The Perceived Value of Intercultural Competence

• • cultural competency, culture, democracy, ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism, global perspective, international, racism

A new survey titled “Falling Short? College Learning and Career Success” by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) reveals significant disparities between the perceptions of students and employers related to readiness for future careers and the importance of diversity and intercultural learning outcomes. The survey sample includes 613 students at private and public two and four year institutions and 400 CEO’s and executives from private or non-profit organizations.

One of the most surprising metrics is that less than two in five employers rated the following learning outcomes as very important:
Awareness of and experience with diverse cultures and communities within the U.S. 37%
Staying current on global developments and trends 25%
Awareness of and experience with cultures and societies outside of the United States 23%
Proficiency in a language other than English 23%

Despite the lack of emphasis by employers on these diversity and democratic learning outcomes, employers rated students as less prepared in these areas than the students did themselves:
Competency
Employer Rating//Student Rating

Awareness of and experience with diverse cultures and communities within the U.S. 25% //48%
Staying current on global developments and trends 16% //34%
Awareness of and experience with cultures and societies outside of the United States 15% //42%
Proficiency in a language other than English 16% //34%

Only 21 percent of employers strongly agreed that all college students should gain intercultural skills and an understanding of societies outside the U.S., while 57 percent agreed somewhat. By contrast, 87 percent of students felt that such skills were important. A similar gap was found between employer and student perceptions of the knowledge students should have of democratic institutions and preparation for citizenship in a democratic society.

The lack of emphasis on intercultural understanding by employers is striking, given the fact that in the U.S. alone there are more than 20,000 multinational companies, that exceed the number of companies in the Fortune 1,000 or the Fortune 5,000. And the average U.S. based multinational company generates roughly 45 percent of their revenue from countries outside the U.S. The boundary between local and global has become blurred, as most companies compete in a global marketplace.

The survey also reveals that students agree with employers on the value of cross-cutting skills of teamwork, communication, critical thinking, ethical decision-making and applying knowledge in real-world settings as learning outcomes. Ironically, however, in a global society and even within the United States all of these components demand a high level of cultural competency, a recognition of cultural pluralism, and the ability to communicate effectively with individuals from diverse backgrounds and cultures. Perhaps the employers’ perspectives could be viewed as what Derald Wing Sue calls “ethnocentric monoculturalism,” a Eurocentric focus that fails to recognize the importance of connections and communication in a multicultural society and global economic environment. Instead, as Rosabeth Moss Kanter indicates, the reality is that companies need to thrive locally in a global economy by creating new world-class mindsets that embody globally relevant skills.

While employers in the AACU survey endorsed an applied learning emphasis in higher education, they also appeared not to acknowledge the importance of intercultural skills and competence as part of what is needed in an applied learning focus. If we are indeed living in what Fareed Zakaria calls “the rise of the rest” in a post-American world defined and directed by people from many locations our educational systems, in turn, must be finely tuned to the development of the applied cultural competency needed for college graduates to thrive in this new, global millennium. As he writes:

Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that by the turn of the 21st century, the United States had succeeded in its great, historical mission—globalizing the world. We don’t want them to write that along the way, we forgot to globalize ourselves.

Whiteness and Global Academia: Sociological Observations

• • Africa, global racism, inequality, international, sociology

I have recently taken a look at the list of the current board members of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Labour Movements. I was convinced that the composition of the board would reflect, at least to some extent, the diversity of the global sociological community and the fact that labor movements are a global phenomenon.

To my utter surprise, I immediately realized that there was not even one Black African scholar among the sixteen members of the board. And, even more strikingly, the Africa Regional Representative is a white woman from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg …

Not only Black sociologists from Africa, but also Black sociologists in general are glaringly absent from this important committee. The president is a white South African woman, again from the University of Witwatersrand, and there is yet another white woman from another South African university among the board members (a most peculiar fact).

Five other members, from Europe, the United States and Australia, are white, too, and the Regional Representative for Latin America, a Brazilian sociologist, would be identified as white in many parts of the world. Both vice-presidents are white men from Europe. There are no board members from the Caribbean, and the Brazilian member is the only Latin American one.

