Loading ...Archive for racism
Irish-Americans, Racism, and the Pursuit of Whiteness
Posted by: | CommentsFrom the archive (originally posted 03-17-2009): Today in New York City and throughout the U.S., Irish-Americans will celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and Irish heritage(
photo credit: ktylerconk). What few will acknowledge in this day of celebration is the way in which the Irish in American deployed whiteness in order to deflect the racism they encountered in the U.S.
Like many immigrant groups in the United States, the Irish were characterized as racial Others when they first arrived in the first half of the 19th century. The Irish had suffered profound injustice in the U.K. at the hands of the British, widely seen as “white negroes.” The potato famine that created starvation conditions that cost the lives of millions of Irish and forced the out-migration of millions of surviving ones, was less a natural disaster and more a complex set of social conditions created by British landowners (much like Hurricane Katrina). Forced to flee from their native Ireland and the oppressive British landowners, many Irish came to the U.S.
Once in the U.S., the Irish were to negative stereotyping that was very similar to that of enslaved Africans and African Americans. The comic Irishman – happy, lazy, stupid, with a gift for music and dance – was a stock character in American theater. Drunkenness and criminality were major themes of Irish stereotypes, and the term “paddy wagon” has its etymological roots in the racist term “paddy,” a shortening of the name “Patrick,” which was used to refer to the Irish. However, this is also a gendered image and refers to Irish men, specifically. The masculine imagery of “paddy” hides the existence of Irish women, but did not protect Irish women from racism as they were often more exposed to such racism through domestic jobs. Women typically played a key role in maintaining Catholic adherence, which resonates closely with Irishness and difference. The “model minority” (if you will) stereotype of Irish-American women is of a “Bridget,” recognized for her hard work and contribution to Irish upward class mobility.
Simian, or ape-like caricature of the Irish immigrant was also a common one among the mainstream news publications of the day (much like the recent New York Post cartoon). For example, in 1867 American cartoonist Thomas Nast drew “The Day We Celebrate” a cartoon depicting the Irish on St. Patrick’s Day as violent, drunken apes. And, in 1899, Harper’s Weekly featrued a drawing of three men’s heads in profile: Irish, Anglo-Teutonic and Negro, in order to illustrate the similarity between the Irish and the Negro (and, the supposed superiority of the Anglo-Teutonic). In northern states, blacks and Irish immigrants were forced into overlapping – often integrated – slum neighborhoods. Although leaders of the Irish liberation struggle (in Ireland) saw slavery as an evil, their Irish-American cousins largely aligned with the slaveholders.
And, following the end of slavery, the Irish and African Americans were forced to compete for the same low-wage, low-status jobs. So, the “white negroes” of the U.K. came to the United States and, though not enslaved, faced a status almost as low as that of recently-freed blacks. While there were moments of solidarity between Irish and African Americans, this was short lived.
Over the course of the 19th and early 20th century, Irish Americans managed to a great extent to enter and become part of the dominant white culture. In an attempt to secure the prosperity and social position that their white skin had not guaranteed them in Europe, Irish immigrants lobbied for white racial status in America. Although Irish people’s pale skin color and European roots suggested evidence of their white racial pedigree, the discrimination that immigrants experienced on the job (although the extent of the “No Irish Need Apply” discrimination is disputed), the simian caricatures they saw of themselves in the newspapers, meant that “whiteness” was a status that would be achieved, not ascribed.
For some time now, Irish-Americans have been thoroughly regarded as “white.” Evidence of this assimilation into whiteness is presented by Mary C. Waters (Harvard) in a recent AJPH article, in which she writes that “the once-rigid lines that divided European-origin groups from one another have increasingly blurred.” Waters goes on to predict that the changes that European immigrants ahve experienced are “becoming more likely for groups we now define as ‘racial.’” While I certainly agree that the boundaries of whiteness are malleable – it is a racial category that expands and contracts based on historical, cultural and social conditions – I don’t know if it is malleable enough to include all the groups we now define as ‘racial’ Others.
As people rush to embrace even fictive Irish heritage and encourage strangers to “Kiss Me I’m Irish” today, take just a moment to reflect on the history of racism and the pursuit of whiteness wrapped up in this holiday.
