‘Drink Like an Indian’: Racism to Celebrate Thanksgiving

November 25, 2010 • Jessie Daniels • gendered racism, Native American

A sports bar in St. Paul, Minnesota is featuring a blatantly racist ad to attract business over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend (h/t to reader Gina Kundan for alerting us to this ad).

While I’m a little puzzled by what it means to “party like a Pilgrim” (were they big partiers?!?), the invitation to “drink like an Indian” – with the illustration of a passed out Native American man leaning against a white cowboy in the background – trades on some of the oldest stereotypes of Native Americans as “drunks.” The convivial image of a white cowboy and the “drunk” Indian as companionable drinking buddies, obscures a history of genocide. (Would it be possible to imagine a similar image featuring an SS officer and a Jewish person in such an embrace?) The image of the supposedly indigenous woman in the photo (I have my doubts) dressed in a sexy outfit and provocative pose also plays on the gendered racism of Native American women as squaw, princess, sexual slave.

Is it possible to get a drink in this bar without the bad politics? Bartender: I’ll have a shot with a beer back, hold the racism.

Addendum (Joe):
Not only is this racist, but rather ignorant about the history of the Massachusetts Puritans (including those called ‘Pilgrims’). They actually were very strict in their morality and condemned many such “amusements” like this as very corrupt and sinful. They would be horrified to be identified with hard drinking and partying like this suggests. And, of course, the Massachusetts Puritans also engaged in genocide against indigenous societies like the Pequots in the Massacusetts area. At one point, in 1637, they surrounded an Indian village and burned it down with hundreds of Indians in it. Then shot others, sold remainder to slavery. A nice bunch for indigenous people to party with, right? Many Americans, especially whites like these, seem to be just plain dumb about North American history.

New Research: Journalists “Grappling With Our Own Racism”

October 19, 2010 • Jessie Daniels • anti-racism, journalism, racism, scholarship

There is interesting new research just published about journalists and racism in the production of news. The research is reported in an article, “Coming to Terms with Our Own Racism: Journalists Grapple with the Racialization of their News,” by Emily Drew, Assistant Professor at Willamette University, and appears in the October issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication (behind a paywall).

It came as something of a surprise to me to learn that from 1990 to 2005, 28 major metropolitan newspapers in the United States sought to grapple with race relations and racism by devoting significant time, staff, and financial resources to launching systematic examinations of the ‘‘state of race.’’ (p.2)

photo credit: mfhiatt

Drew’s research was well-designed. She interviewed 31 of the editors and writers who brought their newspaper’s race series into being. In this research, she argues that explicit and intentional ‘‘racial projects’’ can foster antiracist consciousness in their producers and promote changes in news production. (p.3)

Specifically, she examines how a journalistic project that was seemingly about ‘‘them’’ (society), ultimately became about ‘‘us’’ (news media). Drew found that as journalists sought to ‘‘discover the facts’’ about how racism manifested in their communities, they began recognizing its manifestations in their own profession. As one editor put it, her paper’s race series, ‘‘challenged us to go beyond the rhetoric and hold up a mirror, an honest mirror . . . one that was not tainted by our own thinking that we were too sophisticated to be part of that.’’ (pp.2-3). Here is one of her respondents, explaining the change:

“We thought we were reporting on ‘them’ . . . those people, and organizations, and institutions that were still disenfranchising racial minorities. As it turned out, racism was about ‘us’ in the media, our news production, our editorial decisions and our own lack of diversity. (Editor of a ‘‘Race Series’’ at a major U.S. newspaper)” (p.1)

Returning to Drew’s analysis of this process, she writes:

“In the process of investigating how ‘‘new racism’’ operated in their local communities, journalists began engaging in a reflexivity, one that illuminated the need to probe their own institution’s relationship to race and racism. Most interviewees indicated that analyzing the media — let alone their own newspaper — was not a part of their agenda or design when they first began. But once the series began publication, community responses and discussions in the newsroom meant they could not avoid examining the racialization of their newsroom. As one interviewee noted, newspapers across the country, for 20 years, had been ‘‘guilty of their own sort of ‘benign neglect’ towards race as a newsworthy issue’ ” (p.8).

She concludes by talking about the dismay that some of the white participants in her research expressed about the lack of opportunity to address race:

Having undergone significant learning through the race series, one white journalist expressed tremendous frustration at the lack of opportunity wite people have to learn and grow. ‘‘There is not a forum in which we can discuss race, genuinely, with people listening. How can we have such a risky and honest [conversation] without a reason?’’ he asked. When white people have reason, and people of color have safe opportunities to address race and racism with openness and intentionality, they interrupt the mechanisms of racism that socialize people into blindness and silence about the structures of privilege and oppression” (p.16).