It is obvious that this important committee of the best known and most largest international sociological organization is grotesquely and shockingly dominated by white researchers; but somehow this grotesque and shocking fact seems to have gone unnoticed, as if it were somehow “normal” that such committees are white-dominated, “normal” that even though the ISA currently has members from 167 countries, the white members are far more likely to access positions of power and play a significant role inside the organization.

In 1969, at the annual meeting of the African Studies Association in Montreal, some African and African American scholars publicly expressed their justified outrage at the white domination of this organization by staging a walk-out and an occupation protest. After the ASA meeting, the African descendant scholars, led by the eminent and largely self-taught historian John Henrik Clarke, founded a new organization devoted to African studies, African Heritage Studies Association, which organized its first annual conference in 1970, at the historically black Howard University. The AHSA describes itself on its website as “the major challenger of Eurocentric view of Africa and African Studies.”

One is left to wonder if Black/African descendant sociologists are likely to revolt against the white domination of the ISA in the foreseeable future, despite the enormous imbalance of power between them and white scholars.

Significantly, a sociologist who was one of the presidents of the ISA in recent years, the Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka (he was the ISA president in the years 2002-2006), has displayed on many occasions a complete misunderstanding of the position of those who oppose white-dominated sociology.

Ever since Akinsola Akiwowo made a call for ‘indigenous African sociology’, I have been puzzled by such claims and searched for possible examples of those alternative, indigenous sociologies. Akiwowo did not provide one, and because he based his conclusions in the area of the sociology of knowledge on the empirical evidence of African oral poetry [it] does not indicate any alternative sociology, but new original data to support (or undermine, as the case might be) the ‘mainstream’ sociology of knowledge of Marx and Mannheim

wrote Sztompka in his 2011 article “Another Sociological Utopia.”

Sztompka clearly believes that sociology is a discipline created by white Western scholars, but (mysteriously) free from any white-centric bias and fully trustworthy, and that alternative approaches are neither needed nor possible. His views did not in the least prevent him from reaching the highest position of power inside the ISA: this fact speaks volumes about the imbalance of power inside the global sociological community.

Joanna Tegnerowicz is a specialist in the history of ideas and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology of the University of Wroclaw in Poland

United Nations’ Universal Declaration Of Human Rights: A Personal Perspective

• • activism, civil rights, human rights, international, politics, white elites

At the conclusion of the forthcoming third edition of Joe Feagin’s Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations, he recommends that a new constitutional convention for a true multiracial democracy begin with the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights ratified in 1948. Feagin points out that the United States has never had a constitutional convention that represented all or even the majority of the population. As he notes, the original constitutional convention that met in Philadelphia in 1787 was comprised of 55 white men, representing only 5 percent of the population, and did not include white women, Native Americans, or African Americans.

Feagin’s identification of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights brings to mind the work of my father, Dr. Hung-Ti Chu, at the United Nations and his great personal admiration for Eleanor Roosevelt who shepherded the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to its ratification by the General Assembly. My father joined the United Nations in 1946 during the time the Declaration was drafted as a member of the Human Rights Division, and remained at the U.N. in the Secretariat until he retired more than twenty years later. He recalled that Eleanor Roosevelt considered the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be the Magna Carta for all humankind. She viewed her role in securing adoption of the Declaration of Human Rights as her greatest achievement. Several years earlier, as a member of the steering committee of the International Student Conference representing the five great world powers, my father had breakfasted with her in the White House and was invited to sit in on FDR’s Fireside Chats over the radio.

My father came to this country as a scholarship student in recognition of his work in the Chinese nationalist movement, receiving his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Illinois in 1937. In 1942, he was invited to become President of Yunnan University in his home province of Yunnan, China, but due to political events and the Communist takeover, was not able to return. After joining the United Nations, he later served as the Principal Secretary of the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea, and gave the opening speech of the first democratically-elected National Assembly in Korean history.

