Nov

27

Paul Mooney Vows Not to Use the N-Word

Filed Under Black/African American Issues, Race and Racism, Uncategorized | 54 Comments

Yes, folks.? I am shocked at this, but I had to post it.? I just watched the Keith Olbermann show, and heard renowned African American comedian/writer Paul Mooney, who has made a career of risque racial humor, has vowed to stop using the n-word and the b-word.? He said he felt so disturbed by Michael Richards’ racist rant at the Laugh Factory that it shocked him into banishing the n-word from his vocabulary. Now anybody who is familiar with Mooney knows that he is really hard to shock, and even recently Mooney has defended the use of the n-word.?

Maybe something? good may come out of Michael Richards racist behavior.? When people hear this word used in its historical context, and it is? connected to lynching. Its power is apparent, and the idea of reclaiming it starts to look futile.? Mooney has frequently defended the use of the n-word; in fact, the last time I heard him was on the Star and Bucwild Show (which has now been cancelled due to a racist and pedophilic threats that Star issued), and the gratuitous use of the n-word was so terrible that I had to change the channel–I never listened to that show again.? Mooney noted that he was trying to take the power out of the n-word by using in his act (and in his comic writing for Richard Pryor), but something snapped in him when he saw Richards.? He realized that the word still had power.

Mooney really is a comic genius, and if he is changing this is a really big step in the Abolish the N-Word Campaign.? I also have to admit that I’m happy to see that he threw in the b-word, too.? I get tired of trying to discuss the use of the n-word every semester

What do you all think?? Do you think Mooney will actually have some influence on people?

Nov

26

Racism Round-Up: College Racism Edition 11/27/06

Filed Under Education and Academia, Race and Racism, Racism Round-Up, Uncategorized | 15 Comments

For some reason? it seems like? racist incidents on college campuses have peaked? during the fall semester this year.? There? have been several blackface incidents, and other random racist happenings.? Here are a few:?

1. American Indian students take on racism at Dartmouth.

2. NAACP issues statement about recent racist incidents on college campuses.? I think they need to add Trinity College, Whitman, and now Dartmouth to the list of campuses mentioned in the article (Johns Hopkins, Texas A&M, Univ. Texas, Austin).

3. Maybe? the NAACP? also need to talk to the college republicans at Boston University, who feel the need to have a “Caucasian scholarship.”?

4. Next? we have the University of Cincinnati, where racist fliers were delievered to the campus.? The UC administration seems to be taking the exact opposite of Whitman.? When Whitman students showed up in blackface, the administration cancelled classes, according to some UC students the administration hasn’t said much at all about these fliers.?

5. Black students at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis got fed up with racism on campus and issued a list of demands, to which white students and at least a few other racial minority students declared that they wanted their tuition money back.? You can read the students grievances and demands here? (PDF). It is also interesting to see that a South Asian woman is leading the charge against the black students grievances.

6. Racial slurs and religious bigotry found on Pace University campuses.

7. I already put up this story about a University of Michigan student who was attacked on line for his opposition to an anti-affirmative action ballot iniative.

8. Students in a multicultural dorm at Lehigh University find a dead animal’s head on? their doorstep.

9. I also posted this incident earlier.? The white University of Memphis fraternity members who called their fraternity brother’s black girlfriend a racial slur.

Nov

22

Who’s White: Debriefing

Filed Under Original Essays and Analysis, Race and Racism, Sociology, Uncategorized | 31 Comments

I have been using the “Who’s White Exercise?” for years in my classes (I also did a “Who’s Black?” version once in my African American sociology class.) There are several points to the assignment, but I would like to highlight? a few? of them. One of the primary points of the exercise is to point out that race is a social construction.? The? exercise demonstrates this because the answers vary and the reasons given are often unrelated to biology, and in many cases unrelated to phenotypical appearance.? I always tell the students to look around and see what others say, so they can get a sense of the level of agreement.? What also inevitably happens is that debates break out for some of the groups (as you can see in the comments section of the thread.)? This lets us know that? race is also? contested.? We don’t agree, and the definition is influx.? Most of my students take race for granted.? They think it is biological, and they think it is fairly straight forward. My other goal is to get them to understand that race is not so simple or straight forward.

