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Guest Contributor on April 9th, 2010
by Andrea, cross-posted from Racialicious.
(TRIGGER WARNING)
Well, this is a fine way for me to commemorate Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
I survived a young Black man raping me when I was five years old, and I’ve been subjected to decades of the stereotype of the Black male rapist and the racism behind it. So, this cartoon triply triggered my reaction.
I rubbed my hands. I walked away. I wanted to cry but couldn’t because I was at work when I clicked on the link. I shook inside, back to that frightened little girl who couldn’t possibly tell my mom the truth about what happened. (I eventually did, about a decade later.) I didn’t want to reflect on my experience—not like this.
But there it all was, splayed on my screen, demanding some sort of order, some sort of reason for it all. To deal with it. Again.
As does the cartoon itself. Why this scenario? Why these stereotypes? Why all the justifications—again? (Yes, the poster said it can’t be racist because the woman is green.) More after the jump.
Guest Contributor on April 7th, 2010
Guest Contributor on March 26th, 2010
Richard Hamilton.
I hesitate to even go into it at this point because it’s too easy. This post is probably a few years late. Of course I hate Rip now. We’re 20 games under .500 and headed straight for the lottery. He’s old and overpaid and well past the modest prime he achieved following the Pistons’ lone championship in 2004. So let the record show I have always hated Rip. From the moment the Pistons traded Stackhouse for Hamilton I have always given him the full Silky Johnson treatment. Mostly because he’s soft as pudding and completely out of wack with the tough, defensive mindset of the franchise. But also because of his one-dimensional game, malcontent attitude and inability to keep his mouth shut at the most crucial moments. More…
Guest Contributor on January 22nd, 2010
by R.A.B.
Air America falls silent, and so my friend and former boss and fellow badass Megan Carpentier is back in the market for a writing gig. The year so far, for me at least, has been all about unemployment and liberal setbacks; this particular collision of both has shaken some talented, good people.
[...]
Guest Contributor on January 19th, 2010
By R.A.B.
Over at Education Week’s LeaderTalk blog, former school superintendent Dennis Richards asks, “Should high school students take college courses?” Richards revisits a 2008 study by the Community College Research Center, where Karen Hughes and Melinda Karp asked, “Why would we take students who are not necessarily prepared for college, put them in a college class, and hope that that will help to prepare them to make that transition to college?”
The most striking thing we found is that the focus was not all on academic subject matter; the programs had a range of components, including experiential components so students would understand the kinds of social and personal behaviors they need to have to be succesful in college. Also, there would often be a remedial component for students who aren’t prepared, you don’t want to just put them in a college course and risk that they will fail; you want to provide them some kind of academic preparation so that they will be successful in those courses.
A few things: access to AP courses and college prep support otherwise is hardly universal across American high schools, and many observers (and students) have long recognized that AP prep, much like SAT prep, is largely a matter of privilege and affordability. Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County, MD, for instance, offers 28 AP courses — in addition to 17 honors courses — across four grade levels. AP curricula at Walt Whitman HS include economics, psychology, Eastern languages, world history, and comparative politics — already that’s a first-year university liberal arts curriculum in high school. More…
Guest Contributor on January 18th, 2010
Martin Luther King was never the saintly, beloved man in life that he has become in death. Ari Kelman over at Edge of the West gave us permission to re-run this fantastic post on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the sterilization of his image.
The Martin Luther King of American memory serves this nation as the safe Civil Rights leader. When shrunk to fit within the confines of soundbite history, the pages of a textbook, or the scenes of a primary school pageant, King is cleansed of anger, of ego, of sexuality, and even, perhaps, of some of his humanity.
Counterpoised against the ostensibly violent Malcolm X, who supposedly would have forced America to change its ways by using “any means necessary,” King comes off as a cuddly moderate — a figure who loved everyone, enemies included, even whites who subjugated black people. Although there’s some truth lurking behind this myth, there was more (about both X and King) to the story: complexities and nuances that escape most popular recollections. Martin Luther King, no matter how people remember him now, was not nearly so safe as most of us believe.
