina/o sentiment continues to negatively shape the perceptions of Latinas/os as both the perpetual foreigner and as a permanent threat to the white status quo. This white racial framing (Feagin, 2013) is used to justify white’s often brutal and savage mistreatment of Latinas/os.

The following cases highlight not only white-on-Brown violence, but the lived realities for Latinas/os in the purported land of the free and home of the brave. The proceeding examples represent a small sample of white racial violence. The first case took place April 2006 in Houston, Texas. This hate crime involved the brutal torture and sodomy of a young Latino male and his subsequent suicide. After knocking 16 year old David Ritcheson unconscious, the two white teens, David Tuck, 18, and Keith Turner, 17, continued to punish the defenseless victim:

For the next five hours, they tortured him: They stripped him naked, kicked him with steel-toed boots, burned him with cigarettes and choked him with a garden hose. Tuck shouted racial epithets and carved a swastika in the boy’s chest with a knife. Turner grabbed a plastic patio umbrella pole and placed it near the victim’s rectum. Tuck kicked the pole several inches in.

The following hate crime occurred on July 12, 2008 in the city of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. Two white teens identified as Brandon Piekarsky, 16, and Derrick Donchak, 18, beat Luis Ramirez, 25, to death while yelling racial epithets and told him:

This is Shenandoah. This is America. Go back to Mexico.” According to testimony, Donchak beat Ramirez while holding a thick piece of metal identified at trial as a “fist pack.” After another of their friends punched Ramirez in the face, causing him to fall back and hit his head on the ground, Piekarsky kicked Ramirez in the head as he lay unconscious and prone on the ground. After Piekarsky kicked Ramirez, he told a bystander who was married to a Latino man to “tell your Mexican friends to get out of Shenandoah or you will be lying next to him.

A few months later on November 8, 2008 another Latino male was assaulted by seven teenagers and eventually killed by Jeffrey Convoy, 17, in a Patchogue, Long Island train station. The victim identified as 37 year old Marcelo Lucero was an:

Ecuadorian immigrant who worked at a local dry cleaning store, was stabbed in the chest and left to die. The teens were convicted of gang assault; prosecutors said the attack was part of targeted hate crimes against Latinos in the area, which the perpetrators purportedly called “Mexican hopping” or “beaner hopping.

Unlike whites, Latinas/os are forced to regularly navigate, resist, and deal with white racist xenophobia. For example, on May 6, 2010 in Phoenix, Arizona, Juan Varela, 44 was gunned down in front of his brother and mother by his white neighbor Gary Kelley, 51, who screamed at Varela, in a drunken rage, “You fucking Mexican, go back to Mexico!”

The white racist structure identifies Latina/o bodies as non-white, creating entitlement and privilege; consequently whites are empowered to commit acts of violence against people deemed subhuman and inferior. One of the most recent examples of white violence transpired on January 26, 2013 in Liburn, Georgia; proving that even pulling into the wrong driveway can get you killed. According to news reports Rodrigo Diaz, 22 was driving to one of his passengers friend’s house and mistakenly pulled into the driveway of Philip Sailors, 69. Sailors’ lawyer contends that his client shot Diaz because he was under the impression that Diaz was trying to rob his home:

When officers arrived, Angie Rebolledo, Diaz’s girlfriend, had blood on her jeans, both arms and both hands as she was attempting to get a response from him and screamed frantically that her boyfriend had been shot, according to police.

These murders are best understood within the historical trend of white nativism and discrimination, and illustrate the systemic nature of white-on-Brown racial killings. Anti-Latina/o violence has not stopped. In the past seven years there has been numerous Latinas/os murdered by whites. Although each case is separate and carried out by individual whites, collectively over time, these acts of aggression represent a systematic pattern of white antagonism and violence against Latinas/os (Feagin, 2013). White supremacy is not only defined but relies on violence to replicate the existing social system; white-on-Brown violence is foundational to the U.S. both historically and contemporary (Feagin, 2013); Delgado, 2009.

Latinas/os can be victims of physical assaults and murder at any given place or moment. Whites do not deal with this same fear, hostility, and threat of violence. Ultimately Latinas/os and their families are left to deal with death and devastation.