I also? wanted to use? this exercise to create a “whiteness scale.”? ? I don’t typically do this in class, but this exercise is a little harder to do on line. I compiled all of the answers on this site and Alas A Blog (Total of 27 answers.)? If people said that a group was not white I gave the group a zero. If people gave ambiguous answers or “sort of” answers I gave the group a 1, and if they said white, I gave the group a two.? I tallied the results. If people said, they do not know I didn’t fill in any answers.? After this I tabulated a “whiteness score.”? On this scale score could range from 0 to 2, with zero indicating that no one thought the group was white and 2 indicating that everyone thought the group was white.? ? Of course,? the two sites I posted on will not generate a? random sample, but I still think it is instructive to think about “whiteness” as a sort of continuum rather than a rigid box.? Here is how the groups ranked based on your answers (from least white to most white):

Whiteness

Iranians, Chileans, and Israelis drew very diverse answers.? Many people labeled them white, many labeled them not white, and others thought they were somewhere in between. Other groups like Cameroonians, Chinese and Nigerians we mostly considered not white, and on the other end of the spectrum English, Germans, and Irish were almost always considered white. What do you think about this chart?? Why do you think each groups falls where it does? Does any group surprise you?

Many people thought that there was a “hidden trick” to the exercise.? This happens in class too, and the students usually think they have figured it out when we get to “Americans” (which is why I put this last on the original list).? They believe that I am trying to get them to say Americans are white.? Changeseeker also brought up another point about the term Americans, which occasionally leads people to think they are being tricked, sometimes people will say “North Americans or South Americans?”? What I have generally found is that my students only worry about this with the American category, not other countries most of whom also have a somewhat mixed population.? This generally provides an opportunity to talk about the US’s image here and abroad.? Are we viewed as a white country?? Do we view ourselves that way?? Do others view us that way?? Nevertheless, this really isn’t the main point.

The main point is to get people to think about race, and not take it for granted.? Race is generated out of collective knowledge. In other words it’s sociological, and the best way to understand it is to see it debated and discussed.? Because contemporary racial ideology tends to squash open discussions of race; many people never get the chance to see or discuss race in public company and in mixed race company.? Once this is done, the unstable nature of race emerges.

Nov

20

Judge Finds In Favor of Day Laborers’ Racial Discrimination Claim

Filed Under Race and Racism, Sociology, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

I have been following this case for a while as it relates to my local area, but it is a strong victory for immigrant rights activists nationwide.? Here is a brief quote and a link to the article:

A federal judge ruled Monday that the Village of Mamaroneck discriminated against Hispanic day laborers when it closed a hiring site and stepped up police patrols on the streets where they looked for work.

“Since August 2004, and continuing into this past summer, the defendants have engaged in a campaign designed to drive out the Latino day laborers who gather on the streets of Mamaroneck to seek work,” Judge Colleen McMahon wrote. “The fact that the day laborers were Latinos, and not whites, was, at least in part, a motivating factor in defendants’ actions.”

While finding the village liable, McMahon did not specify a remedy, giving the two sides 10 days to make suggestions. And in a footnote at the end of the decision, she suggested there waas still time to find a settlement.

Nov

17

Bunch-O-Links: Racism Round-Up Edition 11/17/06

Filed Under Bunch-O-Links, Race and Racism, Racism Round-Up, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Well unfortunately, there is all kind of news to report this week.

1. Ann has been keeping me abreast of the Latino boy in Houston? who was brutally beaten and sodomized by two white boys.? Stephanie posted the link about the conviction of one of the racists and the video taped confession over at her site. Thanks ladies for keeping this story in the news. Here’s an additional story in the Washington Post.