There are a number of things to note about this study, perhaps foremost is the focus on the process of news production which is often lamented for its role in the production of racist images, but too little studied. I also appreciate the nuance here in examining people who are “well-meaning” and filled with “good intentions” not to replicate racism, yet find themselves in an occupation and industry which does this in many unexamined ways.

If you’d like to read more about racism in the production of news, I recommend Pamela Newkirk’s Within the veil: Black journalists, white media. (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2000) and Darnell M. Hunt’s Channeling Blackness: Studies on Television and Race in America (NY: Oxford UP, 2004).(H/T to @dr_grzanka for that second ref.)

Race, Racism and the Politics of Reproduction

October 18, 2010 • Jessie Daniels • African Americans, race, racism, reproductive justice

This is long, but worthwhile, video (around 20 minutes) from Laura Flanders’GritTV about race, racism and the politics of reproduction:

More GRITtv

In this first installment of a new GRITtv series, “Conspiracy Tactics,” producer Charlie Stuart unravels a right-wing strategy that is attacking reproductive freedom and breaking up Barack Obama’s voting base by equating fetal rights with civil rights.

Taking Hate Speech Seriously When Racism is a Joke

September 9, 2010 • Jessie Daniels • humor, popular culture, racism

I’ve been pondering a contradiction about racism. On the one hand, I’ve argued here and in my book that racist hate speech, including on the Internet, is something that we should take seriously. On the other hand, Internet culture in general is one where humor is the prevailing norm and racist hate speech often gets treated as a joke. One of the students at Johns Hopkins University earlier this week raised this point in the Q&A following a talk I gave there. It’s also a nuanced point that Lisa Nakamura made in her talk about “Enlightened Racism” in online games at Harvard’s Berkman Center a few months ago.

photo credit: theloushe

Part of the reason I (and other critical race theorists) argue that it’s important to take racist hate speech seriously is that words harm people. Everyone living in a democracy has a right to be equally protected from harm and to not be subjected to a particular kind of harm just because of their race, religion or other identity status. In the U.S., that’s known as “equal protection” and it’s covered by the 14th Amendment, among other laws. As a recent example of how racist hate speech harms people, there’s a story out of Roanoke, Virginia about a notorious white supremacist with the rather un-ironic name of William A. White. White recently lost a lawsuit – and fined over half a million dollars – for his racist hate speech. The lawsuit was filed by five African American women who had the bad luck to be tenants in a Virginia Beach apartment complex where White was the landlord. White wrote threatening letters to the women, saying they were “Section 8 N—s” and elsewhere referred to all blacks as “parasites.”

These words had an impact. During testimony in U.S. District Court in Roanoke, the five black women described their reactions to getting the threatening letters from White: one said she began to suffer seizures; another developed an ulcer. Yet another woman testified that she no longer lets her 10-year-old grandson outside to play or ride his bike alone. “I didn’t know what was around the corner waiting for us because of him,” she said. All five of the women testified that they still live in fear of White based on the racist hate speech he sent in that letter. Although White used a traditional form of letter for this round of racist hate speech, he’s used the Internet in other attacks.

The jury did the right thing when they found in favor of the women suing White (it was a civil case, so he was not found “guilty”). Part of what this jury did was take hate speech, and the harm it caused, seriously. That kind of racist hate speech is not, as many Americans assume, protected as “free speech” under the first amendment. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled (Virginia v. Black, 2003) that a “burning-cross is not protected speech” because it’s not speech that’s intended to contribute to democracy, but is intended to terrorize people.

I know, I know – not very funny so far. Where are the lulz in this story?

The second part of this contradiction I’m pondering is that the culture of the Internet is all about what’s funny. Lisa Nakamura made the excellent point in her talk about the “racist griefing” that goes on in online games which often makes explicit use of racist epithets, which she explains this way: “The n-word is funny because it is so extreme that no one could really mean it. And humor is all about ‘not meaning it.’ If you take humor and the n-word, you get enlightened racism online and attention.” She calls this “enlightened racism.” Nakamura goes on to argue that paradoxically, “the worse the racism and sexism are, the more extreme and cartoonish it is, the harder it is to take seriously, and the harder it is to call it out.”

She points out, quite astutely I think, that for those within gaming culture, calling out racism in this context signals you as someone “not of the gaming culture” and thus, as someone who is taking racism “too seriously” and doesn’t have a good sense of humor. Yet, this sort of humor is a “confusing discursive mode for young people,” she observes, because they are “unable to separate enlightened racism from regular racism.” And, indeed, I think this is a real problem here. As Nakamura notes, the image of the “humorless feminist” is now joined with the image of a “humorless” old(er) person who takes race too seriously. I’m going to have to plead guilty to this. Racism, in my view, is serious business, but that stance is antithetical to mainstream Internet culture.