Following the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1946, Eleanor Roosevelt accepted a position offered by President Harry Truman on the first United States delegation to the United Nations. At the time she was the only woman on the delegation and in her words:

I knew that as the only woman, I ‘d better be better than anybody else. So I read every paper. And they were very dull sometimes, because State Department papers can be very dull. And I used to almost go to sleep over them, and– [laughs] But I did read them all. I knew that if I in any way failed, it would not be just my failure; it would be the failure of all women. There’d never be another woman on the delegation.

In a perceptive article titled “Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” John Sears states that many believe that the U.N. Commission on Human Rights that drafted the Declaration of Human Rights would not have succeeded without the skillful leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt in chairing the Commission. Without legal or parliamentary training, she oversaw the drafting of the Declaration through weeks of arguing over the meaning of each word and phrase.

The initial commission appointed to recommend a structure for the Human Rights Commission consisted of Eleanor Roosevelt and representatives from Norway, Belgium, China, India, Yugoslavia and the ambassador to the United States from China, Dr. C.L. Hsia. Dr. Hsia was a close personal friend and mentor of my father.

Furthermore, as Sears notes, Eleanor Roosevelt insisted upon the unequivocal anti-discrimination article in the Declaration. She believed it would support the struggle for civil rights in the United States and was aware of the shortcomings of this country in attaining these rights. She even clashed with members of the State Department who did not believe that economic and social rights belonged in a bill of human rights.

The U.N.’s Declaration of Universal Human Rights adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948 asserts that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and that “all are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.” Eleanor Roosevelt’s uncompromising view of universal human rights identifies the source of such rights in events close to home, such as in our everyday interactions:

Where, after all, do universal rights begin? In small places, close to home (…) Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.

In a time when women’s leadership was not widely accepted, Eleanor Roosevelt was truly “the first lady of the United States,” a skillful and practical negotiator, able to maneuver in confidence in male-dominated diplomatic circles, able to build the consensus necessary to forge a lasting testament to the freedom, equality, and dignity of all human beings.

The Segregation of Seattle’s John Stanford “International” School

• • Asian Americans, education, immigration, international, racism, resegregation of schools, systemic racism

About 15 years ago, John Stanford became head of Seattle Public Schools. He had a vision. Recognizing the demands of a global economy and an increasingly diverse student body, he proposed an international language school. Key components included: proficiency in English and at least one other language, global perspectives infused into all areas of study (rather than being “add-ons”), and partnerships with parents, community leaders, and international sister schools. His vision led to Seattle creating a network of international schools, featuring immersion programs and curriculum that prepare students to be globally competent in the 21st century. The first, John Stanford International School (elementary), opened in 2000 with two immersion tracks, Japanese-English and Spanish-English.

 

International public schools, now seen across the nation, are a huge departure from trends of the recent past which discouraged multilingual learning based on the assumption that it would be confusing for young children. Implicit in this assumption was an insidious message about assimilation to mainstream culture through fluency in English and abandonment of native tongues. Immigrant parents were led to believe their children would suffer, be slow, or “dumber” than their monolingual counterparts. Many Americans today are all too familiar with our history of educational pressure to conform, and can easily recount personal and painful stories about loss of heritage language and access to culture.

Research on dual language development has grown substantially since the 1970s. We now know there are actually many cognitive benefits for young children simultaneously exposed to more than one language. These children have greater brain activity and denser tissue in areas related to memory, attention, and language. They have performed better on measures of analytical ability, concept formation, cognitive flexibility, and metalinguistic skills. Evidence also suggests that children who continue to learn academic concepts in their native language while gradually learning English outperform academically and socially children who are immersed in English-only programs.

So, did John Stanford lay the foundation for global elementary education in Seattle? Not quite. In her long awaited second book Can We Talk About Race? Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D., alarmingly spotlights the slow resegregation of our nation’s schools over the last decade. She shows how a series of recent legislations reverting school assignments to neighborhood have led to the undoing of much achieved by Brown v. Board of Education. Given that much of the U.S. is still severely divided across racial lines when it comes to housing, schools have naturally fallen back into segregated patterns.