2. My co-blogger at Alas, Ampersand has a post about challenging the 100 to 1 rule in federal cocaine sentencing.? Amp also highlights the racial disparities in outcome of this policy.? Basically, as the current federal law stands, 100 grams of powder cocaine gets the same punishment as 1 gram of crack/rock cocaine. The race and class of those arrested with crack is much more likely to be black an/or poor, while powder cocaine users are more likely to be white and wealthy.

3. This story is dripping with irony.? It seems that bodyguards for Miss Angelina “I Want to Adopt a Child of Every Race” Jolie threatened Indian locals and used racist language.? This is while Angelina Jolie is filming her movie about Marianne Pearl (Remember the controversy over Jolie playing a biracial woman; this is that movie.)

4. A University of Michigan student becomes a campus activist after he was called a racial slur on Facebook because he? opposed Proposition 2? (an anti-affirmative action measure).? I’m impressed with his fortitude and strong response.? Dumi at Black at Michigan has a post about the defeat of affirmative action on U of M’s campus, and it’s connection to Detroit.

5. S* sent me this link to a story about a Black firefighter, who won a $2.7 million law suit after being harassed by his co-workers.? The article claims that the case was a racial discrimination case, but at the same time, they don’t spell the specific nature of the racial harassment.? There seems to be something missing; I guess I was supposed to read between the lines where it says slurs and insults. I get frustrated with these reporters when they present cases in this way.? I know many papers don’t want to print racial slurs, and that is well intentioned; however, they can say the “n-word” instead of spelling it out.? It seems like using these generalities whitewashes racism (pun intended).

Nov

17

Who’s White Exercise (Updated)

Filed Under Race and Racism, Uncategorized | 49 Comments

Update: I’m moving this thread back to the top, to get a few more responses before we debrief.

Given the debate in the comments section on the immigration thread, I thought this might be a good exercise/thread. This comes from a classroom exercise I used, which is based on an article by Doug Daniels. For the following groups, please answer whether or not each group is white: YES or NO

  1. Chileans
  2. Irish
  3. English
  4. Iranians
  5. Cameroonians
  6. Israelis
  7. Italians
  8. Nigerians
  9. Chinese
  10. Mexicans
  11. Portuguese
  12. Russians
  13. Puerto Ricans
  14. Saudis
  15. Egyptians
  16. Germans
  17. Canadians
  18. Americans

Feel free to cut and paste your answers into the comments section. If you would like to explain your answers, you can also do this in the comments section.

Bibliography Daniels, Doug. The White Race is Shrinking: Perceptions of Race in Canada and Some Speculations on the Political Economy of Race Classification. Pp. 51-54 in Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror by R. Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Eds.). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Nov

17

Has Desegregation Stalled? Trends in Gender Segregation of College Majors

Filed Under Education and Academia, Gender and Sexism, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

The most recent issue of Gender and Society, the top journal sociology of gender journal, has and article by Paula England and Su Li that examines trends in gender segregation of college majors.? On a positive note, the study indicates that during the overall time period gender segregation decreased dramatically, but the study also found that the pace of gender desegregation stalled in the later years of the study (It covers 1971-2001).?

The data the authors’ use points to the “devaluation of the feminine” argument.? This argument posits that the pace of desegregation is driven by women entering male fields; however, men do not reciprocate by entering females fields since these fields are considered a “step down.”? Thus, the process of change is asymmetrical–women are changing dramatically and men are not changing much.

