Archive for the ‘race’ Category
The Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time: Lessons from Chicago
The Chicago Teachers’ Strike
by Afrah
The teachers’ strike in Chicago in in its fifth day at the time of this posting. The coverage has divided into roughly two parallel narratives. One decries the overreach of the teacher’s union, led by Karen Lewis. According to this viewpoint, it is a public relations disaster at best. In these economic hard times, the unions are pushing back against the elimination of automatic pay raises and other job protections. The teachers look like they are not willing to their part in sharing the sacrifices like other workers. The other story about the strike worries aloud about the state of the roughly 350,000 students in the public school system whose largely working class parents have to scramble to find accommodations for them during the strike. Both storylines are incomplete because they overlook important complexities. There are extraordinarily high stakes embedded in this strike because educational inequality is the civil rights struggle of our time. The Chicago teachers have drawn an important line in the sand in a fight for the future of public education.
First, the teachers’ strike demonstrates that union power is alive and robust in the twenty first century. They have always been–and continue to be–a necessary counterweight to management’s interest. The idea that teachers are the enemy is a fallacy. My first and most enduring professional identity is that of a teacher. I began my career as a history teacher in 1999 at Benjamin Banneker Academy for Community Development, a public high school in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn. With over ten years experience in the New York school system as a teacher and administrator, I can attest to the necessity of unions to exercise its power to improve the bread and butter issues of working conditions, salaries, and tenure. I found it incredibly useful that I had the freedom to teach U.S. History courses to my students that principally included the voices of people of color, women, poor people, and folks of all sexual orientation in a critically engaging manner. Due to union protection, I taught a curriculum that challenged the great (white) man’s version of American history without fear of reprisal from my supervisors. Read the rest of this entry »
All Hail the Mom-in-Chief: Michelle Obama, Feminist Icon
Michelle Obama waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention
by Afrah
The reviews are in. Both liberal and conservative commentators agree: Michelle Obama gave a barnburner of a speech last night at the Democratic National Convention. She was pitch perfect: sincere and persuasive. And she looked great in her custom made Tracy Reese dress and J.Crew pumps. She earned high marks for performance and presentation. As I digest the speech content today and bask in the warm glow of the Obama’s increasingly solid reelection prospects, there is a thought that rests uncomfortably in my mind as I consider in the figure of Michelle Obama. As a good feminist, can I truly applaud a woman who subverts her own personal prowess in favor of a more palatable “aww shucks, I am a mom” public personality?
A partial explanation of Michelle Obama’s careful construction of her role as first lady rests with the public image that emerged during the 2008 presidential election. According to her most strident critics, she was the fist bumping, angry, and radical black woman who did not love America. Remember The New Yorker cover on July 21, 2008? It was unfunny because it did not critique and merely replicated the extreme right wing caricature of Barack Obama as a secret Muslim and Michelle Obama as gun toting black revolutionary. Read the rest of this entry »
Barack Obama: Jackie Robinson of Black Presidents
by David
Barack Obama
For the most recent issue of The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has penned a superb essay on Barack Obama as Black president. Coates argues that Obama, by not talking about race while sitting as president, has taken an accommodationist stance against white racism. You should read the whole thing, because it really is a spectacular piece of writing. Indeed, it’s an essay that is much better than this blog post in response to it, an essay that so impressed me that I will likely assign it to my “Race and Identity in Judaism” class.
And yet, it’s an essay that I have some problems with, on historical grounds.
As Coates correctly notes, “Obama is not simply America’s first black president–he is the first president who could credibly teach a black-studies class.” In short Barack Obama is an intellectual. America has long been uncomfortable with intellectuals, as can be evidenced by the cult of anti-intellectualism surrounding Sarah Palin and other figures on the far right. I think Black intellectuals make this sector of white America even angrier than than the poor black underclass does, because they want to feel superior to Barack Obama, but they can’t.