R.I.P.
David Ritcheson (1989-2007)
Luis Ramirez (1983-2008)
Marcelo Lucero (1971-2008)
Juan Varela (1966-2010)
Rodrigo Diaz (1991-2013)

White Men as the Major “Social Problem”

December 17, 2012 • Joe • Americans of color, politics, violence, white elites, white privilege, white racial frame, whiteness, whites

Journalist and commentator David Sirota has an interesting piece about the reaction to some statements about the role of white men as the typical killers in the mass murders like the ones in Columbine, Aurora, and Newtown which he made in an MSNBC commentary and interview with Chris Hayes:

I said that because most of the mass shootings in America come at the hands of white men, there would likely be political opposition to initiatives that propose to use those facts to profile the demographic group to which these killers belong. I suggested that’s the case because as opposed to people of color or, say, Muslims, white men as a subgroup are in such a privileged position in our society that they are the one group that our political system avoids demographically profiling or analytically aggregating in any real way. Indeed, unlike other demographic, white guys as a group are never thought to be an acceptable topic for any kind of critical discussion whatsoever, even when there is ample reason to open up such a discussion.

Calling out white men, and most especially elite white men, as a/the social or political problem is something I have written and lectured on for many years now, but it is still very rare for anyone, commentator or researcher, to even go as far as Sirota does in this important Salon article.

Toward the end of the article even he starts backing off on some of the logical implications of calling out white men and insisting that he is not calling for racial profiling of white men as potential killers. He notes that the current tempered and nuanced conversation of these mass killings is only occurring because “white guys” are the (usually unremarked upon) demographic so dramatically involved:

But the point here is that those tempered and nuanced conversations are only able to happen because the demographic at the center of it all is white guys. That is the one group in America that gets to avoid being referred to in aggregate negative terms (and gets to avoid being unduly profiled by this nation’s security apparatus), which means we are defaulting to a much more dispassionate and sane conversation — one that treats the perpetrators as deranged individuals, rather than typical and thus stereotype-justifying representatives of an entire demographic.

In my White Men on Race (With E. O’Brien) and The White Racial Frame book (soon out in a second edition in February) I have argued that these discussions such as Sirota raises barely begin to raise the issue of the role and significance of white men, particularly elite white men, in creating and maintaining our system of racial oppression, and the supporting social, political, and economic institutions that operate to protect that systemic racism and its white male regulators.

Here is a very brief overview of some historical points I make in that white frame book about that political background and current political reality:

The “founding fathers” created a U.S. origins narrative that was (and still is) substantially mythological, a story in which a mostly anti-democratic, often slaveholding, group of elite white men were said to be heroes championing ideals of equality and democracy for a new United States. These elite leaders created an imagined community, that is, a heralded “democratic” society in which all Americans supposedly shared comradeship. However, contrary to this mythology, the U.S. Constitution did not create a democracy where most adult Americans had the right to participate substantially and freely in political institutions. Native Americans and African Americans, constituting at least a fifth of the population, were excluded. (So were all women) As Vincent Harding has put it, the U.S. constitutional convention was “more like a poorly attended dress rehearsal, with most of the rightful and necessary performers and creators barred from the stage.”

From the beginning, the democratic rhetoric was usually more about public relations and the interests of the white elite than about creating actual democratic institutions. The new U.S. society was highly inegalitarian, with extreme inequality across the color line. The new United States was mostly led by white men who were overt white supremacists. It was a society that had no sense of shared comradeship among its white, black, and Native American residents. In 1843 no less a figure than former president and then member of Congress, John Quincy Adams, asserted in a congressional speech that the United States had never been a democracy because it had long been effectively controlled by a few thousand slaveholders. In this founding era U.S. political institutions were often openly proslavery, and an overtly white supremacist framing and dominance were asserted by many white leaders through these institutions until the ending of Jim Crow segregation in the 1960s.

Things mostly did not get better over time, as (especially elite) white men stayed completely in control of major institutions:

During the slavery and Jim Crow eras, the Supreme Court was a clear manifestation of white dominance, for only elite white men served on it. Examining the justices’ decisions on racial matters during most of the legal segregation era, one finds that they regularly reflect the dominant white-racist framing and routinely ignore or dismiss the civil rights counter-frames of Americans of color. Between the 1870s and the 1930s, Supreme Court decisions regularly eroded the civil rights that African Americans had theoretically gained under the 14th and 15th amendments that were added to the U.S. Constitution in the Reconstruction era. In the influential 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, a nearly unanimous court (one dissenter) upheld a Louisiana law requiring white-black segregation in public accommodations.