Seattle is no exception. After a decade of other unsuccessful efforts to desegregate its schools, Seattle School District instituted mandatory busing in 1977. reaching its racial-enrollment goals 3 yrs later. However the District ended busing in 1989 and the racial balance at Seattle schools began to unravel. In 2007 Seattle parents played a pivotal role in legislative resegregation in the Supreme Court case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No.1. The Court prohibited assigning students to public schools solely for the purpose of achieving racial integration and declined to recognize racial balancing as a compelling state interest. For years, Seattle parents had been given wide latitude to pick and choose schools for their children. In June 2009 however, Seattle Public Schools adopted a new student assignment plan reverting to a community-based approach, sending students to schools closest to home. The plan was phased in from 2010-2011.

2010 Census results indicated that more than a third of Seattle residents were persons of color. This population grew 26% from 1990-2000, and 32% from 2000-2010. The largest non-White racial group in Seattle is Asian and Pacific Islander living predominantly in the South end (International District, Rainier Valley, Beacon Hill) and outside the city in parts of Bellevue, Redmond, Kent, Bothell, Auburn, SeaTac and Maple Valley. Despite these statistics, John Stanford’s visionary first International School and Japanese immersion program, is located in North Seattle, Wallingford. A predominantly White neighborhood. Originally parents from all over the city could apply to John Stanford. Children with Japanese heritage were given priority.

But since the district reverted to neighborhood assignment, only students within the assignment zone may attend. According to the School District’s own annual reports (before 2010) and school reports (2010-), while John Stanford’s Asian student body remained constant at about 23% from 2004-2010, its White student body grew from 41% in 2004 to 56% in 2009/10. When the neighborhood school assignment was phased in from 2010-2011, John Stanford’s White student body jumped up to 61% while it’s Asian student body dropped to 13% (though 10% newly identified as multiracial and some may have been part Asian). This racial demographic shift certainly doesn’t reflect what is happening in the city at large. When I called the school to confirm, an impatient woman curtly told me that the drop in Asian attendees was not true and that the school had just added a kindergarten class. When I told her my own son has Japanese heritage and I was interested to apply, she told me I couldn’t because we didn’t live in the zone.

Is John Stanford International School teaching students to be globally competent in the 21st century? Or is it teaching them racial exclusion and preferences of old?

Sharon Chang’s great blog is here.

Livestreaming Now: Whiteness & Health Roundtable Today at CUNY Graduate Center (Updated)

• • academic, anti-racism, blogging, children, colonialism, critical race theory, digital video, family, gendered racism, health, international, Internet, media, racism, white privilege, white racial frame, whiteness, whites

The archived video(s) of An Exploration of Whiteness and Health A Roundtable Discussion

is available beginning here (updated 12/16/12):

The examination of whiteness in the scholarly literature is well established (Fine et al., 1997; Frankenberg, 1993; Hughey, 2010; Twine and Gallagher, 2008). Whiteness, like other racial categories, is socially constructed and actively maintained through the social boundaries by, for example, defining who is white and is not white (Allen, 1994; Daniels, 1997; Roediger, 2007; Wray, 2006). The seeming invisibility of whiteness is one of its’ central mechanisms because it allows those within the category white to think of themselves as simply human, individual and without race, while Others are racialized (Dyer, 1998). We know that whiteness shapes housing (Low, 2009), education (Leonardo, 2009), politics (Feagin, 2012), law (Lopez, 2006), research methods (Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva, 2008) and indeed, frames much of our misapprehension of society (Feagin, 2010; Lipsitz, 1998). Still, we understand little of how whiteness and health are connected. Being socially assigned as white is associated with large and statistically significant advantages in health status (Jones et al., 2008). Anderson’s ground breaking book The Cultivation of Whiteness (2006) offers an exhaustive examination of the way whiteness was deployed as a scientific and medical category in Australia though to the second world war. Yet, there is relatively little beyond this that explores the myriad connections between whiteness and health (Daniels and Schulz, 2006; Daniels, 2012; Katz Rothman, 2001). References listed here.