The authors summarize their findings in this way:

Baccalaureate degree recipients have gone from 44 to 58 percent women from 1971 to 2002. Womens representation increased most rapidly in the first decade. Indeed, although the fact that women are getting more college degrees than men has just recently surfaced in the popular press, womens numbers passed mens in 1982 and have remained higher ever since. During these three decades, the gender segregation of fields of undergraduate study has declined, but the largest decline was in the first half of the period. During that period, successive cohorts of women changed their field choices quite dramatically toward fields dominated by menout of fields dominated by women such as education and English and especially into business-related fields. Virtually none of the desegregation came from more men choosing fields traditional for women in significantly greater numbers. In the latter half of the period, womens probabilities of choosing the historically male-dominated majors failed to continue their upward trek, and their probabilities of choosing fields traditional for women (such as English and elementary education), which had been falling, stopped their fall. This is a large part of why desegregation has stalled. Desegregation was also stalled by the fact that, as fields feminized, men eschewed the fields, especially in the more recent period, as our regression results show. Whether this still-somewhat-segregated equilibrium is temporary or will hold for the long term remains to be seen.

Our interpretation of these patterns draws on two theoretical perspectives with implications for change. The devaluation perspective helps us to understand why gender-related change is deeply asymmetric. While desegregation could come from womens abandoning predominantly female for predominantly male fields or from mens abandoning predominantly male for predominantly female fields, almost all the change was of the former type. We believe that this is because any field associated with women has been culturally devalued, so that women have more to gain than men in status and rewards from majoring in fields nontraditional for their gender. Devaluation also explains our regression-based findings that feminization of fields deters men from entering.

The authors also say that this trend is consistent with other trends in gender inequality in recent years.? Over the 1990s the indicators of gender inequality such as the pay gap, occupational segregation, and egalitarian attitudes have not changed much. (The authors cite a study by Cotter, Hermsen and Vanneman (2004) for the pay gap and occupational segregation.? I have a feeling the the 1990s and 2000s are going to be for gender what the 1970s and 1980s were for race–the point at which major progress towards ending inequality stalls.? Of course, this is just me speculating.

On of the things that this study suggests is that after a certain point, gender desegregation is really contingent on men’s choices and behaviors.? This also leads me to wonder what we can do to get more men to enter fields like nursing or education, since women have been entering fields like engineering and physics in larger numbers.

Bibliography

England, Paula and Su Li. 2006. “Desegregation Stalled.” Gender and Society 20(5):657-677.

Cotter, David A., Joan M. Hermsen, and Reeve Vanneman. 2004. Gender inequality at work. New York: Russell Sage.

Nov

17

Erase Racism Submissions Due Nov. 17th

Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

The Carnival is being hosted by Autobiography of a Face. You can submit here.

Nov

16

New Email–Update

Filed Under Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Update: I haven’t been getting email for two days, so if anyone sent me any messages in the past two days, they didn’t come through.?

I have been completely inundated with spam, so I have changed the site’s email.? the new address is: rachel at rachelstavern.com

Obviously it is written in typical email form, but I have to write it this way to keep spambots from sending automatic emails.

Nov

15

US Threatens to End Adoption From Guatemala

Filed Under Family Issues, International Racism, Sociology, Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Here is the article, and here is a quote:

“The current adoption process in Guatemala does not afford many of the children and families the protections they deserve,” the State Department official said, adding that the adoption process there is rife with “conflicts of interest” and “improper financial gain.”

The chairman of the House subcommittee, Republican Representative Chris Smith, welcomed the call for tighter controls in Guatemala.

“The convention is very clear that birth parents must not be induced by payment or compensation of any kind … and that consents to adopt must be freely given,” he said.

“What concerns me is the fact that the privately-run adoption system uses baby brokers to pay birth mothers for their newborns,” he said.

“This affronts the dignity of the baby, the birth mother and the prospective adoptive parent,” he said, adding that it also flouts the Hague convention.

Smith said vigorous adherence to the international adoption treaty would also protect the rights of adoptive parents.

“Prospective parents can count on the fact that the child they want to adopt has not been abducted, sold or trafficked,” the lawmaker said.

The United States is the world’s biggest adoptive country, receiving more children from overseas that all other countries combined.

Last year the United States took in nearly 23,000 adopted children from overseas — double the number adopted just ten years ago.

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