College Racism — Again
Posted by: | CommentsGraffiti was discovered warning that on Feb. 2, 2010, the safety of black students here on campus at Hocking College would be in jeopardy
said Hocking College president Dr. Ron Erickson, as reported by the Associated Press. A follow-up note stating “kill the [n-word]” was also found. At least two African American students have permanently withdrawn from the school, and numerous others have moved off-campus.
As reported by the Associated Press, campus spokesperson Judy Sinnott said
Any time that there are young people, you know, there’s going to be tension. Young people will be young people.
Let’s just be clear: Dismissing racial violence (expressed in words or in action) as just “kids being kids” sends a dangerous and clear message of who is protected and, hence, valued at the university, and who is not.
The news coverage (such as here ) reveals striking differences in responses from white students, who thought it was overblown and just a joke, compared to responses from African American students, who reported concern for their safety. In Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage (Routledge, 2007), Joe Feagin and I discuss the frequency of backstage racist joking among white college students who often dismissed it as “no big deal” as long as they didn’t get caught.
For these students in our research, racist joking was just part of the fun: There were no negative repercussions, and no connections to the larger racial hierarchy. A hostile racial climate could absolutely account for the ambivalent reaction by some white students at Hocking College.
The threats at Hocking College are absolutely a way of instilling fear. Whether or not the threats are carried out, it has already achieved the consequences desired by the person(s) who wrote the threat. The African American students likely did not withdraw simply due to fear of this isolated event, but we can speculate about a hostile racial climate on this campus, and sadly, on many college campuses across the country.American
Racial Bias Affects Perceptions of Victims’ Need
Posted by: | CommentsResearchers at Kansas State University have found that racial bias affects people’s perceptions of those in need. Researchers Donald Saucier, associate professor of psychology, and psychology graduate students Sara Smith, Topeka, and Jessica McManus, Maineville, Ohio, surveyed undergraduate students a year after Hurricane Katrina to examine their perceptions of the hurricane victims and the helping response. Here’s a brief recap of the study from Science Daily:
The researchers created a questionnaire that evaluated the participants’ perceptions of Hurricane Katrina victims. The questionnaire evaluated whom the participants perceived to be the victims based on measures like gender, race and socioeconomic status. The results showed that participants generally thought people impacted by Hurricane Katrina were black and lower class.
“What we wanted to do was see how perceptions of victims of Hurricane Katrina would interact with things like racism,” Saucier said. “We wanted to look at how much the participants felt that the victims may have been to blame for their own situation in Katrina.”
The researchers measured differences in the participants, including their levels of conservatism, empathy and racism. The findings showed that when recalling victims of Hurricane Katrina, participants who were less racist thought the victims did not receive adequate help from the government. Participants who were more racist thought the victims received adequate government assistance and were at fault for their situation. The survey also asked questions that measured whether the participants thought the victims had enough time to evacuate and whether they had enough resources to get out before the hurricane hit.
“We asked the participants to make personality attributions about individuals, such as whether they thought the victims were lazy, stupid, sinful or unlucky,” Saucier said. “If they said they were lazy, stupid or sinful, they were putting more blame on the victims for the situation. If they said they were unlucky, they took away the blame.”
The results of the study showed that when recalling victims of Hurricane Katrina, participants who were less racist thought the victims did not receive adequate help from the government. Participants who were more racist thought the victims received adequate government assistance and were at fault for their situation.
Their findings are not surprising but disturbing nonetheless given the continued harrowing news out of Haiti. Recent news from Democracy Now confirms what I anticipated last week, namely that racism is hindering relief efforts in Port-au-Prince.
More on Haiti: Will Racism Hinder Relief?
Posted by: | CommentsThere’s a lot of good news about relief efforts to Haiti. As just one example, Haiti-born musician Wyclef Jean’s online and mass media efforts to help his home country have raised $400,000 in the first day. Yet, at the same time, there is a strong current of racism directed toward Haitians that may hinder relief to this devastated Island nation.