Things changed only because of centuries of protest by Americans of color, and then only as allowed by elite white men once again:

To the present day, the U.S. Constitution and the Supreme Court decisions interpreting it—almost all made over centuries by elite white men—have greatly shaped the basic contours of the legal and political systems, as well as other societal institutions. Important changes in the system of oppression, such as the official ending of Jim Crow in the 1960s, have come only when many whites have believed those changes to be in their group interest—that is, when there is what Derrick Bell has called “interest convergence” between the interests of the racially oppressed and the interests of whites, especially some in the white male elite.

When will any of the mainstream media call out and discuss various (elite) white male “social problems,” including problems of mass violence like at Newtown, as often and openly as they now do for non-white-male groups?

Sikh Temple Shooting: White Supremacist Kills 7

August 6, 2012 • Jessie Daniels • costs of racism, hate crime, violence

It’s happened again. A white man gone mad has walked into a group of people and started shooting. Yesterday, in a suburb outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin a man with ties to white supremacist groups entered a Sikh Temple and opened fire. While this has prompted many to ask if it’s time to talk about gun control, I want to talk about racism and white supremacy.

(Image from here)

The gun man has been identified as Wade Michael Page, someone that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) had been tracking for some time as a potential threat. Page was a front man for a couple of white power bands and was heavily tattooed with white power symbols. However fascinating it may be to “decipher the tattoos” he wore, it would be a mistake to dismiss Page was an isolated actor from a lunatic fringe disconnected from the mainstream of U.S. society.

In fact, the reality is that white supremacy is a persistent, tragic feature of the American cultural and political landscape. The extreme expressions of white supremacy – like this shooting, or like some of the violent images and messages previously circulated in print and now online – are part of a larger problem. White supremacy is woven into the fabric of our society and it kills people.

Vijay Prashad, author of Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today (New Press, 2012), has studied the deadly consequences of racism directed toward South Asians, including many of whom are Sikh (a religion, not an ethnicity). Following 9/11, Sikh men and women were targeted for their turban and head-scarf. The (il)logic of white supremacy seems to be that since Osama Bin Laden wore a turban, it was the turban-wearing Sikhs who ought to be attacked. As Prashad noted in Uncle Swami, within the first week after 9/11, a disproportionately large number of the 645 bias attacks took place against Sikhs. Prashad goes on to make the connection between everyday racist acts and the recent violence when she writes:

“Patterns are shunned. Structural factors such as the prevalence of guns and the lack of social care for mentally disturbed people should of course be in the frame. But so too should the preponderance of socially acceptable hatred against those seen as outsiders. Intellectually respectable opinions about who is an American (produced, for example, by Sam Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenge to National Identity) comes alongside the politician’s casual racism (Romney’s recent suggestion that the US and the UK are “part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage,” erased in a whip lash the diversity of the United States and Britain). Racist attacks are authorized by a political culture that allows us to think in nativist terms, to bemoan the “browning” of America.”

As Rinku Sen points out here, there’s nothing “random” or “senseless” to this event but it is, instead, linked to the everyday microaggressions in our (white) families. She writes:

“I implore of my white friends, when your nutty uncle or classmate goes off about some set of foreigners, you must make a fuss, cause a family crisis, become unpopular, speak up. We cannot do this for you.”

This is precisely the kind of thing that Jenni Mueller talked about doing here. Some of us are doing this, making a fuss, causing a family crisis, but not enough of us, not nearly enough. Harsha Walia in a guest post at Racialicious echoes this when she writes:

“Whites might actually have to start distancing themselves from white supremacy.”

Where was Page’s family, one wonders, as he got more and more overtly extremist in his views and body art? Quietly ashamed or happily cheering him on? We won’t know from the usual bland, mainstream reporting on stories involving race.

Perhaps more pressing, there need to be more white people who will educate themselves and start exposing white supremacy in all its forms whether shooting up Sikh temples or heralding the superiority of “Anglo-Saxon heritage.”

Walking While Black: The Senseless Killing of Trayvon Martin

March 24, 2012 • Darron Smith • African Americans, Americans of color, police, racial profiling, racism, social justice, violence, white racial frame, whites

The recent slaying of 17 year-old Trayvon Martin is yet another reminder of the every day presence of racism in the United States. I find it necessary to remind everyone that this is not an isolated incident, but one that occurs daily across America for most black men. The difference here is that the normal threats and harassment that Trayvon would typically encounter on any given day as a black man, turned into his innocent death. As Malcolm Gladwell discussed in the death of Amadou Diallo, an innocent black man in New York City who was mistakenly shot 19 times by 4 police officers (who fired a total of 41 shots), the decisions that George Zimmerman made about Trayvon Martin were done in a “blink of an eye”. His actions, on the other hand, were done in justification of his already conceived (and likely subconscious) thoughts about this young man rather than in response to Trayvon’s clearly non-threatening behavior. Any one of Zimmerman’s compilation of actions that fateful evening, if terminated, would have likely resulted in a different outcome, one where Trayvon would still be alive today. But Zimmerman is operating on societal-based stereotypes and assumptions of anti-black racial frames about black men that has been around since the mid-1600’s and continues in today’s white-dominated society.