There are some people, far more talented than I am, who can take racism – even racist hate speech – and make it funny. No, really. Let me introduce you to Elon James White (no relation to William A. White, that I know of), and his video blog series, “This Week in Blackness”(TWIB). His take on Dr. Laura’s racist rant a few weeks ago (Season 3, Episode #8) is one of the funniest things I’ve heard in awhile. In addition to being funny, Elon’s routines are scathing, and much needed, critiques of white privilege and white culture. I’m a fan of Elon’s (even downloaded the iPhone app of TWIB) and I think what he does is valuable and entertaining.

I think it’s the racism as entertainment meme where we need to be careful here. Chauncey de Vega (of We are Respectable Negroes) has a thoughtful piece about Slavery as Entertainment, in which he highlights two role-playing games in which people can reenact some aspects of slavery (“I wonder if visitors can be whipped, branded, physically disfigured, manacled, or raped and defiled to complete the “historical” experience?”). He notes that these types of “reenactments” can go oh so wrong because they trivialize the experience of what was until then an unimaginable historical tragedy. If you look at historical accounts of lynchings, those were considered entertaining by whites at the time. Whites often packed picnics and smiled when they had their photo taken at those vigilante lynching “parties.”

And, I see I’ve veered right back into the unfunny material. I’m old school like that.

I’m not sure there’s a way out of this contradiction. In some ways, this contradiction speaks to the “both/and” quality of racism that characterizes the current historical moment. We have both the vitriolic racist hate speech, often spread via the Internet; and, we have a dominant culture in which humor is the prevailing norm, often making racism into entertainment. Just because some of us are laughing doesn’t necessarily mean we’re making progress.

I Feel Good: Elevation, Positive Thinking & The Persistence of Racism

September 1, 2010 • Jessie Daniels • popular culture, social change

Everyone, it seems, likes a story with a happy ending. It may be a particularly American cultural phenomenon or part of human brain structure. But the rather relentless focus on cheerful positive thinking is also getting in the way of confronting the persistence of racism in the U.S.

( photo credit: joshfassbind.com)

In the U.S., the prevailing narrative about race is that “racial dynamics have been transformed,” first by the Civil Rights Movement and most recently – and finally – by the election of President Barack Obama. We see this meme repeated again and again by mainstream news media, in popular movies (e.g., “Blind Side” and the entire genre of “white savior” films), and in personal conversation. There is something in this narrative that speaks to both a human desire for “elevation” and the American quest to be “positive.”

Roger Ebert, film and social critic, explains that he’s never moved to tears by sad moments in movies, just during “moments about goodness.” Ebert describes the feeling this way:

“What I experience is the welling up of a few tears in my eyes, a certain tightness in my throat, and a feeling of uplift: Yes, there is a good person, doing a good thing. And when the movie is over, I don’t want to talk with anyone. After such movies I notice that many audience members remain in a kind of reverie. Those who break the spell by feeling compelled to say something don’t have an emotional clue.”

This is the feeling that the movie “Blind Side” was supposed to evoke. Ebert doesn’t mention the Sandra Bullock movie, but touches on race when he goes on to compare that feeling to the way he – and lots of other people – felt in Grant Park the night President Obama was elected.

In an article at Slate.com by Emily Yoffe, “Obama in Your Heart,” she describes a study about “the emotions of uplift” conducted by Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at UC-Berkeley, who had studied physical responses in test subjects who are deeply moved — what psychologists call “elevation.” Yoffe writes:

Elevation has always existed but has just moved out of the realm of philosophy and religion and been recognized as a distinct emotional state and a subject for psychological study. Psychology has long focused on what goes wrong, but in the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in “positive psychology”–what makes us feel good and why. University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation, writes, “Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental ‘reset button,’ wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration.”

Some of this research suggests that elevation is triggered by the stimulus of our vagus nerve. As Yoffe writes again:

“In his forthcoming book Born To Be Good, Keltner writes that he believes when we experience transcendence, it stimulates our vagus nerve, causing ‘a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat’.”

This emerging field of “positive psychology” is proving very popular. A course in the positive psychology at Harvard is consistently the most popular course on campus, with over 800 students enrolled in it. Whether or not this is a result of something linked to human biology remains to be determined. Closely tied to the ideas of elevation and positive psychology, is the deeply American notion of “positive thinking.”