In a conversation with Dr. Goddess on Twitter yesterday, she brought my attention to the casual racism of this individual (if her profile is to be believed, a young, white female who loves both beer and Jesus in equal measure):
But surely, I can hear the objections now, this is just the misguided rant of an uneducated person. This young woman is surely an outlier, the exception, rather than the rule. Perhaps. About the same time, I heard the reports of Rev. Pat Robertson explaining what had happened in Haiti:
“…something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, Napoleon III, or whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we will serve you if you get us free from the French. True story. So the devil said okay it’s a deal, so the Hatians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since then they have been cursed by one thing after another. Desperately poor, the island of Hispanola is one side, on the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts et cetera, Haiti is in desperate poverty. They need to have, and we need to pray for them, and out of this tragedy I’m optimistic something good may come, but right now we’re helping the suffering people and the suffering is unimaginable.”
So, rather than a proud history of resisting colonial oppression, Haitians are – in Robertson’s mind – aligned with the devil. This seems rather stark racism, in my view, but certainly coat-and-tie racism. While it’s easy to dismiss Robertson as a crank, his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) has a global television audience. CBN was at one time the largest supplier of 24-hour cable programming in the world, claiming to reach 66 foreign countries through 150 local stations, 2,500 satellite cable systems, and even through the U.S. Armed Forces Radio and Television Network. Although the influence and reach of the network has declined in recent years, it would be a mistake to underestimate Robertson’s influence on his audience. The Haitian Ambassador, Raymond Joseph, offered an eloquent rebuttal to Robertson’s nonsense on Maddow’s show last night, saying:
“I would like the whole world to know — America especially — that the independence of Haiti, when the slave rose up against the French and defeated the French army — powerful army — the U.S. was able to gain the Louisiana territory for $15 million. That’s 3 cents an acre. That’s 13 states west of the Mississippi that the Haitian slave revolt in Haiti provided. Also the revolt of the rebels in Haiti allowed Latin America to be free. So, what pact the Haitian made with the devil has helped the United States become what it is.”
Unfortunately, Maddow and the rest of MSNBC do not hold much of the audience share compared to conservative outlets, such as Fox. So, while this thumping by the Haitian Ambassador is getting lots of play by liberal and left-leaning bloggers, it’s not making much of a dent in the conservative reverberation chamber.
And, that brings me to the largest (ahem) conservative pundit of them all, Rush Limbaugh, sometimes referred to as the de facto chair of the Republican party. Limbaugh seems to be the hands-down leader so far in efforts to use racism to hinder relief efforts to Haiti. His recent remarks on the earthquake:
“In the Haiti earthquake, ladies and gentleman, in the words of Rahm Emanuel, ‘we have another crisis simply too good to waste,’” the conservative talk show host remarked. “This will play right into Obama’s hands, humanitarian, compassionate.”
“They’ll use this to burnish their, shall we say, credibility with the black community, in the light-skinned and black-skinned community in this country,” Limbaugh added. “It’s made to order for them. That’s why he could not wait to get out there. Could not wait to get out there.”
In fact, as Allen McDuffee points out at his blog, Governmentality, it’s right-wing organizations like the Heritage Foundation, that are eyeing the Haitian earthquake opportunistically.
Limbaugh also suggested falsely that the U.S. has “already donated” to Haiti through U.S. income. Limbaugh, like Robertson, would be easy enough to dismiss were it not for the large audience his show commands and the rather remarkable political power he wields.
And, then there is the liberal racism of mainstream television shows that obsessively report about white, Western victims of the earthquake while spending comparatively less time on the majority of indigenous, Haitian residents, as if whiteness is the sine qua non for personhood and empathy.
Whether or not racism – from the crass Twitter comments, to the racist propaganda of Robertson and Limbaugh, to the white hegemony of television talk shows - will hinder relief efforts to Haiti, only time will tell. My hope is that this crisis will, in the words of Ferentz Lafargue, prompt us to think not only “about Haiti’s plight today, but to whatever extent possible two years and two decades from today” (h/t @dumilewis, @DavePurcell).