The Whiteness & Health Roundtable is an afternoon conversation with scholars and activists doing work on this area.

Follow the livetweeting on Twitter at @jgieseking (Jen Jack Gieseking) and @SOSnowy (Collette Sosnowy), and via the #DigitalGC. You can also view the compilation of those Tweets on Storify here.

The roundtable is sponsored by the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) and the Critical Social & Environmental Psychology program at the Graduate Center CUNY. The event is hosted by Michelle Fine (Distinguished Professor, Social Psychology, Women’s Studies and Urban Education), Jessie Daniels (Professor, Urban Public Health and Sociology) and Rachel Liebert, (PhD Student, Critical Social/Personality Psychology).

Racist Framing: Michelle Obama in a Spanish Magazine

• • African Americans, Black women, international, media, racism, white privilege, white racial frame

Gracing the front page of magazines is nothing new for First Lady Michelle Obama. However, on August 8, a photoshopped picture of Michelle with her breast exposed appeared on the cover of Fuera de serie, a Madrid-based magazine. The image is the work of artist Karine Percheron-Daniels in which the First Lady is dressed in garb similar to that of enslaved Africans with her right nipple exposed and seated in a chair with the U.S. flag draped across it. While news pundits have been highly critical of the nudity on the cover, the racialized nature of the photo deserves attention.

Exploring the image of a half-nude Michelle Obama reveals the centuries old framing of black bodies as hyper-sexual and racist framing of black women. Racist imagery has long been a part of the dominant racial frame in media. As sociologist Joe Feagin (2010) notes, “A great range of racist imagery, stereotyping, and emotionality was communicated in popular entertainment settings from the early nineteenth century onward.”

One of the most pervasive images is the Jezebel, the hyper-sexual Black woman who uses her sexual prowess to beguile white men. The Jezebel has occupied a unique space within the white ethos as an exploited sexual object feared for her manipulate nature. Analyzing the Fuera de serie cover, the photo of Michelle is laden with Jezebel imagery.

At first glance, one notices the First Lady’s bare breast, suggesting she recently engaged in sexual activity. Further implying erotic intentions is the seductive gaze placed in the photo. Hence, the image asserts it was not Michelle’s intellect or ingenuity, which gained her popularity with Americans, but her sexuality. Such claims are central features of the racist framing of Black women. While the front page of Fuera de serie, is laden with racist framing, the article juxtaposes the first lady’s popularity as an intelligent, classy role model (especially among African-American women).

The troubling issue of the international media’s (in this case Spanish) use of Jezebel framing of Michelle Obama is then explicitly stated in the author’s claim that she was able to not only conquer the love of her husband, President Barack Obama, but able to seduce the American public (“Para conocer de qué manera Michelle ha conseguido seducir al pueblo americano, el periodista Pablo Scarpellini detalle los secretos de la mujer que no solo ha conquistado el corazón de Barack Obama.”).

The dominant racist frame has long be perpetuated through racist imagery. Racist images are central to racist framing because they create visual counterparts to racial narratives. This is the case in Fuera de serie cover. Presenting Michelle Obama as a lascivious Black woman seducing the American public, Percheron-Daniels is reinforcing the narrative of the Jezebel. Such framing is particularly harmful because is reaffirms the dominant racist frame in the international community.

The U.S. Today: Still Diversifying

• • Americans of color, anti-immigrant, Asian Americans, Asians, immigration, international, Latinos, nativism, people of color, politics, racism



The MSNBC website has a nice summary of the new census data a lot of folks are talking about, titled “Census: Minorities now surpass whites in US births.”

According to census bureau figures for 2011 the children born, for the first time, are majority not white:

Minorities made up roughly 2.02 million, or 50.4 percent of U.S. births in the 12-month period ending July 2011. That compares with 37 percent in 1990.

And even with some decrease in Latin American and Asian immigrants, because of the economic downturn in the U.S. and some improvements south of the U.S. border, the population of the U.S. is still becoming ever more diverse.