In her recent book, Bright-Sided:How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, 2009) Barbara Ehrenreich writes that :”Americans are a ‘positive’ people. This is our reputation as well as our self-image. We smile a lot and are oft en baffled when people from other cultures do not return the favor.” The central tenet of this reputation is that positive thinking will make us feel better (physically and emotionally) and this optimism will actually make happy outcomes more likely. In other words, if you expect things to get better, they will.

She goes note that there are some serious downsides to ‘positive thinking,’ including acting as an ideological cover for consumer capitalism and making it impossible to foresee the events of 9/11 (even though there was plenty of evidence of an impending attack). I’m quoting the following at length because it’s good and she cites a number of sociologists:

While positive thinking has reinforced and found reinforcement in American national pride, it has also entered into a kind of symbiotic relationship with American capitalism. There is no natural, innate affinity between capitalism and positive thinking. In fact, one of the classics of sociology, Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, makes a still impressive case for capitalism’s roots in the grim and punitive outlook of Calvinist Protestantism, which required people to defer gratification and resist all pleasurable temptations in favor of hard work and the accumulation of wealth.

But if early capitalism was inhospitable to positive thinking, “late” capitalism, or consumer capitalism, is far more congenial, depending as it does on the individual’s hunger for more and the firm’s imperative of growth. The consumer culture encourages individuals to want more — cars, larger homes, television sets, cell phones, gadgets of all kinds — and positive thinking is ready at hand to tell them they deserve more and can have it if they really want it and are willing to make the effort to get it. Meanwhile, in a competitive business world, the companies that manufacture these goods and provide the paychecks that purchase them have no alternative but to grow. If you don’t steadily increase market share and profits, you risk being driven out of business or swallowed by a larger enterprise. Perpetual growth, whether of a particular company or an entire economy, is of course an absurdity, but positive thinking makes it seem possible, if not ordained.

In addition, positive thinking has made itself useful as an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy. If optimism is the key to material success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failure. The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must because you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success. As the economy has brought more layoffs and financial turbulence to the middle class, the promoters of positive thinking have increasingly emphasized this negative judgment: to be disappointed, resentful, or downcast is to be a “victim” and a “whiner.”

In her remarkable book, Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst, sociologist Karen Cerulo recounts a number of ways that the habit of positive thinking, or what she calls optimistic bias, undermined preparedness and invited disaster. She quotes Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsch and Michael Isikoff, for example, in their conclusion that “a whole summer of missed clues, taken together, seemed to presage the terrible September of 2001.”7 There had already been a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993; there were ample warnings, in the summer of 2001, about a possible attack by airplane, and flight schools reported suspicious students like the one who wanted to learn how to “fl y a plane but didn’t care about landing and takeoff .” The fact that no one — the FBI, the INS, Bush, or Rice — heeded these disturbing cues was later attributed to a “failure of imagination.” But actually there was plenty of imagination at work — imagining an invulnerable nation and an ever-booming economy — there was simply no ability or inclination to imagine the worst.”

Ehrenreich’s focus in the rest of the book is about her encounters with this relentless drive toward ‘positive thinking’ after her diagnosis with breast cancer (her critique is a devastating one leveled at the “positive thinking” pink ribbon campaigns).

There’s also relevance in Ehrenreich’s critique of positive thinking for understanding the persistence of racism in the U.S. and our collective reluctance to address it. Many people – mostly white people – think that the best way to solve racism is to ignore it. Some black folks think that way, too (e.g. Morgan Freeman). This view exists across party lines and political affiliations, both liberals and conservatives. And, in a way, it’s a version of the “positive thinking” that Ehrenreich describes: if you expect things to get better, they will. Now, just apply that to racism. End of story. To do otherwise is to be a “victim” and a “whiner.”

I think that’s a mistake. Where we err is when we think that the best way to deal with racism is to look only at the bright-side, to study only how we’ve overcome, without a simultaneous critique of the persistence of racism and a thorough analysis of how we go about dismantling it. Racism will not just “go away” because we wish it would. And, it won’t go away if we keep producing and consuming images that “elevate” us about the subject.

I will feel elevated when there are enough jobs (even for black teens), and everyone is housed (and there are not predatory lending practices), and there are no differences in health outcomes based on race (including an end to diabetes among Native Americans and low birth weight babies among African American mothers), and there are fewer people locked up (and those who are reflect the racial demographics of the entire nation). Now that would be a happy ending to the story of American racism.