I find it hard to understand why anyone would be foolish enough to discount the continuing assault on the black male presence. Black men have always been public enemy number one in white America, and that has not changed much in 400 years. Since slavery times, African American men were seen as threats to white manhood. Unrelenting white racial stereotypes around black male bodies provided the perfect justification for the incredible violence directed at them, whether in the cotton fields or working for his master in the big house.

Black men were clearly not on equal footing with other men, especially white men for centuries. The conditions, stories, received wisdoms and other discourses created by whites about black folk constituted predictable cognitive road maps or frames that white folks enacted on black bodies. Frames are patterned ways of thinking about human differences such as race that apply generally to people at large and influence our legal system, schooling, healthcare, unemployment and housing to name a few. The white racial frames created around “Black” were and remains anathema, which is certainly the case with Trayvon’s senseless death. The shooter, George Zimmerman, a man of apparent Latino heritage and self-proclaimed neighborhood watch captain, mystifies many white observers. Given that both black and brown people in American are oppressed, how could this be? What’s happening here is that Zimmerman is acting on the existing white racial frames that operate as unconscious scripts on how to interact with racial “others” in our society.

White racial framing of black male bodies is a large-scale centuries-old undertaking that not only affects white behavior toward Blacks, but black and Latino behaviors toward each other and themselves. These racial understandings have existed ever since Europeans first stepped foot on the Western shores of Africa and began a long and tortuous relationship with Africans. And this continues today where the steady stream of media portrayals of young black men as “dangerous” predators is too prolific in our society to ignore. Anyone reading this blog can certainly think of one or more stereotypes about black men. When you think of the face of crime, it is easy to conjure the image of Trayvon or another young man of color as the scary and dangerous “other” or the boogey man. Minorities are not immune to this frame or thought process. Latinos, Blacks and other Americans of color receive and act on many of the same white racial stereotypes and impulses, and Mr. Zimmerman is no exception.

Now, take the context of white society from its historical vantage point and see how it continues the play out (albeit less overt at times). Floridians have instituted a law that has resurrected the Wild Wild West, which allows an individual to take the law into his/her own hands. A law seemingly provoked by the looting that occurred following several Florida hurricanes. After filtered media images following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the assumption is that the people looting are black. Thus, the law can be interpreted such that if a black man is stealing, a white man can shoot and kill him. And the onus is placed on the victim from prove he was innocent of a crime before being shot. We have now gone even beyond the egregious “eye for an eye” and moved to a place where a heart can be taken for the loss of a finger, but no one seemed to care that the law implied it was the heart of a black man until it was taken literally. What results is that someone like Trayvon Martin has become caught in the crosshairs of a nation that has yet to truly reconcile its profoundly racist past.

While the nation continues to mount an all out and justifiable assault on the circumstances surrounding Trayvon’s death, let’s not forgot the conditions that gave rise to this young man’s death in the first place: white supremacy, or to put it nicely, a white dominated society. Rest in peace Trayvon Martin; may your death not be in vain.

Please sign this petition and forward to all concerned stakeholders.

Slavery By Another Name: Devastating History, Epic Research and Media Project

February 14, 2012 • Jessie Daniels • African Americans, history, video, violence

The Pulitzer-Prize winning book by Douglas Blackmon Slavery By Another Name (Doubleday, 2008), has also become a documentary film (and Sundance Film Festival selection). In this epic research and media project, Blackmon and his collaborators bring to light a period of time when slavery had officially ended, yet a new form of was being reinstated. Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel Corp.—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of “free” black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery. In the following (long for the web at just over 8 minutes) video clip, Blackmon describes how he came to write the book and why he thinks it’s important history for everyone in the U.S. to consider today:

In addition to the devastating historical account of the brutal oppression of African Americans by white overlords, there is a meta point to be made about the project as well. What Blackmon, along with filmmaker Sam Pollard and unnamed web production staff at PBS, have created here is a triumvirate of knowledge production in the digital age: a book, a documentary film, and an interactive website with additional materials. This, my scholarly friends, is the wave of the future in knowledge production. Doctoral students in the social science and humanities, take note: time to begin forging those collaborative working relationships with your friends in visual media, art and interactive design (and/or, cross-training on skills).

