Category Archives: race

meet the de blasios

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05_Flatbed_2 - AUGUST

Such an innocent act.  A simple family photo.  I’m so disappointed that anyone even thought to turn this into a “scandal.”  In my opinion, a white man who has a “black” family very likely does “get it” more than one who has not or would not cross that line.  He’s become black by association to a degree, and even if he doesn’t fully understand the experience and the struggles, I’m pretty sure that he cares a lot.  For it affects him.  It affects everyone, but chances are de Blasio cannot and will not ignore it.

New York Post Attack On Bill de Blasio Is Bogus

by Sheryl McCarthy

The New York Post claims that Bill de Blasio’s use of photographs of his interracial family in his campaign mailings for the public advocate’s job amounts to pandering to black voters. Frankly, I was delighted to see the photographs of the Brooklyn City Councilman’s family.

With his wife, Chirlane, an attractive, dark-skinned black woman who wears her hair in natural braids, and his children, Dante and Chiara, who are clearly biracial, the de Blasios are the picture of an attractive and apparently happy family. Leave it to the Post to lend credence to claims by City Councilman Charles Barron that the photographs are designed to pander to black voters, and that they were mailed only to voters in predominantly black sections of the city, while voters in predominantly white areas received mailings with no photos or photos of the candidate only.

DeBlasio’s press secretary’s told me the family photos were sent out citywide and were not intended to appeal to just black voters or other voters of color. They were sent out because, as de Blasio told WNYC interviewer Brian Lehrer, “I’m showing my family, and I’m showing my family to all communities because that is who I am.”

The Post story is a shoddy piece of reporting which quotes only Barron and two anonymous sources who reportedly claim that black women are complaining about the campaign flier in which Chirlane de Blasio says of her husband “He gets it,” because it suggests that de Blasio understands black residents’ concerns simply because he’s married to a black woman.

…It’s customary for politicians to run ads featuring their families. So why shouldn’t de Blasio feature his? They’re certainly attractive, and if the fact that they’re black and bi-racial wins him points in the black community and any other community in the city, so what? When I was a columnist for Newsday I interviewed de Blasio on several occasions, without knowing the race of his wife and children. When I saw the campaign photos, I was frankly delighted. His wife looks adorable, his children attractive, and aware as I am of the dearth of suitable mates for black women in this country, I’m always thrilled to run across a successful man who’s attracted to black women. Since most of the five candidates for the public advocate’s job are more or less qualified for the job, I have to admit this fact makes me think more favorably of de Blasio’s candidacy.

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indifference

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Study Shows Whites Are More Racist Then They Think

http://newsone.com/nation/study-shows-whites-are-more-racist-then-they-think/

Whites who think they wouldn’t tolerate a racist act are having to think again, thanks to a surprising experiment that exposed some college students to one and found indifference at best.

Here’s the scene: Researchers in Toronto recruited 120 non-black York University students for what purported to be a psychology study.

A participant was directed to a room where two actors posing as fellow participants – one black, one white – waited. The black person said he needed to retrieve a cell phone and left, gently bumping the white person’s leg on the way out. The white actor then did one of three things: Nothing. Said, “I hate when black people do that.” Or used the N-word.

Then a researcher entered and said the “psychology study” was starting and that the student should pick one of the two others as a partner for the testing.

Half the participants just read about that scene, and half actually experienced it.

Those asked to predict their reaction to either comment said they’d be highly upset and wouldn’t choose the white actor as their partner.

Yet students who actually experienced the event didn’t seem bothered by it – and nearly two-thirds chose the white actor as a partner, the researchers report Friday in the journal Science.

“It’s like these nasty racist comments aren’t having an effect,” said York University psychology professor Kerry Kawakami, the lead author.

“It’s important to remind people that just because a black man has been elected as president doesn’t mean racism is no longer a problem or issue in the States,” she added.

The study can’t say why people reacted that way, although the researchers speculate that unconscious bias is at work. They have new experiments under way to see if maybe these witnesses suppress that they’re upset to avoid confrontation.

