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In an attempt to summarize a dining experience I had that didn’t exactly rub me the right way, I explained to a friend: “You know how white people will come home after work and turn on the blues? … It was kind of like that.” Music for me can be a touchy and [...] Crossposted from ColorLines: As the nation marks the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have taken to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to, as they put it, restore our nation’s honor. The Washington Post reports that “an overwhelmingly white crowd of tens of [...]
Kenny inspired a lot of inappropriately racist, pimpish nicknames, like chocolate bear and big daddy, and, when he was kicked off, an unfortunate number of outdated South Park jokes (I think you know the one). But mostly he was a gregarious, lovable self-promoter; fans believed he was the big cheese because he said he was every week. In truth, his cooking skill seemed uneven. But whether you think he deserved to go or not, his absence highlights a longstanding problem with the show: there hasn’t been enough diversity, and it is particularly problematic in the way it portrays its black chefs. Diversity on a reality TV show might not seem the most important topic, ever, but it evidences two things: one, the dearth of people of color at the top of many fields extends to reality contests that purport to propel novices to the top of those fields; and two, shows like this in which contestants are judged subjectively still often pick white male winners. First, some by-the-numbers history. The premiere season wasn’t bad: of 11 chefs, two were Asian, two were black and one was Latino. Only one, Lee Anne Wong, made it close to the top. The second season was worse: of 15, only three were of color. Cliff, a black chef from New York City, finished fifth, but his finish is the important part: he was the only person ever kicked off the show for becoming physical with another contestant. That season, all the chefs picked on a scrawny, whiny kid named Marcel, and on one of the last nights Cliff and the other finalists decided they were going to shave Marcel’s head. In fairness, head judge Tom Colicchio wanted to kick off all the other conspirators, too, who were just as mean to Marcel that night, and make Marcel the winner by default. But Cliff actually wrestled Marcel down to the floor, and was the only person to explicitly break the rules against physically fighting another contestant. In the third season, the only black chef, Tre, a favorite in the beginning, was voted off after the Restaurant Wars episode because he didn’t lead his team well enough. (A Vietnam-born chef named Hung won that season). The next season, the only black chef was out so early I don’t even remember her, though, in a bright spot, a woman won for the first time that year. The fifth season marked the first Indian American chef, Radhika, and Carla, a black woman from D.C. who made it to the finale and who has had a real career-boost since the show. Season 6 brought us another Indian American and a chef from Haiti, both of whom were out in the middle of the competition. Of the six winners, five have been white and all but one was a man. That brings us to the current season and its surprising diversity buffet. When it started, Kenny had three fellow black chefs, two Latinos and one Asian chef, which means that nearly half its contestants were people of color. It could be that the show’s producers, who chose to film in D.C. this season after the arrival of the Obamas gave the city a short-lived sizzle, became more cognizant of its diversity needs, or it could be that it’s been on so long now that it’s luring a more diverse applicant pool. Either way, Kenny’s timer wasn’t the first to go off early: Kevin, Angelo and Tiffany are the only chefs of color left. So, what’s the problem? When a woman won for the first time in the fourth season, Colicchio wrote pretty elegantly about the problems women face in professional kitchens, which aren’t too different from the problems women face in many careers. The balance of work and life falls squarely on women’s shoulders, and a lot of sacrifice is demanded of top chefs. I don’t think anyone’s surprised to know that the challenge of overcoming discrimination in high cuisine is similar to the challenges people of color overcome in other fields. Coming in on the tail end of a meme is always interesting. Sometimes it’s just as hilarious as everyone who was on it from the beginning said it was. Sometimes it’s not hilarious, and rather, just pretty effed up. Case in point: Antoine Dodson, also known as the “Bed Intruder” dude. I was vaguely [...] PostBourgie: The Podcast #8: N-word, Please! In this week’s podcast, Monica, Joel and Jamelle discuss the way people misunderstand culture and poverty, “emerging adulthood,” and Dr. Laura’s hilarisad use of the n-word on her radio show. Key Links: A Daily Dish reader blames the disparate life outcomes between blacks and whites on [...] [cross-posted from TAPPED] From ColorLines comes this excellent video, and accompanying story, of what it feels like to be stopped and frisked by police in Brownsville, Brooklyn. That neighborhood, along with nearby neighborhoods of Crown Heights and East New York, are some of the “Impact Zones” flooded with police officers to address the [...] Before Monday, I can’t say that I knew much – if anything - about Jeffrey Lord. I was probably better off, considering his online column posted yesterday morning at The American Spectator about Shirley Sherrod was breathtaking in its ignorance and shamelessness. Lord essentially called Sherrod a liar for using the word “lynch” [...] Jamelle: This week’s controversy centered on Shirley Sherrod, an official with the USDA who was forced to resign today after a video surfaced of a speech she gave on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website. In the speech, Sherrod talks about an incident that happened when she worked for an agricultural nonprofit and [...]