On March 12, 1968, less than a month before he was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee, King visited the wealthy Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. Largely white, Grosse Pointe was — and to some extent still is — a bastion of establishment power. By that point in his career, King had embraced issues that moved well beyond the struggle against de jure segregation in the South. He had begun focusing most of his energy on inequality nationwide — de facto issues of poverty, job discrimination, fair housing, and, as Matthew Yglesias notes, the Vietnam war.
While in Grosse Pointe, King delivered a speech, “The Other America,”* which details the orator’s evolution over the course of his too-brief career:
Now let me say that the struggle for Civil Rights and the struggle to make these two Americas one America, is much more difficult today than it was five or ten years ago. For about a decade…we’ve struggled all across the South…to get rid of legal, overt segregation and all of the humiliation that surrounded that system of segregation. In a sense this was a struggle for decency; we could not go to a lunch counter in so many instances and get a hamburger or a cup of coffee. We could not make use of public accommodations. Public transportation was segregated, and often we had to sit in the back and…stand over empty seats because sections were reserved for whites only. We did not have the right to vote in so many areas of the South. And the struggle was to deal with these problems.
That’s the story most Americans know: from the buses of Montgomery to the lunch counters of Greensboro to a jail cell in Birmingham to the March on Washington and maybe to Stockholm and then Selma. But more likely straight from giving the “I Have a Dream” speech in DC to Memphis, to murder, to martyrdom.
This narrative skips over a number of chapters from late in King’s life, the period after he began organizing in the North, when success often proved elusive.
More after the jump.
Guest Contributor on January 14th, 2010
By R.A.B.
In March of last year, as Texas’ unemployment rate crept to 6.7% (pdf), Governor (and hater of Texans) Rick Perry (R) publicly rejected his state’s $555 billion share of federal unemployment assistance from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Unemployment in his state now hovers at 8% (pdf).
This year, Perry [...]
Guest Contributor on January 7th, 2010
 via Wikimedia Commons. by Syreeta McFadden, x-posted from Bellewether State.
”This is the spiritual capital of the African diaspora. Something had to be done.”
IBO BALTON, the housing department’s planning director for Manhattan, on Harlem. February, 2001
Ibo wandered in my office and was flattered that I had a photocopy of his NYT Quote of the Day taped to my wall when I worked for the city’s housing agency back in 2001. I remember telling him that I needed to have it there to remind me why we do what we do. He had come to ask me for a copy of the Bradhurst Negative Declaration (he was always asking me for a copy of the Bradhurst Neg Dec) but instead, he posed a question that clearly had been weighing on him, “Maybe we really are gentrifying Harlem?”
To be clear, we asked ourselves this question frequently.
Manhattan Community Board 10 is probably the regional equivalent to everyone’s idea of what Harlem is. Bounded to the south by 110th Street, to the north by West 155th Street, to the west by Morningside Avenue and to the east by Fifth Avenue, Community Board 10 covers roughly 60 city blocks. Maybe more. And in 1998, the Community Board asked the City of New York to fight to bring middle class residents back into Harlem. One of the oldest residents and members of the board who had lived in Harlem all of her life, and was fortunate to own her home, knew that to make her community remain sustainable, meant that those acres of vacant lots along Frederick Douglass Boulevard and across West 116th Street, on the east end of Marcus Garvey Park (Mount Morris) needed the middle-income families. She had already seen her share of public investment in her community, which unfortunately included a heavy saturation of low-income housing. And while there were a disproportionate amount of African-Americans who’d benefit, the black middle class had all but disappeared. Where were their housing opportunities? The best and brightest who were born and raised in Harlem leave and then return to see their community remain stagnant? Property taxes pay for infrastructure. Infrastructure supports communities. When wealth disappears from a community, how will it pay for itself? Public safety, street repair, all things that makes communities run? A mixed income community spends cash in their neighborhoods, creates and sustains jobs for local residents, spurs investment in open spaces and parks. It means that there’s a tax base to support the services the community demands.
So when an elder and owner of Harlem brownstone curses you out and tell you to make sure 55,000 square foot vacant property contain affordable AND market rate homeownership apartments because it brings an influx of stakeholders to her community, regardless of what color they look like, you do it.
All of this comes to forefront of my memory in reading the recent Times article about greater Harlem’s shifting demographics and the subsequent reactions to it. Many folks were offering compelling narratives of housing’s discrimination past, a history of institutional and economic racism. I get that and don’t dispute that legacy. However, I know and have been active participant in a different story. More after the jump.