Race, Racism & the Internet: 10 Things Sociologists Should Be Researching

August 20, 2010 • Jessie Daniels • academic, racism, social change, sociology

There was exactly one session on “Race and New Media” among the hundreds of panels at the recent American Sociological Association meetings last week in Atlanta. The panel was interesting, thought-provoking and presented by a diverse group of sociologists, and I’m not just saying that because I organized it. I think there should be lots more research like this.

photo credit: atxryan

One of the main points I make in my book Cyber Racism is that white supremacy has entered the digital era, and that means it’s changing, morphing into new forms. Some of those centuries-old components continue to exist, but now they exist alongside new forms of racism, such as cloaked websites. This is true not only of the extremist groups I’ve studied, it’s also true of lots of other dimensions of race and racism. This seems like an arena ripe for sociological investigation, yet I continue to be puzzled by the fact that there’s not more research in this area.

Within sociology there’s a gap between researchers who critically study race and those who study the Internet. I talked with several prominent sociologists who study Internet and society at the meetings, and they concurred with my assessment of the field. As one scholar told me when I mentioned the few submissions I received for the “Race and New Media” panel: “That’s because no one studies that.” Another prominent scholar suggested that the problem is that the critical race folks just don’t know the Internet research and vice versa. I tend to agree. I talk to people who know the Internet and the research about it, and they generally don’t know much about critical race scholarship. And, the people I talk to who are critical race scholars, generally don’t know much about the Internet.

In many ways, the study of race and the Internet has been ceded by sociologists to scholars working in other fields such as history, psychology, communications, cultural studies, and political science. There’s good work going on in those fields, most notably Lisa Nakamura’s work, which I admire and have mentioned here before. One of the things I enjoy about the growing field of Internet-related research is that it’s interdisciplinary, so maybe it’s not worth raising these intra-sociology disciplinary issues, but it strikes me as a missed opportunity for the field. Part of the problem here is that the Internet changes quickly, and sociology is just slow. One of my graduate professors used to refer to sociology as “slow journalism”. If journalism is the first draft of history, sociology is the re-draft of history in many ways. I think that sociologists have something valuable to offer in terms of our understanding of how the Internet is transforming patterns of human social behavior. While lots of sociologists who study race are using the Internet as a tool for their research (everything from Google Scholar to analyzing messages on email listservs), only a very few are considering the Internet as an object of study, and exploring the ways it’s changing the production of and resistance to race and racism.

So, in an attempt to suggest ways to bridge this gap, I’ve sketched out 10 areas I think sociologists should be researching:

infrastructure / design – How computers and the “graphic user interface” (GUI) – like web browsers are designed affects how people use the Internet. In 2008, I wrote about the development of a custom browser, Blackbird, designed for use by African Americans, that cause some uproar. How does the way that interfaces are designed affect the way people use the Internet and how is race implicated in this? There’s terrific research on user-centered design being done by sociologist Nalini Kotamraju and some on open source software by Jon Smajda which highlight the useful bridge between a deep knowledge of infrastructure and software design. Michelle White (cultural studies) has done some interesting work on this (why is that little hand always white?), and of course, Nakamura’s relevant here again. I don’t know of any one in sociology doing research like this on race and interface design.
industry – The leading tech firms in Silicon Valley are dominated by white men and a few white women, yet the manual labor of putting together circuit boards that run computers is largely done by immigrant and global south women. How does the predominantly white tech industry located in the global north and the immigrant / global south labor that powers the Internet say about race and technology? (See, J. Shih, Circumventing Discrimination: Gender and Ethnic Strategies in Silicon Valley, Gender & Society, 2006, 20; (2): 177-206).
gaming – Literally millions of people are playing online games, and meeting in person at gaming conferences, yet this social phenomenon is going largely unremarked upon by sociologists. Lori Kendall’s Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub (UCPress, 2002) looks at the reproduction of race and gender in one of these game spaces, but I see little other work on this important topic by sociologists.
popular culture / fandom – There are huge – again in the millions – of online groups for everything from tennis to celebrities to popular fiction. How is being a “fan” shaped by race, and how is online “fandom” in popular culture shaped by race and racism? Sociologist Sarah Gatson has explored some of this in her work and is seeking papers [pdf] for a special issue of a journal about this.
mobile technology – It’s been a few years since Howard Rheingold (whom I think of as an honorary sociologist) wrote his groundbreaking book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, and I’ve yet to see anyone extend that work to look at mobile technology and race. There’s research by the Pew Internet & American Life Project documenting that African Americans and Latinos are more likely to access the Internet through mobile devices. What does this suggest for all that talk of the “digital divide” among sociologists a few years ago?
identity + community – In the early days of the Internet, lots of people thought that we would go online to “experiment” with identity, to engage in “identity tourism” to use Nakamura’s phrase. Yet, that’s not turned out to be the case. In fact, the way people use the Internet most often is to reaffirm their offline identities. Sociologist Emily Ignacio’s excellent book Building Diaspora: Filipino Community Formation on the Internet (Rutgers UP, 2005) is an example of this type of work and there should be more.
social movements : I mentioned my book on racist social movements, and I’d like to see more done on progressive social movements around race, such as the march organized around the Jena6, which was mobilized primarily through young, African American bloggers. One of the strategies I used in my research was to examine movement discourse pre-Internet and post-Internet, and this is another angle that could be pursued by those interested in race and the offline mobilization of social movements around race.
racist framing in Facebook, MySpace, Twitter – Social media is framed by racist language, and within a larger white racial frame, yet there’s very little sociology that looks at this. Stephanie Laudone (graduate student at Fordham) is at work on a dissertation that takes up some of these issues in Facebook.
health/science – Internet users increasingly look for health and scientific knowledge online. Victoria Pitts (a CUNY colleague) has written about these issues as they relate to gender, (see Illness and Internet empowerment: writing and reading breast cancer in cyberspace, Health, 2004, Vol 8 (1):33-60), but I don’t know of any similar research that looks critically at race and health.
surveillance culture – We live in what some have called a ‘surveillance culture.’ Sociologist Simone Brown is writing about some of these surveillance technologies as they relate to border crossings (fascinating work), and there are implications of this surveillance culture for understanding race and the Internet. As just one example, given the millions of Black and Latino men locked up in the U.S., what are the implications of the “inmate locator” websites run by state and federal governments? How do systems of incarceration work together with online registries and databases of Black/Latino men to shape racial inequality in the digital era?