Islamophobia: Popular, Acceptable Form of Racism
Posted by: | CommentsIslamophobia, and the racial profiling of almost anyone not white, seems to be the popular and acceptable form of racism these days. Following the Christmas Day attempt to blow up an airplane bound for Detroit by Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, a Nigerian and a Muslim, a majority of Americans favor racial and ethnic profiling be used in airline security. Recent poll data from Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds:
“…59% of adults say factors such as race, ethnicity and overall appearance should be used to determine which boarding passengers to search at airports. Twenty-six percent (26%) say these factors should not be used to determine which passengers to search. Another 15% are not sure. Interestingly, however, even more Americans (71%) believe such profiling is necessary in today’s environment. Eighteen percent (18%) disagree and see profiling as an unnecessary violation of civil rights. Men feel more strongly than women that profiling is necessary in the modern environment. Sixty-eight percent (68%) of men say profiling should be used to determine which boarding passengers to search, but just 51% of women agree. Sixty-two percent (62%) of whites and 52% of those of other races say profiling should be used at airports. African-Americans are more closely divided on the question.”
This is striking data suggesting that Americans are quite willing to jettison civil rights in the service of stereotypes and racial prejudice. It’s also based on faulty reasoning. Quite simply, racial profiling doesn’t work. As Arsalan Iftikhar, writing for CNN, points out:
For years, the concept of “racial profiling” has reportedly undermined important terrorist investigations here in the United States. Most notably, these examples include the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in which the two white male domestic terrorists, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, were able to flee while officers operated on the theory that the act had been committed by “Arab terrorists” for the first 48 hours of the investigation.
Similarly, during the October 2002 Washington-area sniper investigation, the African-American man and boy ultimately accused of the crime reportedly were able to pass through multiple road blocks with the alleged murder weapon in their possession, in part, because police ‘profilers’ theorized the crime had been committed by a white male acting alone.
According to a report last summer by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Rights Working Group to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination: “Both Democratic and Republican administrations [in the United States] have acknowledged that racial profiling is unconstitutional, socially corrupting and counter-productive, yet this unjustifiable practice remains a stain on American democracy and an affront to the promise of racial equality.”
If the fact that racial profiling is tremendously ineffective doesn’t seem to deter the American impulse to want to “do something” following this lastest attempt at a terrorist act, perhaps considering the fact that this sort of knee-jerk, McCarthyism stands in stark constrast to democratic ideals of equality will temper this reaction. I fear that such an appeal will fall on deaf ears and there’s growing evidence that this is so.
Consider, for example, a recent interview with Retired Lt. Gen. on Fox News (opens video), in which he flatly states that we should profile and strip search all 18-28-year-old muslim men. In my view, this qualifies as Islamaphobia - prejudice and discrimination against Islam and against Muslims. It seems clear that this is a popular, and increasingly acceptable, form of mainstream racism.
And, as another example, Ed Koch – former mayor of New York City – saying in another recent interview (opens video) that “not every Muslim is a terrorist, but “hundreds of millions are,” which is just patently false as the protest by peace-loving Muslims in Detroit, outside the courthouse where Abdulmuttalab was being arraigned, demonstrates. But, as we see again and again on this blog, such racism is unlikely to be moved by logic and rational argument.
A writer using the name ‘unspeakable’ asks at Daily Kos: do Arabs and Muslims have a place in America? I want the answer to this rhetorical question to be a resounding, “yes, of course!” Increasingly, I fear that my country is saying “no.”
Systemic Racism & the “Race to Execution”
Posted by: | CommentsThe New York Times reported recently that a leading group, The American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the current system of capital punishment almost 50 years ago, pronounced the project a failure and walked away from it (h/t to Sister Scholar). Even though there were other important changes in news about the death penalty last year, including that the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely, but none of these changes was as significant as the institute’s move, which represents “a tectonic shift in legal theory.” The WSJ has more analysis of this issue here, suggesting we’re the throes of an upheaval in the administration of the death penalty.
We write here often about systemic racism and what that means. For compelling evidence about how race is built in to the very fabric of U.S. society, one needn’t look much further than the evidence about the race and the death penalty. Race is the single greatest factor in who lives and who dies when it comes to death penalty cases. A black defendant who kills a white victim is up to 30 times more likely to be sentenced to death than a white defendant who kills a black victim.