Obama’s status as intellectual makes me wary of lumping him in the same accommodationist category as Booker T. Washington, as Coates does. For Washington displayed an anti-intellectualism of his own, as he preached industrial education, economic self-development, and acceptance of segregation for the black community of the South. Washington’s antagonist, W.E.B. Du Bois, argued in favor of integration, in favor of civil rights for African Americans, to be led by a “talented tenth.”
So is Obama an accomodationist in the vein of Booker T. Washington? As president, when he has dealt with race, it has been to engage in the “time-honored tradition of black self-hectoring, railing against the perceived failings of black culture.” Coates is most angry about Obama’s treatment of Shirley Sherrod, who was forced to resign from the US Department of Agriculture after the late Andrew Breitbart aired selective moments of an interview with her to make it appear as if she harbored anti-white sentiments. By failing to stand up for Sherrod, Obama followed in Washington’s footsteps by backing down in the face of white racism.
Booker T. Washington
And yet I think there might be another way to understand Obama here.
First, there are important differences between Obama and Booker T. Washington beyond the purely intellectual. The latter preached a doctrine of group uplift through industry and agriculture. His was a separatist, if not segregationist schema. It’s no wonder that Marcus Garvey, who led an even more radically separatist group in his “Back to Africa” movement, looked to Washington for inspiration. Washington, Garvey, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, these leaders and movements rejected integration. Obama, whether he discusses race or not, is an apostle of integration.
Obama’s story, then, is not one of accommodation and separation, but of accommodation and integration. In order for this integration to occur, Obama has had to avoid the perception of succumbing to “black rage,” of being an “angry black man.” And in that way, the black leader he most resembles is baseball player Jackie Robinson.
Jackie Robinson
When Jackie Robinson entered the major leagues in 1947, he made a promise to Brooklyn Dodgers’ general manager Branch Rickey, the man most responsable for signing him in the first place. Robinson promised Rickey that no matter how many taunts he received from players and fans and teammates, no matter how many baserunners slid into him spikes high or pitchers who threw at his head, he could not fight back. He had to take it, grit his teeth, and remain silent. Robinson promised to do this for three years. Rickey knew that if Robinson retaliated, he would be labeled an angry black man, other owners would refuse to sign African Americans, and the great experiment at integrating America’s national pastime would be rendered a failure.
Barack Obama is the Jackie Robinson of the white house. He has effectively integrated the presidency. But in his first term in office he has behaved like Jackie Robinson did in his first three years in the majors. After those first three years, Robinson was free to retaliate, to yell and fight back, and he did so vociferously. The metaphorical gloves came off. He succeeded in integrating baseball, and could then assert himself, as a black man, and as an individual.
Obama has not faced the degree of racism that Robinson did, but he has faced racism, both overt and subtle, in large part coming white resentment in the face of a changing national makeup. He is living in the post-Civil Rights era, indeed, HE IS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. One would think he would have the ability, the power, to speak his mind more forcefully on racial questions.
Or maybe it’s precisely because he is president, because he is blazing a trail, that he needs to keep a low profile on race issues. The question remains: will Obama, if elected for a second term, take the gloves off? Will he be the tough-as-nails player that Jackie Robinson was his whole career, while still putting up Hall of Fame numbers?
This question may be related to the left’s criticism of Obama, that he promised change but then governed from the center. If a re-elected Obama changes course on race, will he change course and veer left on other policy arenas?
Queer and Hip Hop: Frank Ocean Comes Out, Black Music Opens Up
Beyonce’s Words of Support to Frank Ocean
by Afrah
It’s hard not to succumb to the temptation to overread the importance of firsts: Frank Ocean, the R&B singer who is best known to a wide audience for singing the hook on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s “No Church in the Wild” and member of Odd Future collective, wrote a poignant story on tumblr about falling in love with a man. By virtue of his post, he accomplished a first for mainstream black music in openly discussing his relationship with a man. The actual story is powerful because in many ways because it is universal. Ocean recounts the longing, unrequited feelings, and finding closure from a transformative love. The posting is a pivotal one in his personal journey and feels like a great moment for black music writ large. The expression of Ocean’s group member, Tyler, the Creator sums up the exuberance of this moment by stating on Formspring, “yeah thats my n***a tho, shit is hard for him but he did that.”