Of course, this is just a back-of-the-envelope sketch of what I think are the promising areas of investigation for sociologists. Where I know about people’s work in these areas, I’ve included it (let me know if I left your work out and i’ll add it). So, what did I miss? What are some other areas of research?

The ‘Mosque’ Controversy

August 18, 2010 • Jessie Daniels • Islamophobia, racism

What’s quickly become known as ‘the mosque at ground zero’ controversy should be a local story about land use and zoning, has blown up into a national disgrace that says a lot about the current state of religious intolerance, Islamophobia and racism in the U.S. As Keith Olbermann cogently pointed out, there is no “mosque” (it’s an interfaith community center) and it’s not “at Ground Zero” (it’s several blocks away in a former Burlington Coat Factory). I was here on 9/11 and watched those towers fall to the ground. I’ve also watched as a particular group of survivors from that day, often referred to as “The Families,” have been valorized in the press and by themselves beyond all reason. This group, “The Families” never includes any of the relatives of the workers from the restaurant at the top of the towers, many of them undocumented immigrant workers.

In many ways, the objection this project in lower Manhattan (aka, the ‘mosque’) is one that appeals to the lowest common denominators of racism, religious intolerance and Islamophobia. But, there are other voices.

Earlier this month, Mayor Bloomberg (not always my favorite flavor) gave this speech which was brilliant, i thought, and hit just the right note:

“We’ve come here to Governors Island to stand where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted. We come here to see the inspiring symbol of liberty that more than 250 years later would greet millions of immigrants in this harbor. And we come here to state as strongly as ever, this is the freest city in the world. That’s what makes New York special and different and strong.

“Our doors are open to everyone. Everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants, and it’s sustained by immigrants — by people from more than 100 different countries speaking more than 200 different languages and professing every faith. And whether your parents were born here or you came here yesterday, you are a New Yorker.

“We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That’s life. And it’s part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11, 2001.

“On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn’t want us to enjoy the freedoms to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams, and to live our own lives. Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that even here — in a city that is rooted in Dutch tolerance — was hard-won over many years.

“In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue, and they were turned down. In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies, and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.

“In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion, and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780s, St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site, and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center.

“This morning, the city’s Landmark Preservation Commission unanimously voted to extend — not to extend — landmark status to the building on Park Place where the mosque and community center are planned. The decision was based solely on the fact that there was little architectural significance to the building. But with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building.

“The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

“Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

“This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

“Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.

“For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetimes, as important a test. And it is critically important that we get it right.

“On Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, ‘What God do you pray to?’ (Bloomberg’s voice cracks here a little as he gets choked up.) ‘What beliefs do you hold?’

“The attack was an act of war, and our first responders defended not only our city, but our country and our constitution. We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.

“Of course, it is fair to ask the organizers of the mosque to show some special sensitivity to the situation, and in fact their plan envisions reaching beyond their walls and building an interfaith community. But doing so, it is my hope that the mosque will help to bring our city even closer together, and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any ways consistent with Islam.