There was this interesting bit of data as well:

. .the nation’s minority population continues to rise, following a higher-than-expected Hispanic count in the 2010 census. Minorities increased 1.9 percent to 114.1 million, or 36.6 percent of the total U.S. population, lifted by prior waves of immigration that brought in young families and boosted the number of Hispanic women in their prime childbearing years. . . . 348 of the nation’s 3,143 counties, or 1 in 9, have minority populations across all age groups that total more than 50 percent.

Still, the growth rate fell for Latino and Asian American populations to just two percent last year,

.. roughly half the rates in 2000 and the lowest in more than a decade. . .. Of the 30 large metropolitan areas showing the fastest Hispanic growth in the previous decade, all showed slower growth in 2011 than in the peak Hispanic growth years of 2005-2006…

Over at the NY Times, Thomas Edsall, has some interesting comments on the political implications of these shifts, which I recommend to you. Here is a sample:

. . . it’s interesting that the two-party system has not imploded. In the face of sustained centrifugal upheaval — including a proliferation of religious affiliations, the enfranchisement of substantial minority populations, rising levels of economic inequality, and the belief among a plurality of voters… that our economic system (capitalism) and the religious identification of three-quarters of the electorate (Christianity) are not compatible — we still are a nation of Republicans and Democrats.

He makes some interesting points about some opinion poll findings on how people see the Christian religion and capitalism (as in tension, a real surprise there) and also wonders out loud about the future of US parties and especially the Republican party. Can it adapt in this changing demographic world that

threatens its ability to compete nationally? As presently constituted, the Republicans have become the party of the married white Christian past.

This issue and related issues are ones I have dealt with deeply and historically in context in my new book, White Party, White Government.

There are clearly many political and policy implications to these demographic changes. Given the explosion of anti-immigrant nativism in this country in recent years, one can wonder if the mostly white nativists will take these data to heart and cut back at least on their anti-immigrant screed. One also has to wonder if the declining immigration will have any effects on the anti-immigrant legislation passed in numerous states. Especially with the looming Supreme Court ruling that will come down on the Arizona anti-Latino-immigrant law that has been celebrated in some white conservative circles.

Yet, many of us find these changes exciting and healthy for a country that has long depended on a diverse immigration for its social and economic health.

International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination: US Failures

• • affirmative action, discrimination, international, law

The U.S. Human Rights Network has a good summary of the weaknesses in U.S. civil rights laws and civil rights enforcement. In 1965 the United Nations adopted an antidiscrimination treaty called the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). The U.S. Senate took until 1994 to ratify it largely because of white conservative opposition to it. We have only ratified three international human rights treaties, which are binding on U.S. states and the federal government.

We as a nation are way behind in our law and Supreme Court interpretations of CERD. Here are two excerpts from this critical analysis (The document is at the Poverty and Race Research Action Council website; look for the June 23 weekly update. It is well worth joining their list too):

The CERD treaty embodies an obligation not just to avoid policies with a discriminatory impact, but also to affirmatively take action to address racial disparities in outcomes for people of color, both within government programs and in society at large. This principle of affirmative obligations to redress past discriminatory practices and present day outcomes is largely absent from federal civil rights law (with the notable exception of the Fair Housing Act, which calls on the government to “affirmatively further” fair housing. The CERD treaty requires its signatories to use carefully tailored race-conscious measures to redress past racial discrimination and continuing racial disparities. But the U.S. Supreme Court has recently been undermining this basic principle of our civil rights law by making it harder for government to use race as a factor in student assignment to promote voluntary racial integration. The CERD Committee has recommended a government-wide “Plan of Action” to implement CERD, and a central agency or commission to educate the public and monitor treaty compliance. No such mechanisms exist in the U.S.

Civil rights enforcement vs. human rights compliance: the Obama Administration has done a good job of reviving the dormant civil rights enforcement units within each federal agency that are responsible for investigating complaints of discrimination by state and local recipients of federal funds, and the revived Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice is once again at the forefront of civil rights enforcement. But civil rights enforcement is only a part of compliance with the CERD treaty – the federal government is also supposed to be addressing racial disparities and impacts in the way it spends its money and runs its domestic programs (including federal programs affecting health, education, labor, environment, criminal justice, housing, transportation, etc). The federal government is still falling short of its CERD obligations in this area.