“The failure of people to confront or do anything about racist comments is pretty widespread in the real world,” said Indiana University psychologist Eliot R. Smith, who co-wrote a review of the experiment. “People may feel uncomfortable if someone makes a remark like this, but it’s rare they will actually confront them.”

inspired by mad men…sort of

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I’ve actually been planning to blog this for a while, but I got lazy and tucked it into a folder on my computer.  Last week’s episode of Mad Men has inspired me to get it together though.  If you saw the episode, you probably know what this is all about.  The blackface.  The throwback to the “good old days” when it was just hilarious (and not at all inappropriate) to mock the darkies.  I’m not exactly sure how I feel about the scene from the show.  It was kind of long and awkward, but perhaps that was the point.  Anyway, it’s not like the writers of the show just pulled that out of thin air.  I bet they didn’t have the song written for the show. As with racist advertising (and as malevolent as), there is a plethora of  good ole “racist” music out there.  Wanna see some?

allcoonsErnest Hogan was a black man. Here are his lyrics:

“All coons look alike to me, I’ve got another beau you see, and he’s just as good to me as you, nig!”

Here’s some back story on Hogan and the song from Wikipedia:
In 1895, black entertainer Ernest Hogan published two of the earliest sheet music rags, one of which (“All Coons Look Alike to Me”) eventually sold a million copies. As fellow Black musician Tom Fletcher said, Hogan was the “first to put on paper the kind of rhythm that was being played by non-reading musicians.” While the song’s success helped introduce the country to ragtime rhythms, its use of racial slurs created a number of derogatory imitation tunes, known as “coon songs” because of their use of extremely racist and stereotypical images of blacks. In Hogan’s later years he admitted shame and a sense of “race betrayal” for the song while also expressing pride in helping bring ragtime to a larger audience.

463px-Cooncooncoon“Coon!  Coon!  Coon! I wish my color would fade.  Coon! Coon! Coon! I’d like a different shade.  Coon! Coon! Coon! Morning, night, and noon, I wish I was a white man ‘stead of a Coon!  Coon! Coon!”

No lyrics for these two, I believe:

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Here’s one that I thought was kind of sweet, yet sad:
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“Mama, are there any angels black like me?  I’ve been as good as any little girl could be.  If I hide my face do you think they would see?  I wonder if they’ll find a place for Little black me.”

birthers

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A couple of days ago I came across a well written letter to the editor of the Philadelphia Daily News addressing “birthers.”  I’ve been trying to ignore the birthers.  Too crazy to waste time on.  But of course I do have an opinion, and Rev. Weathers echoes it.

THERE are many who aren’t going to agree with my assessment of the questions about the citizenship of President Obama.

But the questions say to me as an African-American that whatever President Obama does will not be accepted by a certain faction in this country because of his race.

Hawaii became part of the U.S. in 1959. President Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961. The state of Hawaii has confirmed that Barack Obama was born in the state, which answers the question and places a period at the end of the story. Yet we still have some on the extreme right who continue to perpetuate this propaganda because they have never accepted the fact that America has elected its first African-American president.

If the critics of President Obama don’t believe he was born in the state of Hawaii, they have a right to sue Hawaii for falsifying records and committing fraud. Would they go this far? No, because they know they don’t have a case. The birthers’ story illustrates that they will not accept President Obama because of the color of his skin.

Rev. Dr. Wayne M. Weathers, Philadelphia via

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civil rights instruction

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I’m thrilled to learn that Mississippi is mandating civil rights instruction for al K-12 students.  They’re the first and only state to do so!  Maybe this will lead to the eradication of segregated proms there.  And maybe even to honest, well- rounded history books/classes throughout the country.  Be the change, Mississippi!

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JACKSON, Miss. — In Mississippi, where mention of the Civil Rights Movement evokes images of bombings, beatings and the Ku Klux Klan, public schools are preparing to test a program that will ultimately teach students about the subject in every grade from kindergarten through high school.

Many experts believe the effort will make Mississippi the first state to mandate civil rights instruction for all K-12 students.

So far, four school systems have asked to be part of a pilot effort to test the curriculum in high schools. In September, the Mississippi Department of Education will name the systems that have been approved for the pilot. By the 2010-2011 school year, the program should be in place at all grade levels as part of social studies courses.

Advocacy groups such as the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation and Washington-based Teaching for Change are preparing to train Mississippi teachers to tell the “untold story” of the civil rights struggle to the nearly half million students in the state’s public schools.

“Now more than ever we are engaged in national debates about race and so much of those debates are impoverished in their understanding of history,” said Susan Glissen of the Winter Institute. “We want to emphasize the grassroots nature of civil rights and the institution of racism.”

Anti-Civil-Rights

…Education officials looked to other states for a model but couldn’t find one that included anything as comprehensive as what Mississippi has in mind, said Chauncey Spears, who works in the curriculum and instruction office of Mississippi’s education agency.