The African American community has expanded immeasurably by the figure of Frank Ocean. Black music in general and hip hop in particular is supposed to reflect the vast expanse of human existence and the reality of life in urban America. It has often been summed up by shorthand to keep it real. Authenticity is a preoccupation of hip hop and its marching orders. It is a medium that possesses a youthful swagger that has become a dominant force in popular culture. Like all art, hip hop both transcends and remains frustratingly bound by material limitations of sexism and consumerism. In other words, it encompasses the contradictions, myopias, strivings and beauty of life. At this moment, black music also has the power to become more accepting of the range of human sexuality. Read the rest of this entry »
The Agony & Ecstasy: A Review of Love & Hip Hop Atlanta
The Ladies of Love and Hip Hop Atlanta
by Afrah
Watching reality tv shows such as Vh1′s Love and Hip Hop Atlanta leads to existential questioning such as: Why do we watch? Do shows like this fuel the poor representation of black people in popular culture writ large? And can 3.6 million people who watched the show’s debut possibly be misguided?
I am of two minds. I am shocked, shocked to see black folks embodying the racial stereotype that predicts loud and uncouth behavior. As of this posting, over two thousand people have dutifully signed the change.org petition to boycott the show. Yet the conventions of reality tv rewards bad behavior and highlights extreme personalities. Given the platform, their actions are unsurprising.
The clear anti-heroes of the show are Stevie J and Joseline Hernandez. The audience can easily root against them and are riveted by the pure unabashedness of their characters. Stevie J is a former Bad Boy producer of classic 90s hits with Notorious B.I.G. and Diddy who has won three Grammy awards. He is the resident cad who is juggling a relationship with Joseline and Mimi, who is the mother of his young daughter. Joseline is a stripper turned recording artist for Stevie J who unironically states that her purpose on the show is to inspire young girls to follow in her footsteps.
Their motives are clear: to get paid and get into as much drama as possible. Read the rest of this entry »
New Book on Race on the Canadian Campus
by David (shameless self-promotion)
In line with our series of three posts on affirmative action, I thought I would mention this cool new book that just came out called “Too Asian?” Racism, Privilege and Post-Secondary Education. The title is a response to Canada’s Maclean’s magazine article “Too Asian?” from 2010. It just so happens that I contributed the second chapter, “Asians and Affirmative Action on Campus: An Historical Canada–US Comparison.” That chapter came out of this blog post. Here’s the blurb on the book:
The now notorious Maclean’s article “’Too Asian?’” from the magazine’s 2010 campus issue has sparked a national furor about race in Canadian higher education. Since the founding of the federal policy of multiculturalism, Canadians have prided themselves on their ability to integrate diversity into a broader multicultural environment, but the often heated discussions about race point to fissures in this national project. This collection uses the controversy about the Maclean’s article as a flashpoint to interrogate issues about race and representation on Canadian campuses and what it means for students and learning across the country.
Anyhow, if you’re interested in buying the book, you can do so at this link.
Affirmative Action and the Post Racial Trap
by Afrah (the third in a series of three posts on affirmative action)
Affirmative Action got its start in the 1970s as a conservative program that had the support of the Republican administration of Richard Nixon. A combination of the civil rights movement call for change and black student led protest for increased access to majority white college campuses provided the context for the implementation of affirmative action. The purpose of the program was to increase the number of women and historically underrepresented minorities in employment and education. Despite the very auspicious beginnings of a policy that had liberal and conservative support, the backlash began soon thereafter. During the 1970s, the main criticism came from supporters of a so-called colorblind policy. The current day post racial critique of affirmative action is colorblindness that has been updated and repackaged for the new millennium. Despite its seemingly neutral and laudatory goals, the true purpose of post racialism is to undermine a program that is essential for continued opportunities for people of color.