“Muslims are as much a part of our city and our country as the people of any faith. And they are as welcome to worship in lower Manhattan as any other group. In fact, they have been worshipping at the site for better, the better part of a year, as is their right. The local community board in lower Manhattan voted overwhelmingly to support the proposal. And if it moves forward, I expect the community center and mosque will add to the life and vitality of the neighborhood and the entire city.

“Political controversies come and go, but our values and our traditions endure, and there is no neighborhood in this city that is off-limits to God’s love and mercy, as the religious leaders here with us can attest.”

Much of the fury around this faux-issue has been generated by the vengeful rhetoric of George W. Bush immediately following 9/11 and his misguided “war on terror” and attack on Iraq. Bush’s rhetorical legacy continues in Sarah Palin’s bumbling vitriol. If Bush had given this kind of speech immediately following 9/11, I believe we’d have a safer world and dramatically less of the Islamophobic racism fueling this controversy. Very recently, President Obama has defended the notion of a mosque in downtown Manhattan, and then seemed to equivocate on it. One of Obama’s strengths has been his pitch-perfect ability to reach that note of America’s highest ideals and, drawing on Lincoln’s rhetoric, to appeal to the better angels of our nature. If ever there were a time for Obama – and each one of us – to appeal to the better angels of our nature, it is now and around this controversy.

Race, Racism & Rampage Shootings

August 6, 2010 • Jessie Daniels • racism, violence

Earlier this week, Omar Thornton walked out of a meeting in which he was being fired from his job at a beer distributor in Connecticut and opened fire on his former co-workers. He shot 10 people, eventually killing 8 and ending his own life. Omar Thornton was African American and all of his victims were white. According to a number of a reports, Thornton said he experienced racial harassment at his workplace at the hands of those co-workers he later gunned down. In some ways, what Thornton did was exceedingly rare. In other ways, it was all too common.

(Photo: Jessica Hill/AP)

Rampage shootings are an overwhelmingly white and male phenomenon. In this way, Thornton stands out as an anomaly. From Charles Whitman, perhaps the first rampage shooter who climbed the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin and gunned down 14 people in 1966, to James von Brunn who walked into the Washington, D.C. Holocaust Museum in 2009 and shot a security guard, the perpetrators of rampage shootings are most often white men. As I noted back in 2009, there’s extensive research linking race, gender and rampage.

Probably the most widely-cited sociological research on this subject is Katherine Newman’s (and co-authors’) 2004 book Rampage Shootings. While Newman et al., do a decent job addressing gender in rampage shootings, there’s very little in the their analysis about race and nothing at all about racism, which is disappointing given that the overwhelming pattern here is that white men are perpetrators. Exceptions, like Virgnia Tech (where the shooter was Asian American) and this one involving Thornton, only serve to highlight this larger pattern.

What is all too common in this story is the systemic racism that Thornton reportedly endured and the desperation he felt in how to deal with it. The recording of Thornton’s 911 call (h/t Johnny Eric Williams) he started shooting offer a glimpse into some of this:

“You probably want to know the reason why I shot this place up. This place is a racist place. They’re treating me bad over here. And treat all other black employees bad over here, too. So I took it to my own hands and handled the problem. I wish I could have got more of the people.”

Thornton’s girlfriend of the past eight years, Kristi Hannah, said he showed her cell phone photos of racist graffiti in the bathroom at the beer company and overheard managers using a racial epithet in reference to him.Another report seems to confirms this assessment of the workplace as a racially hostile environment. Thornton’s best friend, who chose not to reveal his name, told The New York Daily News that he also used to work at the beer distributor and saw Thornton subjected to racist taunts:

“No one should have had to endure what that company put him through. Stuff on walls. Racist comments. I saw it with my own eyes.”

Ross Hollander, CEO of the beer distributor company, Hartford Distributors, denies any claims of racism in the workplace. Although racial discrimination in the workplace is illegal, actually proving racial discrimination in the U.S. courts is difficult, sometimes impossible without evidence that the employer intended to discriminate.

The persistent denial of racism by white employers can be a kind of gaslighting for employees who are experiencing that racism. As Jonathan Metzl notes in his recent book, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Beacon Press, 2010), psychiatric professionals began in the 1960s and 1970s to explicitly connect the clinical presentations of African American men with the politics of the civil rights movement in ways that treated aspirations for liberation and civil rights as symptoms of mental illness. Drapetomania, anyone? No one’s reporting that Omar Thornton was mentally ill, but in the absence of a recognition that systemic racism exists and without effective means to address that inequality, it’s not inconceivable.