Interestingly, Blackmon has done this innovative scholarly project as a journalist and with the largess of his employer, the Wall Street Journal. One of my graduate school advisors used to say that “sociology is slow journalism,” but the reality is that really good journalism takes a long time – Blackmon says he thought this project would take him 2 years, but it ended up taking 7 years (the average length of time to complete a PhD dissertation). It would be great if more PhD-degree granting institutions began to recognize the potential for such cross-platform forms of knowledge production.

You can watch the entire film, “Slavery By Another Name,” along with the “Making Of…” on the PBS website, here.

Racial and Class Revolts (“riots”) in Britain

August 9, 2011 • Joe • Europe, police, politics, racism, urban, violence, white racial frame, whites

An article in the Grio by Lola Adesioye, a Black British writer, is titled “Riots were a long time coming for black Britons,” and helps to explain some of what is going on in the London and other urban rioting. She notes that

The riots have been ferocious. Buildings have been burned down, shopping centers looted, police and firemen attacked. People are afraid for their lives and their livelihoods.

And that many people there are calling even for the British army to come in and put down the rioting. We might note that the U.S. used military units to put down black revolts in the 1960s in several major cities, so this public and political orientation is not new.

Adesioye points out that the rioting started in the Tottenham area of North London, where conflict between the mostly white police and young black men has been at a high level for decades. Indeed there was another major riot in that area some 26 years back, involving earlier generations of white police and black Britons. The riot in 1985, as with these riots, started because of an apparent police malpractice incident. The Tottenham rioting reportedly started when a mostly white police unit called Trident shot and killed a black man, father of two, and nonviolent protests over that killing turned violent. The Trident unit had been started as a community-generated attempt to deal with black-on-black killings in the area, but she notes that many in that community now see it as “just another way in which the police can oppress young black men,” much like they do in the United States.

Adesioye summarizes her view of the causes of the riots by black Britons this way:

This violence is as a result of . . . unexamined racial issues, a crumbling sense of community among black people with no real leadership, unresolved class issues, social exclusion coupled with a lack of opportunities, a deep recession in addition to an extremely high cost of living, a new government who has been cutting back on services for youth, disenfranchised young people, and a dependency culture. . . . Black people are underrepresented in all areas of public British life from politics, to economics. . . . and we are overrepresented in crime and incarceration.

She further notes that the rioting has spread to other areas and involved nonblack young people, especially working class white youth, who also face major economic and social class barriers, especially under the new austerity policies of the new conservative British government.

What is entirely missing in Adesioye’s article, however, as in almost all research on U.S. rioting in the 1960s-1970s (and most research on racism and racial inequalities today), is a clear focus on the white, mostly male elite decisionmakers who are immediately or ultimately responsible for most of the underlying conditions of these British riots. These “racial issues” seems a very tame and deflecting way of saying “white racial oppression.” The white elite’s drive to keep British (and U.S.) society highly unequal lies behind most items in her list, yet even she does not call out these powerful whites. The beginning of wisdom on these matters is the what Michael Parenti calls the “reality principle,” that is the necessity of calling out and making transparent the underlying oppressive reality and the main agents in that reality. Race riots are always about oppressive underlying conditions, and often triggered by precipitating incidents caused by the police.

And do look at the individual comments made by people after the end of her article. Numerous whites make extraordinarily racist comments. And there are several comments about the possibility of racial riots in the United States. Of course, we as a country hold the record for the number of race riots over a few years in the 1960s and early 1970s—more than 500, with many lives lost and many people injured.

Given the extreme and growing economic inequality in this country between white and black Americans, and indeed between rich and working class whites, how long will it be before we see similar urban rioting in the United States?

The Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 43 Years Ago Today

April 3, 2011 • Ruben Rumbaut • African Americans, civil rights, racism, violence, whites

[Note: Professor Rubén G. Rumbaut sent this out to his class today. It reminds me of my own experiences that terrible day. Joe]

Martin Luther King, Jr. (born on January 15, 1929) did not live to see his 40th birthday, but he left us a legacy for all seasons. A religious man of modest origins, who like many of you majored in sociology in college (at BU) and became perhaps the greatest orator in American history, he was murdered in Memphis, TN, on April 4, 1968, at the young age of 39 — a brutal, senseless assassination that changed the narrative arc of history in ways we can scarcely imagine.