That is the U.S. is out of compliance with a major treaty, and indeed in several ways fairly weak in its civil rights enforcement and action on racial and other discrimination.

Some Republicans Rejecting Universal Declaration of Human Rights

• • human rights, international, politics

Many on the Republican right, like the governors of Wisconsin and New Jersey and their wealthy corporate sponsors, are taking on the world’s and the US’s human rights tradition, progress, and ratified agreements. They seem to wish to move the world and this country backwards on hard-won and potential human rights. We as a nation in the late 1940s agreed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which several Americans had helped to prepare. Notice a particularly critical part, Article 23, of this grand international declaration:

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
• (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
• (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
• (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Here is the main text after the preamble, a clear agreement on human rights for humanity, and signal of the free and democratic futures yearned for by many democratic protesters in Egypt, Libya, Wisconsin, Ohio, and across the planet, today and for centuries now:

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations…..
2 Article 1.
• All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
3 Article 2.
• Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
4 Article 3.
• Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
5 Article 4.
• No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
6 Article 5.
• No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
7 Article 6.
• Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
8 Article 7.
• All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
9 Article 8.
• Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
10 Article 9.
• No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
11 Article 10.
• Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
12 Article 11.
• (1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
• (2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
13 Article 12.
• No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
14 Article 13.
• (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
• (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
15 Article 14.
• (1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
• (2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
16 Article 15.
• (1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
• (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
17 Article 16.
• (1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
• (2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
• (3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State. Continue reading…

Racial and Class Exclusion and Marginalization: Major British Universities

• • education, international, systemic racism



A recent Guardian report shows dramatic racial and class tracking and racial/class exclusion in major British universities:

A bleak portrait of racial and social exclusion at Oxford and Cambridge has been shown in official data which shows that more than 20 Oxbridge colleges made no offers to black candidates for undergraduate courses last year and one Oxford college has not admitted a single black student in five years. . . . one black Briton of Caribbean descent was accepted for undergraduate study at Oxford last year.

In addition, the overwhelming majority of those at Oxbridge are drawn from the top social class groups, mostly from among whites.

The same extreme racial exclusion can be seen in the academic and lab staff at Cambridge University. University data show

of more than 1,500 academic and lab staff at Cambridge, none are black. Thirty-four are of British Asian origin.

The sharp increases in university fees, up to £9,000 a year, that are now likely will further make the universities even more class and racially exclusive, with very few students from working and lower middle-class backgrounds. There are also significant geographical differentials, with large areas of Britain not having any students at Cambridge. Some groups are pressing for change:

Rob Berkeley, director of the Runnymede Trust, a thinktank that promotes racial equality, said: “If we go for this elite system of higher education … we have got to make sure what they are doing is fair. If you look at how many people on both frontbenches are Oxbridge-educated, Oxford and Cambridge are still the major route to positions of influence. If that’s the case we shouldn’t be restricting these opportunities to people from minority backgrounds.”

Such commentaries seem quite tame and understated. Britain seems far behind the US in moving toward more diverse university student bodies, which is not to say the US is doing very well at its major (especially “elite” universities). The anti-affirmation laws and court rulings (such as Michigan’s Gratz and Grutter cases), as well as state referenda, have contributed to the atmosphere and/or state and university actions that have reduced students of color at major universities, which often do a poor job any way of intelligent students-of-color recruiting and retention. In addition, the report shows that British students of color who do well at lower school levels tend to go to certain urban universities:

A boom in university participation in recent years has led to a more diverse student body, but black students are concentrated in a handful of institutions. In 2007-08 the University of East London had half as many black students as the entire Russell group of 20 universities, which include Oxford and Cambridge.

Clearly, the British system of higher education remains the route to power and the better jobs in Britain, yet remains much more elitist and racial/class biased than that of the United States.