The Education Commission of the States didn’t know of any other state with a such a program, although it does not specifically track social studies curriculum.

Some states, including Alabama, Georgia and Arkansas, have placed an emphasis on civil rights instruction. New Jersey created an Amistad Commission to ensure the history of slavery is taught in schools. Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia school district requires students to complete an African-American history course before graduation.

“We’re behind time. Students don’t know about what Blacks did. They’re not taught anything about culture, about our history,” said Ollye Shirley, a member of the commission created to research the Mississippi curriculum and a former Jackson Public School board member.

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…Deborah Menkart, executive director of Teaching for Change, said it’s important to help students understand that Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. weren’t the only important figures in the Civil Rights Movement.

“The traditional version would be that it started in 1954, thereby leaving out the fact that a lot of groundwork had to be done before that,” Menkart said.

via

re:mixed race in the uk

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This is a sad story.  I’m not up on the politics of the United Kingdom, so I had to look up the BNP or British National Party.  Here’s what I found on Wikipedia:

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The British National Party (BNP) is a far-right and whites-only political party in the United Kingdom.

The BNP is not represented in Parliament.

According to its constitution, the BNP is “committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948”. The BNP proposes “firm but voluntary incentives for immigrants and their descendants to return home”. The party also advocates the repeal of all anti-discrimination legislation, and restricts party membership to “indigenous British ethnic groups deriving from the class of ‘IndigenousCaucasian’”. The BNP also accepts white immigrants that are assimilated into one of those ethnicities. The BNP asserts that there are biological racial differences that determine the behaviour and character of individuals of different races, although it claims that it does not regard whites as superior to other ethnic groups, and that preference for one’s own ethnicity is a part of human nature.

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Schoolgirl victim of racist bullying says tormentor’s sentence is ‘pants’

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By Nick Allen

The victim, a 14-year-old mixed race girl, was repeatedly insulted with racist terms for six months by a 15-year-old, BNP supporting fellow pupil.

Last month the boy became the first school child to be convicted of racially aggravated harassment of a fellow pupil following a trial at Lincoln Youth Court.

The conviction prompted questions over whether such racist bullying should be dealt with through criminal law or by schools themselves.

The boy could have been detained for up to two years in a young offenders’ institution but he was instead sentenced to a six month supervision order and made to pay £500 compensation to the girl, which will be paid by his father.

The victim, who tried to kill herself with an overdose of stress pills and painkillers, said she was “disappointed” with the sentence.

She said: “When my mum told me the sentence I just thought ‘Is that it? That’s pants.’

“He has got a slap on the wrists and been told he was a naughty boy – that’s all. He has not paid the price for what he has put me through and he will never have to suffer like I have.

“I want him to be out into a multi-cultural school where he is one of the only white pupils to see what it feels like to be in the minority. I want him to be in my shoes and see how he copes with that.”

The girl, who is of mixed white English and black African heritage, was called “wog”, “coon”, “nigger”, “gorilla” and “golliwog” by the boy. She also suffered abusive chants of “white, white, white is right, kick them out, fight, fight, fight” and was repeatedly told: “Go back to your own country, you don’t belong here.”

She wrote a suicide note and took an overdose on Jan 25 this year. She was then sectioned for six weeks in a psychiatric hospital before the family moved to a different part of the country.

After the sentencing her mother said: “…He bullied her to the extent she actually wanted to die but he had no remorse. When he was found guilty we were on a high and thought we would finally get justice. But now we feel we have put ourselves out there and not got anything back.

During the case it emerged the boy was a known BNP supporter who actively tried to enlist other youths.

The victim’s mother said: “It’s very sad and comes from ignorance more than anything. My daughter is British, she was born in this country and has a British passport. But they just think everyone living in the UK should be white and English.”

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what “race” means

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So very interesting….

Q & A with Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of the “personal genetics” company 23andMe.

Q. Have you had any situations where a person finds out they have relatively recent ancestors of a race that they were unaware of? If so, have any reacted badly?

A. We know that quite a few people find surprises about their ancestry through 23andMe’s service. One customer with extensive knowledge of his European paternal ancestry discovered that his maternal line traced to a Native American woman. He tracked down paper records that revealed a “mulatto woman” about seven generations back. Native American ancestry makes some sense given that his ancestry traces to the southern U.S. While he was excited about this new information, his 93-year-old mother was far less positive and remains skeptical! Quite a few African Americans have discovered that their paternal line traces to Europe. Although many African Americans may be aware that they have some European ancestry (the average is about 20 percent), some discover that close to 50 percent of their ancestry traces to Europe, and this can take some getting used to.