The 1970s laid the foundation to the eventual conservative political ascendancy that was deeply critical of the racial advancements of the civil rights movement. The right was able to complete a bit of historic revisionism in embracing the “good” 1960s ideology of colorblindness. They shaped a new racial narrative by employing civil rights rhetoric to critique and attempt to dismantle a program that provided for racial progress. This sort of political positioning was a brilliant and cynical element of the conservative battle against affirmative action. They claimed the unassailable moral high ground while advocating for the policy’s demise. Read the rest of this entry »
Universities are still Super-White and if our Leaders have their Way will only get Whiter.
By Peter (the second in a series of three posts on affirmative action)
There is a group of students getting unfair advantage with their admission into college. Despite the best effort at remedial education, this group lags behind other students on most standardized testing. Some (like myself) even suspect that this group could be genetically less intelligent. Worse, they are more prone to violent outburst, misogyny, and other anti-social behaviors.
So why, then, do colleges insist on giving such advantages to white lacrosse players? The answer:
The push by Midwestern liberal arts colleges to add lacrosse programs is one of several tactics employed by these institutions in recent years to hold on to a demographic that presidents say is central to these institutions’ identities and bottom lines, particularly as the population shrinks and becomes more coveted by other types of institutions. Middle-class suburban students, who are not only able but willing to pay the high price for private education, used to be liberal arts colleges’ bread and butter. Now they’re increasingly lured to other types of institutions. Lacrosse is a weapon in the fight to keep them
Let’s dig into this demographic that is “central to these institutions’ identities and bottom lines.” We learn they are “likely white, from a well-educated and wealthy household… Lacrosse players are desirable for several reasons, but the main one is that they tend to be what enrollment professionals call ‘full-pay’ students, or students whose families tend not to qualify for need-based aid.” Ivies, notoriously, recruit for waspy sports like squash and rowing, giving a leg-up to the long-suffering “arrogant prep school jock” demographic.
Do we Really Need Affirmative Action for these guys?
The recruitment of lacrosse players is hardly the only way that colleges give advantages to the already privileged. The worst are legacy admissions. Having parents who went to Yale can be the equivalent of a 160 point increase in your SAT scores when applying. At Amherst, a legacy is 4 times more likely to be admitted than a non-legacy. Nor are legacies insignificant. At most elite schools they compromise between 10-25% of admissions. Finally, schools like to maintain “geographic diversity,” which means that students from sparsely populated mostly rural and white states like North Dakota get an advantage. Note too, that these groups get this formal advantage above and beyond the millions of informal advantages in life that have accrued to them on account of their wealth, whiteness, and educated parents.
Meanwhile, of course, thanks to the age of austerity, black and Latino students are less likely to even have the chance to go to good public universities. Tuition is skyrocketing and the predictable consequence is that poor and working class communities of color have fewer options. Here in New York, thanks to the CUNY tuition hikes pushed by Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo (aka Governor 1%), we’ve seen dramatic drops in the black and Latino enrollment at top CUNY programs. So Cuomo takes the money that had been going to education for poor black and Latino students and hands it over, in the form of tax breaks, to rich suburbanites who now have extra cash to pay for lacrosse lessons.
Something is going on in society when we freak out about giving someone from a poor background a leg-up, but we are silent about all the advantages we give—at the exact same moment!—to privileged demographics. Those who claim to speak on behalf of a “meritocracy” would have a lot more credibility if they showed even half of the concern about how all these privileged people get an unfair advantage. As long as Harvard continues the far more unjust policy of giving an advantage to children of Harvard graduates, I will never take seriously a critique of race-based affirmative action.