Guest Contributor on December 1st, 2009
by Kiana, x-posted from ProperTalks.
It’s been three years since my father’s mother, my Nana, died after a lengthy battle with AIDS. It’s been a year since I decided to write openly about it here for Worlds AIDS Day. And it’s been about three hours since I first attempted this post and allowed myself to go to that place I was in a year ago when I tried to come up with the right words to describe how AIDS has affected my family.
It never gets easy telling complete strangers something so personal about a family member who didn’t even have the strength to tell me herself. When I think about Nana’s last months, the times I reluctantly visited her in the hospital – she looked so withdrawn and skinny; I couldn’t stomach it much – I wonder if she knew I knew that she was fighting to live with AIDS. And she put up a heck of a fight, but no insurance, no money, and experimental treatment don’t mix well.
The way I found out AIDS-related complications had been forcing Nana in and out of the hospital, for years, also made me wonder if the truth about her illness was ever meant to reach me. It was sometime in 2006, I was sitting on the couch and my mother just spit it out as if she was discarding gum or letting me know it was cold outside. I don’t know what she said before, I only remember:
Your Nana has it.
I remember sitting there, completely still, for what felt like eternity. I will remember that feeling like yesterday forever. I was hurt, nauseous, I was angry, and worst of all, I thought about the times I kissed her on the cheek…the times she kissed me, even though I was taught in thousand dollar chemistry classes that HIV and AIDS do not spread that way. In seconds my mother attempted damage control.
I’m sorry. I thought you knew. Your father said he would tell you.
My father didn’t tell me. No one did till that night I was sitting on that couch. I’m not angry now though; I can imagine how hard it was for the family that did know to carry the truth without any support. Without anyone to talk to. Frankly, my family still doesn’t talk about it and I’m almost hoping this isn’t the week some of my younger cousins decide to visit us here. They shouldn’t find out like this.
It’s been hard for me to make sense of it all. Still, I don’t try to tuck it in that place where I store all of my other issues. Instead I make it a point to talk and write about this as much as I can with anyone willing to listen. I intend to share till it rolls off my tongue like I actually am discussing the weather. More after the jump.
Guest Contributor on October 27th, 2009
By Black Scientist.
So it’s no secret that there is a default of whiteness in normative culture. That is: unless otherwise noted, people are white. I think this default can be challenged in communities that are predominantly of color on an everyday level (telling stories with an anonymous “she”), but when we engage with the popular sphere (movies, tv characters, in other words “visible people” in narratives created by others and passed down to the masses), people are – generally speaking – expected and assumed to be/imagined as white.
So, knowing this, why was I still disappointed in the white-middle-class-ness that tainted the narrative of Michael Moore’s capitalism: A Love Story? Is it because he’s touted as a progressive filmmaker, and to interrogate capitalism without also challenging the normativity of whiteness is to basically suck at understanding the intersections and complexity of oppressions? A shortcoming that results in merely symbolic and short-falling attempts at being subversive. because he knows about other stuff, is he supposed to also know how to make a film that doesn’t indulge in the usual habit of seeing things through a white historical lens?
The problem i had with Moore’s film was that the “we” he constructed often translated into white middle class people. and this wasn’t something I can pretend was glaringly obvious, because it was mostly subtle. noted in the use of “we” and the implication that follows of who “they” were. More…
Guest Contributor on October 13th, 2009
by Kiana, x-posted from Propertalks.
 I absolutely love Serena William’s photo for ESPN’s “Body Issue.” Not nearly as much as I love Dwight’s, but it’s definitely worth a spot on my refrigerator door. I’m hoping it will deter me from all things fried. Okay, maybe not all things fried since Serena looks like she knows how to befriend a Twinkies or two.
Aside from the obvious touch ups (where’s the cellulite? Hello Beyonceweave) the good folk at ESPN did a good enough job to stop me from bemoaning yet another magazine cover with a half nekked (yes, we say nekked ’round these parts) woman.
ESPN did well, though I won’t go as far as former Vibe and KING Magazine editor, Jozen Cummings, and hope that larger magazines with a predominately male, and white, demographic publish more covers like this one, or KINGs, for men such as him to appreciate, whatever that means.