Q. As projects like yours and the HapMap uncover numerous instances of genetic differences between human groups or races, what is the responsibility of the genetics community when discussing innate differences between races, particularly when a large part of academia is convinced that there are no such differences?

A. A lot of the difficulty in talking about race has been a lack of agreement on what “race” means. In the past, the idea of pure races also included an ordering of certain races as inherently superior to others. We reject this idea absolutely. However, that doesn’t mean that there are no genetic differences between populations of different ancestral origin. A few of our features use the genome-wide data of reference populations from around the world to trace the origin of pieces of an individual’s genome. Some customers have complex patterns depending on where their ancestors originated. These reference populations aren’t “races”; they’re representative samples of peoples who have lived in a single place for a very long time and have thus accumulated different sets of genetic variants over time.

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interracial roommates

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I just read this New York Times article by Tamar Lewin on the benefits of having a college roommate of a different race.  I’m not at all surprised that are some pros to this situation.  I was surprised by the admission here that campuses have been intentionally segregating students.  The piece makes it clear, but without judgement.  I find it appalling. I would LOVE to make Ohio State out to be the bad guy here, but this practice became apparent to me at my orientation for the University of Michigan which was only attended by incoming minorities, and even more clear when I was placed in an unofficial black dorm on a different campus from all of my classes and all of my friends from high school that were Going Blue.  You see, if having a roommate of a different race reduces racial prejudices, we could be so much farther along in eradicating these race issues if the schools hadn’t been keeping people apart.

michigan-wolverines

Interracial Roommates Can Reduce Prejudice

As a freshman at Ohio State University, and the only black student on his floor, Sam Boakye was determined to get good grades — in part to make sure his white roommate had no basis for negative racial views.

“If you’re surrounded by whites, you have something to prove,” said Mr. Boakye, now a rising senior who was born in Ghana. “You’re pushed to do better, to challenge the stereotype that black people are not that smart.”

Several recent studies, at Ohio State and elsewhere, have found that having a roommate of a different race can reduce prejudice, diversify friendships and even boost black students’ academic performance. But, the research found, such relationships are more stressful and more likely to break up than same-race pairings.

As universities have grown more diverse, and interracial roommate assignments are more common, social scientists have looked to them as natural field experiments that can provide insights on race relations.

…Several studies have shown that living with a roommate of a different race changes students’ attitudes. One, from the University of California at Los Angeles, generally found decreased prejudice among students with different-race roommates — but those who roomed with Asian-Americans, the group that scored the highest on measures of prejudice, became more prejudiced themselves.

Professionals who watch over roommate relationships say that interracial roommate assignments are an important part of campus diversity.

…One new study, of Princeton students, used daily questionnaires to monitor roommate interactions and perceptions.

“In the earliest weeks of the relationship, the positive emotions declined for minority students with white roommates,” said Mr. Trail, an author of the study. “It wasn’t that the white students started being mean or negative. Instead, it was a drop-off in positive behaviors, like smiling or making eye contact, that led the minority students to feel worse.”

“Just having diversity in classrooms doesn’t do anything to increase interracial friendships,” said Claudia Buchmann, an associate professor of sociology at Ohio State… “But the intimacy of living together in residence halls, with no roommate, or a different-race roommate, does lead to more interracial friendships.”

Minority students in a predominantly white environment, she said, often cocoon themselves by clustering together. Both black and white resident advisers at Ohio State said it was common for black freshmen to seek out other black students.

“There are organizations on campus specifically designed to help minority students, and oftentimes minority students try to find their friends through those groups,” said Ellen Speicher, an Ohio State resident adviser who is white and a rising junior. “It makes sense, on a predominantly white campus.”

Mr. Boakye, a resident adviser for two years. said there was comfort in clustering.

“Being a minority at Ohio State, we try to stay together, to build ourselves as a community,” Mr. Boakye said. “It’s different for white guys.

“A lot of them come here without much exposure to diversity,” he said, “so when their first experience with a black guy isn’t so bad, they go and make more black friends. I think I made a good impression on my freshman roommate. When I saw him this year, he said, ‘Hey dude, you’re not the only black friend I have.’ That felt good.”