My point with all of this is to highlight the power of definition. When admissions offices take race into consideration it is defined as “affirmative-action” and therefore a betrayal of American ideals of meritocracy; when they take where your parents went to school into consideration it is simply a legacy admission, protecting the unique “traditions” of each school. Schools take lots of things into consideration: but somehow the act of taking race into consideration gets picked out, put into a separate category of decision making, and subjected to a separate critique and logic than do those processes which benefit white people. One of the privileges of whiteness, then, is its invisibility, as society naturalizes and normalizes the very processes that give white people advantage, sewing white privilege into the unexamined fabric of social reproduction, while subjecting to the most strict and withering examination any systems that try to remedy existing inequality by benefiting black or Hispanic students.
So with this in mind, let’s take a look at race and graduate school. In 2009, 4.9% of all doctorates went to black graduates and 3.7% went to Hispanic students. For both groups that is about 1/3 of what their general population suggests should be the case. Although women come closer to parity, they still only comprise 47% of phds, despite comprising a higher percentage of undergraduates. Clearly we are not in a nation where Affirmative Action has run amuck.
Outside of a handful of disciplines in the humanities, most grad programs are shockingly undiverse. Economics programs, for instance, are both heavily white and heavily male (.73% of PhDs awarded in 2009 in economics went to black students, 1.46% went to Hispanic students. About 2/3rd of econ PhDs are men, perhaps part of the reason the field is so enamored of autistic math-oriented modeling). My university, NYU, lists 7 tenured or tenure track professors of economics who are women; this comprises 13% of the 55 professors in the department.
The sciences do have a lot of Asian-American PhD students, but only 2.9% of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) PhDs go to African-Americans. (Remember this when economists talk about whether their field is a science; it’s not, in fact its much more racist.). Given that 67% of all PhDs in the nation go to those in the STEM fields, you can see that African-Americans and Hispanics are in fact dramatically underrepresented in academia overall.
Perhaps the worst offenders, when it comes to diversity, are philosophy departments, which are remarkably white and male. One study found only 16% of academic philosophers were women and another showed that a shocking 1% of academic philosophers were black. NYU has one of the most prestigious philosophy departments in the world, yet only 6 out of the 36 professors on their website are women (16.7%). As an undergrad, my girlfriend was repeatedly dissuaded from applying to philosophy PhD programs because she was told that it would simply be much harder as a woman to flourish in such a program. Philosophy is especially interesting, because unlike the sciences, it can’t (or shouldn’t) hide behind the formalism of quantitative standardized test scores to explain its lack of diversity; like the other humanities, it supposedly studies more abstract and less measurable ideals of critical thought and intellectual creativity and could sorely use engagement with other perspectives.
It’s hard not to see these numbers and suspect that there are processes of exclusion—formal or informal, conscious or unconscious—going on that are keeping some departments from being particularly diverse. For instance, one study examining why there are so few women in the sciences concluded that who students see teaching matters a great deal: women who only see men teaching Chemistry are less likely to stick with the discipline or find mentors there. Similar processes, no doubt, occur with race. Until those disciplines make exerted efforts to promote professors who are women, black, or Latino, students will never see professors who look like themselves. Thus inequality replicates itself.
The only really diverse PhD programs are in parts of the humanities, like history, English, American studies, cinema studies, etc…, where black and Hispanic students make up a significant percentage of the PhD students.
Elizabeth Warren, the Social Construction of Race, and Affirmative Action
by David
Elizabeth Warren, Native American?
The recent non-scandal/controversy of Elizabeth Warren’s claim to be of partial Native American descent has been an annoying distraction from a glaring truth: Warren will be an awesome senator, probably the most progressive voice on the senate this side of Bernie Sanders. I really hope she defeats Scott Brown this November.