The imposition of the death penalty is even more likely when there is a black defendant and a predominantly white jury. Most minority defendants, especially in death penalty cases, are judged by predominantly white jurors. White male jurors can be especially persuasive in death penalty cases. Researcher Bowers, Steiner and Sandys (2001) analyzed cases in which a black defendant was accused of murdering a white victim found that the racial composition of the jury matters in death penalty cases. Once the proportion of white male jurors reaches 70%, the death penalty is far more likely.
The U.S. Supreme Court took this kind of data into consideration when it ruled in 1972 in the Furman v. George case and struck down the death penalty as “arbitrary and capricious.” Then, in 1987, the Supreme Court ruled again on the death penalty. In the McCleskey v. Kemp case, the court refused to overturn an individual decision to execute a particular man solely based on the bias in the system. Basically, what the Supreme Court basically decided that it didn’t want to look at the “statistics about race” because it wouldn’t consider the social science evidence in the case. The evidence, had they considered it, overwhelmingly showed a pattern of racial bias in who lives and who dies in death penalty cases.
instead, what the Supreme Court was suggesting was that they wanted to look at whether race played a role in each individual case, not at systemic racism. In some ways, what the Supreme Court was doing with this case was rejecting social science in the law and declaring that racial inequality is ineradicable and inevitable.
This is where the The American Law Institute comes in. They were attempting to “fix” what had been broken with the 1987 McCleskey v. Kemp decision, and see if there was some way to administer the death penalty in way that didn’t just reinforce racial discrimination already in place. Now, the organization has decided to abandon the project and admitted it was a failure. Another way of looking at this news is that this is further evidence that the death penalty is deeply, systematically racist and should be abolished.
There is a powerful documentary that tells this story in a fresh way called “Race to Execution” and it’s directed by Rachel Lyon, narrated by Charles Ogletree. While it’s been out a couple of years now, it recently re-aired on my local PBS station and I was moved by it once again. It’s a really powerful, and nuanced, telling of human stories of those affected by the death penalty interwoven with the court cases and social science research about race and the death penalty. (If you’re considering it for the classroom, there is lots of great additional material here.)
If race is the single greatest factor in who lives and who dies, and now the leading legal organization in the nation has admitted defeat in trying to change that, isn’t it time to abolish the death penalty and put an end to state-sponsored racism?
More Invisible Americans: Bias in Media Reporting on Latinos
Posted by: | Comments
The Pew Hispanic Center’s useful Excellence-in-Journalism website reports a survey of the media’s skewed reporting on Latinos, and severe under-reporting of numerous matters of importance to Latinos and others, but falling outside the white-racial-frame’s concerns with Latinos.
photo credit: tortuga767
From early February to early August 2009 they examined 34,452 news accounts on 55 major U.S. news outlets– 13 newspapers, 15 cable programs, 7 broadcast networks’ news programs, 12 prominent news websites, 9 news radio/talk programs. Among thousands of news accounts were only 2.9 percent (645) dealing substantially with Latinos at all. Of these
only a tiny number, 57 stories, focused directly on the lives of Hispanics in the U.S.
The most covered event was the nomination and confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, 39 percent of all accounts dealing with Latinos:
The Mexican drug war came second at 15%; the outbreak of H1NI flu (with its origin in Mexico City) was third, at 13%. . . . Immigration, the number four topic, accounted for just 8.4% of the coverage involving Hispanics during these six months. . . . Immigration, which from 2006 through 2008 had been heavily debated in Congress and on the political campaign trail, was the subject of fewer than one in ten stories involving Latinos, a reflection of the degree to which the issue largely fell off the radar during the early months of the Obama Administration.
I guess the mostly white controllers of the mass media think Latinos are these days mostly about drugs, the flu source, and problematical immigration. The everyday stuff of Latinos’ lives gets little attention–even though there are now about 48 million Latinos in the United States:
In the small portion of coverage that dealt with the experiences of Hispanics living in the U.S., the most common storyline was the effect of the recession. Next was the immigrant experience, after that was population growth and changing demographics, and then the question of fair treatment and discrimination.