What’s remarkable, in many ways, is that there aren’t more cases like this one.

And, there could have been more such cases given the historical example of the black “armed self-reliance” movement in the 1960s. For example, Robert F. Williams led a chapter of the NAACP in Monroe North Carolina that sought to arm black Americans to fight back aggressively against racist practices and especially against the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. Robert F. Williams wrote a book called Negroes with Guns (1961/1989). He and his followers used machine guns, dynamite, molotov cocktails to fight Klan terrorists. Williams eventually had to flee the country and ended up in Cuba. From there, he hosted a radio program, Radio Free Dixie (broadcast from Cuba, but heard up the East Coast). Timothy B. Tyson has written a book about Williams and his radio broadcast called Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. People forget too that the civil rights leaders–including King, T. Marshall, Daisy Bates, Medgar Evers–had guns or armed guards to protect them in the South during the difficult civil rights struggles.

The tragic shooting in Hartford, Connecticut was both an anomaly, because the shooter was black and the victims white, and part of a larger pattern of systemic racism that is, largely, without redress in this country.

The End of White Privilege

July 30, 2010 • Jessie Daniels • affirmative action, government action, racism, white privilege

Sen. Jim Webb (D-Virginia) has called for an end to end to affirmative action programs because, he contends, white privilege is a “myth.”

Here’s what Sen. Webb said in a recent (7/22/10) Wall Street Journal piece:

In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks’ average of 10.6 years, and well below that of most other white groups. A recent NORC Social Survey of white adults born after World War II showed that in the years 1980-2000, only 18.4% of white Baptists and 21.8% of Irish Protestants—the principal ethnic group that settled the South—had obtained college degrees, compared to a national average of 30.1%, a Jewish average of 73.3%, and an average among those of Chinese and Indian descent of 61.9%.

Policy makers ignored such disparities within America’s white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white.

Webb is right to note that white Americans are not a monolith and that there are poor whites among the racial category “white.” However, just because Webb has discovered poor white ethnics does not mean that white privilege is a myth. There are so many examples of white privilege that it barely merits listing them all again, but just in case you’ve never read Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” review it now.
One of the key points that Webb misses (and there are many) is that even in a system in which all poor people are oppressed, some poor people who happen to have black or brown skin are even more oppressed. As Matt Yglesias points out:

Someone accused of killing a white person in North Carolina is nearly three times as likely to get the death penalty than someone accused of killing a black person, according to a study released Thursday by two researchers who looked at death sentences over a 28-year period.

People are generally aware of the fact that the criminal justice system sanctions African-American suspects and perpetrators disproportionately harshly. Less noted, but in some ways even more pernicious, is the way it affords lesser protection to African-American victims and potential victims. Randall Kennedy’s Race, Crime, and the Law explicates this neglected issue in an excellent way.

So, while I will be the first to applaud the end of white privilege, we’re not there yet, Sen. Webb – not by a long shot.

Battling Racism in Drag

July 12, 2010 • Jessie Daniels • popular culture, queer, racism

I’ve written here before about the racism in the gay community and this is one of the most egregious examples. Shirley Q Liquor is one of the drag personas of Chuck Knipp, a white guy who performs in blackface. The centerpiece of his act seems to be trading on the crassest stereotypes of black women.

The following is an excerpt from the Shirley Q. Liquor MySpace page, describing the character:

“How you derrin’! I’m Shirley Q. Liquor. I is from Texarkana and is mother of 19 chillrens. I love some brown bakeded beans, sermons on ignunce, K-Mark, and Shlitz malt liquor. I enjoys goin’ to get my nails did. I think I’m gonna get my nails painted blue with a lil’ gold jessie picture on my littlest nail. I also enjoys hangin’ out with my girl Watusi. Good lawd, she got’s some crazy ass drivin’s. Oh, and she so ugly. She 7″1′ and no amount of make up gonna help her. Oh lawd, she look AWFUL. Well honey, that’s it for now. Tell yo momma I axed her how she durrin’. Bye suga.”

In Shirley Q. Liquor’s repertoire are numbers with titles such as as “Church Slave,” “Who is My Baby Daddy?” and “Jailed.” Although Knipp defends his act as a parody of Tyler Perry’s Madea character, just saying that you’re mimicking black-created foolishness isn’t enough to absolve Knipp of the overtly racist content of his Shirley Q. character. And, just because white, predominantly gay audiences pay for this crap is no excuse either (boys of Queer Eye – I’m *so* disappointed in you for getting your pic snapped with Shirley Q!).

If you object to Knipp’s Shirley Q. Liquor drag character, take a second and sign this online petition.