Ross Douthat spent his precious column real estate Monday on the plight of poor, white Christians from red states who suffer disproportionately, he says, from elite-college admissions policies that favor lower-income black and Hispanic students over them. He borrows liberally from a blog post by Russell K. Nieli on Minding the Campus, who based his argument on a year-old study from two Princeton University social scientists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford. The study looked at admissions rates for seven elite colleges. The study definitely found, as Nieli wrote, that admissions officers give preference to lower-class black and Hispanic applicants, but it’s worth looking at that fact in context. Overall the applicant pool was extremely well off: only about 10 percent of the applications to elite institutions, public or private, came from lower- and working-class families, and only about 19 percent of those applicants were admitted to elite private schools (acceptance rates to the public institutions didn’t correlate highly with class). The private schools in the study did tend to weigh lower- and working-class black and Hispanic applicants more heavily than their better-off counterparts, but there wasn’t an advantage for lower- and working-class whites compared with whites from higher socioeconomic levels who, incidentally, made up most of the applicants. Other studies show this likely stems from a failure to account for a sort of income-based achievement gap, and not, of course, outright animosity toward poor whites. It’s also possible that schools want to admit students who can pay first, but many elite colleges have need-blind admissions processes. The important thing is that, overall, the study shows what we already know. The vast majority of applicants to elite institutions and the vast majority of those admitted are white and middle- or upper-middle class. Where Douthat goes really astray, though, is when he borrows Nieli’s claim that cultural markers seemed to make a difference as well.
It’s too bad that Douthat seems not to have read the actual study, because he would have found that that’s, at best, overreaching with the data. Kai Wright breaks down a recent CDC study about the effect that poverty has on HIV transmission. The study shows a much higher rate of HIV infection among heterosexual poor people in the U.S. But Wright debunks the following too-obvious takeaway from the study: that poverty, not race has the greatest effect on HIV [...]
Joel Johnson at Gizmodo decides to “stalk” a black girl on Twitter:
If you’ve been reading PostBourgie for a while, perhaps you’ll be familiar with a really important part of our ethos: “Blackness is a fuzzy, complicated thing, and we’d really like to discourage essentializing it, policing it, legislating it, or lambasting folks for showing insufficient fealty to some goofy, arbitrary Negro ideal.” On the flip side, this necessarily means that we don’t support the notion that there is an observable, universal “black culture.” Over at TAPPED, I touched on the racial controversy surrounding The Last Airbender, which opens today. (Cliff’s Notes version: the series on which its based is set in an Asian world; in the movie, the main good guys are white and the bad guys are brown.) The blog Racebending, which has done a [...] io9’s Marc Bernardin makes the case for a non-white Spidey*: Lee and Ditko created a wonderfully strong character, one full of complexity and depth, who happens to be white. In no way is Peter Parker defined by his whiteness in the same way that too many black characters are defined by their blackness. [...] The website RaceBox.org has compiled a list of census forms stretching back to the country’s infancy, and it offers a fascinating look at how ideas about racial classification have evolved over time. 2010. 1990. 1970. 1950. 1930.
1860. 1850. 1840. [via [...] |
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