And this for a group growing in significance in 90 percent of U.S. counties and forecast to be 129 million (29 percent of Americans by mid-century). The researchers also found that other Americans of color (Asians, Africans/African-Americans) got even less serious media attention in this period. Whites’ power and privilege again?
(For some stories rarely covered in mainstream media see, just to take one example, the
United Farmworkers website, and listing of recent successes in improving farm workers lives. Also see their worker news blogging at dailykos here.)
New Research Suggests Obama Supporters See Whiteness
Posted by: | CommentsNew research suggests that people’s political views influence how they see biracial candidates (h/t Louise Seamster). When it comes to President Obama (who is biracial), supporters tend to view him as ‘whiter’ than those who are not supporters. The research, published in a recent issue of the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted by Eugene M. Caruso, Nicole L. Mead, and Emily Balcetis. The researchers used a series of experiments to demonstrate that political partisanship influences people’s visual representations of a biracial political candidate’s skin tone.
In the first experiment, participants rated photographs of a hypothetical biracial candidate. In the second and third experiment, participants rated photographs Barack Obama. What the participants didn’t know was that researchers had altered the photographs to make the candidate’s skin tone either lighter or darker than it was in the original photograph. This is, as Omar mentioned, a very cool study.
People in the study who shared the same political views as the candidate, consistently rated the lightened photographs as more representative of the candidate than the darkened photographs. On the other hand, participants whose political views were at odds with the candidate, consistently rated the darkened photographs as more representative. In other words, if they agreed with the candidate, they tended to see them as lighter-skinned, or”whiter”, but if they disagreed, then the candidate was “darker.”
In the experiments where people were asked to rate photographs of Barack Obama, there was a positive correlation between having voted for Obama in the 2008 Presidential election and rating the lightened photos of him as more representative. Obama supporters, in other words, see him as whiter than those who are not supporters.
These findings are interesting on a number of levels, but most of all the results suggest that our deeply held perceptions of race influence how we interpret visual information. Often times, people talk about race as if it were self-evident, obvious way to categorize people. In fact, race is malleable. Who we see as “white” or not white is shaped by many things, including political views. This is also another example of the kind of colorism that Adia and Ed have discussed here recently. The misbegotten notion that “if you’re white, you’re alright,” is one that profoundly shapes how we see the world.
For more, there’s an interview with one of the researchers here.
Racist Employment Practices in a Recession
Posted by: | CommentsThe New York Times has a useful article touching on some recent research on discrimination in employment against black workers with college degrees:
College-educated black men, especially, have struggled relative to their white counterparts in this downturn, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate for black male college graduates 25 and older in 2009 has been nearly twice that of white male college graduates — 8.4 percent compared with 4.4 percent. Various academic studies have confirmed that black job seekers have a harder time than whites. A study published several years ago in The American Economic Review titled “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” found that applicants with black-sounding names received 50 percent fewer callbacks than those with white-sounding names. A more recent study, published this year in The Journal of Labor Economics found white, Asian and Hispanic managers tended to hire more whites and fewer blacks than black managers did.
The focus seems to be just on black men. But black women also face much racial discrimination, as well as gendered-racist discrimination in workplaces, doing business, and elsewhere.
The journalist adds this about the well-educated black men featured in the article:
It is difficult to overstate the degree that they say race permeates nearly every aspect of their job searches, from how early they show up to interviews to the kinds of anecdotes they try to come up with. “You want to be a nonthreatening, professional black guy,” said Winston Bell, 40, of Cleveland, who has been looking for a job in business development
The article reports that many black men hide their racial identity in their resumes because that reduces the discrimination, at least initially, against them.
Not once in the article, however, are the main and major perpetrators of this employment discrimination, mostly white male managers and executives, featured as the central creators of this deep U.S. problem. There is a tone here and there of “they say race permeates,” which softens the analysis of racism. There is of course much evidence and research such journalists could have examined on the white racist framing in the heads of many white executives, whose racialized thinking and action out of that framing needs to be the center of such stories. Such racist practices are old, foundational, and systemic. For even the more “liberal” analysts, yet, they still mostly get presented as episodic and/or tacked on to an otherwise unproblematical society, with white perpetrators seldom problematized.