I agree with Cummings, Black women should be celebrated in the mainstream more often, but there’s something about this article that has irritated me since last week. It isn’t his quick dismissal that the cover is no Saartjie Bartman or how he does not acknowledge the fact that Black women have been subjected to years of sexual exploitation. Rather, the thing that bothers me the most about Cumming’s piece is that he used KING magazine to defend the celebration of Black women and our bodies, when KING magazine did none of that.
When KING flopped, I was happy to see it go. KING was able to provide an alternative to the mostly white, mostly skinny women who grace the covers of most men’s magazines, but that doesn’t mean it was any less misogynistic, sexist, chauvinistic and all those things that made it controversial.
I know that KING wasn’t made for me, but as the type of woman the magazine claimed to celebrate (I am both Black and curvy; in college Angela and our friends referred to my butt as if it was its own entity: The Kiana Booty) I never felt a connection or a sense of pride when I saw the magazine on newsstands. In short, I never felt celebrated.
Instead I felt the women on display were cheapened, used, and angry (peep the photos of KING magazine in Google Images and you’ll be hard pressed to find a cover with a woman smiling). More…
Guest Contributor on October 8th, 2009
(by Cindy Mosqueda, x-posted from at Loteria Chicana)
The emotional complexity of that cultural changeover means that parents don’t just switch from Latin names to English ones in a single go. Rather, says Jasso, they may pass through a three-stage process, “with bilingual names becoming popular for a [...]
Guest Contributor on September 24th, 2009
(by Kiana, x-posted from ProperTalks)
Sundance’s Brick City is the only reality TV show worth watching this week. The street soldiers, sheroes and heroes of Newark New Jersey along with Mayor Cory Booker are all attempting to renew Newark’s urban landscape but they are up against the city’s infamous reputation, earned mostly [...]
Guest Contributor on September 23rd, 2009
(by Jeremy Levine, x-posted from Social Science Lite)
It would be an understatement to argue that the mass media has taken on racial analysis with unprecedented zeal since the election of Barack Obama. Unfortunately, in attempts to present fair and balanced news coverage, cable news programs have typically included panels with representatives from both sides of the Left-Right ideological spectrum.
The problem with this method, of course, is that subsequent analyses usually follow the same tired pattern: “That was racist!” vs. “That is ridiculous! Race was not a factor!” At best, this produces unproductive exchanges. At worst, it woefully simplifies complex social process and interactions, institutionalizing diametrically opposed ideological camps instead of offering nuanced analysis. More…
Guest Contributor on August 27th, 2009
(by Jeremy R. Levine at Social Science Lite)
Last Spring, Brown University economist Glenn Loury presented at Harvard sociology’s Workshop on Race and Black Youth Culture. He titled his talk “Culture, Causation and Confusion: Why Bill Cosby is Wasting His Time,” engaging with the pervasive “rhetoric of responsibility” frequently applied to blacks in the United States. As Loury argued, our public discourse is saturated with demands on the so-called black community to police its own ranks. This rhetoric of “black communal responsibility” suggests that the solutions to racial inequality are cultural, and the ill-defined “black community” should therefore bear the burden of “fixing” its collective deficiencies.
The rhetoric of black communal responsibility is a common response to discussions of racial inequality, and black folks seem to be hearing it from both sides. From within, you have Bill Cosby, John McWhorter and even President Obama stressing the role of black parents in the cultivation and education of black children. From the outside, you have a slew of white conservatives, wide-eyed and incredulous, wondering why the black community just can’t lift itself out of disadvantage.
The problem, as Loury astutely pointed out, is that categories such as “black community,” “black culture,” and “black leaders” are political constructs void of intellectual definitions. So-called “culture talk” imputes a sense of groupness where no such political collectivity exists. African-Americans, as a race, have no institutional structures to police themselves and bring about the kind of solutions culture critics (like Cosby) demand. They don’t hold conferences or summits—at least, none that all blacks are required to attend by virtue of their racial identity.There aren’t any meeting minutes we can rifle through to make sure they are working to “fix” their collective culture. This notion of an aggregate “black community” was invented ex post facto with a distinctly political motive: impute agency on a racial category where none exists, and wipe our hands clean of any societal responsibility for inequality. More…
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