Each year I send my students a note on this fateful anniversary, with varying content — not least because I remember the date as if it was yesterday: I was a teenager in college, working 30 hours a week while going to school in St. Louis, Missouri, with hardly any savings… but enough to buy a plane ticket to Atlanta, Georgia, and make it in time to join the tens of thousands who lined the streets and marched in the funeral procession that followed his mule-drawn casket. I was not even a citizen of the United States then; but I was shocked and dismayed by the senselessness of the assassination of a man of peace at a time of war, and felt that the only meaningful way in which I could respond to was to make an acto de presencia, in silent solidarity. In a way, I have been making that trip of remembrance ever since.

What had brought Dr. King to Memphis the day before was the struggle of 1,300 black sanitation workers for economic justice. Seeking to join the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1733, they had gone on strike in February to protest years of poor treatment, indignities, discrimination, dangerous working conditions and two recent work-related deaths, while being denied the right of collective bargaining. Their picket signs had a simple but profound message: “I Am A Man.” On April 3, the last full day of his life, Dr. King had marched with the garbage workers, facing down the armed forces of a city and state, declaring that “work that serves humanity… has dignity and it has worth.”

This year, 2011, marked the 82nd anniversary of his birth–and the 56th of the Montgomery Bus Boycott that he led as a newly appointed minister (at an age not much older than most of you in this class), after a young woman, Rosa Parks, refused to sit on the back of a bus as required by the norms of the white supremacist Jim Crow system of caste segregation that had been in place since the previous century. That boycott brought both to national prominence and catalyzed a modern civil rights movement, the legacies of which continue to reverberate into the 21st century.

Beginning officially on January 20, 1986–after much controversy and nearly two decades after his assassination–the third Monday of every January became designated a national holiday to commemorate his life. [But not all states agreed to honor it; amazingly, it was not until 2000 before all 50 states did so. Arizona finally did under pressure after the Super Bowl was moved by the NFL from Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe to the Pasadena Rose Bowl in 1993.] Much of what is said and done in those annual days of remembrance amount to little more than a 30-second-sound-bite version of a man, a life, and a historic period that defy trivialization. Given the central relevance of his life and legacy to our course, this e-mail is an effort to do more than join in the collective trivialization, and to urge you to do likewise.

For those of you interested in exploring the extraordinary life, work, times and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., there is now a treasure trove of information–not only of most of his entire collection of published writings but also of his speeches on audiotape (so that you can listen to them just as they were delivered), as well as biographies, articles, an interactive chronology, videos in Real format, etc., plus information about the remarkable project that makes this possible–available online at: http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/. The link is also posted in our Soc 63 website: “Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University.”

I encourage you to visit the Stanford site and spend some time exploring it. For instance, you might want to find the audiolink to listen to selections from his remarkable speech at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination (the war at that time was in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan or Iraq, but what he had to say then remains eerily prescient now), and also read or print out the text of that speech, which is at: Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam, 4 April 1967

I am attaching … on the anniversary of his death, links to his shortest and best known speeches: the one he gave in Oslo when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 (he was but 35 years old at the time): December 10, 1964 – Acceptance Speech at Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony — and perhaps his most famous oration at the base of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963 (the occasion for which was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom coinciding with the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation): Martin Lu ther King, Jr., I Have a Dream, 28 August 1963. Yet Dr. King was no dreamer, but a man of action par excellence: Not one of you should graduate from college, or leave this class, without reading the classic essay he penned from jail in April of that same year: “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963). In it he wrote that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” He sought, indefatigably and with few illusions, economic and political power and justice for a people long downtrodden, as you’ll read in his August 1967 speech, “Where Do We Go From Here?”, but yet driven by the conviction that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

And he could be prophetic, never more so than in his last speech on April 3, 1968 in Memphis, exactly 43 years ago, the night before he was assassinated: “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”. In it he told the crowd about a bomb threat on his plane from Atlanta to Memphis that very morning, adding that he knew that his life was constantly in danger because of his political activism: “I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountaintop, and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.”

Today, even as we are once again shocked by assassinations in a ratcheted-up climate of hate (as in Tucson, AZ, last January, and around the world, as in the murderous rampage in Afghanistan this week provoked by the burning of a Koran by a self-proclaimed fundamentalist “pastor” in Gainesville, FL), do take a moment and go to the King project site to expand your awareness and knowledge of a life that made and continues to make a difference… and a voice for reason that is missed, and needed, more than ever.