But the non-scandal/controversy is also a useful example for academics in the humanities of something we’ve long known: race is a social construction. That’s not to say that race doesn’t exist, but merely to say that it is malleable: sometimes individuals have the agency to fashion their own racial identities, sometimes society will thrust racial identities upon them. As NYU historian Jonathan Zimmerman wrote on Warren and race:
this story is important, nevertheless, for what it tells us about contemporary America. Like Warren, more of us are choosing new racial identities or — more commonly — mixed ones. That’s good news, because it reminds us that “race” itself is a fiction. It exists, of course, but only in our minds.
The other effect the Warren controversy has had is to bring up the issue of affirmative action again, as Warren is being accused of having used, or as her detractors say, invented her partial Native American ancestry to get her faculty jobs at Penn and Harvard. Though I don’t really care what Warren did here one way or the other, I am interested in the question of affirmative action. Starting tomorrow, over the next fews days, PhD Octopus will have a series of posts on affirmative action in academia. Mine will be posted tomorrow morning. Hope you all enjoy.
Jeremy Lin: of course it’s About Race, and it’s Not All Smiles
by David
On February, 13, 2012, Floyd Mayweather Jr., the racist, woman-beating arrogant jail-bound criminal, who also happens to be the best pound-for-pound boxer in the world and current welterweight champion, made a stupid, racist tweet. Here’s what Mayweather tweeted:
Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he’s Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don’t get the same praise.
Mayweather is an asshole. He’s not backing down. And as Washington Post sportswriter Jason Reid notes, Mayweather is mostly wrong. Jeremy Lin’s story is unique: he went to Harvard, he’s an evangelical Christian, he was undrafted, he was sleeping on his brother’s couch, then coming off the bench for the New York Knicks, and now he’s an NBA star.
But there’s at least a kernel of truth to Mayweather’s obnoxiousness. The Jeremy Lin story is big because of everything else. It’s huge because he’s the first Chinese-American in the NBA. And that’s OK.
I’ve finally caught on to the Linsanity. Normally I don’t watch any more than the last two minute of regular season professional basketball games, but I’m making an exception here. We don’t get cable, but I’ll even shlep out to the Columbia med student housing common room to watch the Linsanity.
And it is exciting. Heck even Tiger Mom Amy Chua tweeted that her and her family are “huge” Jeremy Lin fans, and linked to this article, which attributes Lin’s success to tough Asian parenting. But I cry (or call) foul. This piece, by Gish Jen, is more accurate, highlighting the rebellion, the anti-stereotype that Jeremy Lin represents. Because Lord knows that if Amy Chua had a ten-foot-tall son she’d still be shoving a violin in his hands before allowing him to shoot hoops.
I’m exaggerating, of course. But only a little. Because I know this story. It’s why I celebrate Kevin Youkilis and Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax, and why the movie Airplane can make a joke referring to “light” reading, a leaflet of “Famous Jewish Sports Legends.” These Jews, like Jeremy Lin, are exceptions. Sure, there will be more. But most Jews, and most Asian Americans, will go on to more conventional, but still successful paths. Because that’s what their parents want for them, and that is what is expected of them.
And so the real tragedy behind the Jeremy Lin story is here, hidden in a New York Times story about Stuyvesant High School, maybe the toughest and most competitive high school in the country, where thousands of students take a difficult exam, and only the highest scoring are admitted. It’s worth noting this on the last day of Black History month of 2012. Stuyvesant High School has 3295 students. A whopping 72.5% of them are Asian. Forty are Black. Forty. Not Forty percent. Forty students, total, equal to 1.2 percent of the student population. Another 2.4% are Hispanic. These are the Jeremy Lins of the American high school system: Black and Latino students who succeed against the odds, disproving the stereotypes, fighting structural inequality that dates back generations, even centuries. Read the article. It’s harrowing.
So let’s applaud Lin’s success in the NBA. It’s awesome, and need not be denigrated in any way. He’s a pioneer for Asian-Americans in sports. But this story is about race, and when we take a step back, it’s not a happy story. So let’s get our priorities straight.
