The Civil Rights movement contains some of the most hideous and the most beautiful examples of human evil and human possibility. After emancipation in 1862, and until the mid-1960s, they lived under a series of laws that mandated segregation from whites. The Civil Rights movement attacked these laws and their premise.
One of the slogans that would strike down legalized segregation was “I Am A Man.” It challenged the centuries of dehumanization that had justified both slavery and Jim Crow. The beautiful, simple slogan, and its delivery, is pictured here:
Borrowed from NPR, this photo features a group of sanitation workers marching in Memphis in 1968. Photograph by Ernest Withers.
The Lower 9th Ward was one of the neighborhoods in New Orleans most seriously devastated by Hurricane Katrina. As a largely working class, black neighborhood, it was also one of the slowest to recover. State disinvestment, residents low on resources, and unscrupulous insurance companies made for a tough time finding the funds to re-build. The first photograph is of the Lower 9th five years after Katrina; the second, looking significantly worse, is of the region at the four year anniversary (source):
Dmitriy T.M. sent us a link to an interactive graphic at NPR that allows you to virtually travel along Flood and Forstall streets in 2006, 2007, 2009, and 2010 simultaneously. You’ll see that many destroyed homes weren’t even demolished till years after the storm, and most new homes weren’t built until the last couple years. Here is one screen shot:
Please welcome Guest Blogger, Caroline Heldman, PhD. Heldman is an Associate Professor of Politics at Occidental College. The week after Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Helman drove to New Orleans to assist with rescue and relief efforts. She later co-founded the New Orleans Women’s Shelter and continues to work on rebuilding efforts in the Lower Ninth Ward. Below is a post, excerpted from a much longer update on the Katrina tragedy, about the Agliers massacre.
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Trigger warning: racial violence and racist language.
A disturbing picture of racial slaughter emerges in the days following Katrina, at the hands of private residents and police officers. Racially-motivated murders were carried out in Algiers Point, a predominately white enclave nestled in mostly black Algiers, not far from Gretna. This part of the city is connected to the rest of New Orleans by bridge and ferry only, and it did not experience flooding. After the storm, a band of 15 to 30 white men formed a loose militia targeting anyone whom they deemed “didn’t belong” in their predominately white neighborhood (Thompson, 2008). They blocked off streets with downed trees, stockpiled weapons, and ran patrols.
At least eleven black men were shot, although some locals expect that the actual number is much higher. On July 16, 2010, Roland Bourgeois was charged with shooting three black men in Algiers in the days following Katrina (McCarthy, 2010). He allegedly came back to the militia home base with a bloody baseball cap from Ronald Herrington, a man he shot, and told a witness that “Anything coming up this street darker than a paper bag is getting shot.”
To date, this is the only arrest of militia members, but the FBI is investigating the situation and will likely make more arrests given that two Danish filmmakers interviewed multiple residents who admitted shooting black people. In “Welcome to New Orleans,” militia member Wayne Janak smiles at the camera: “It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.” A woman nearby adds “He understands the N-word now… In this neighborhood, we take care of our own.” Many of the victims reported that militia members called them racial epithets during attacks, and a family member of militia members reports that her uncle and cousins considered it a “free-for-all—white against black,” and her cousin was happy they were “shooting niggers.”
Malik Rahim, a long-time Algiers resident and activist who co-founded Common Ground Relief after the storm, took me on a tour of bodies in his neighborhood a week or so after the storm. I only made it through one viewing – a bloated body of a man under a piece of cardboard with a gunshot wound to his back. I assumed that this death was being investigated, but should have known otherwise given that the state had essentially sanctioned these actions with a “shoot to kill” order that allowed civilians to make their own assessments of who should live or die.
One of Many New Orleans Vigilante T-Shirts Slogans:
Please welcome Guest Blogger, Benjamin Eleanor Adam. Adam is a graduate student at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he studies the American history of gender and sexuality. Benjamin also teaches courses in Women’s and Gender Studies at Hunter College which focus on intersectional approaches to thinking about race, class, disability, gender, and sexuality. Benjamin casually blogs about these issues at Thinking Makes it So.
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The following are all of the immediately visible images representing modern humans (as distinct from either earlier human species or animals) from the 10 separate stories NPR published this July and August as part of the series titled How Evolution Gave Us The Human Edge.
In case you missed the obvious, this is just one recent example of a long history of discourse relating whiteness and humanity which has its roots in racial science and ethical justifications of colonialism, slavery, and genocide (google it or something). I would argue that it matters in these contexts more than just the general vast overrepresentation of whites in the media and as allegedly race-neutral “humans” because the context here is one explicitly about defining what is human, what separates humans from animals, and about evolution as a civilizing process.
By presenting whites as the quintessential humans who possess the bodies and behaviors taken to be deeply meaningful human traits, whites justified, and continue to justify white supremacy. This is what white privilege looks like (pun fully intended): being constantly told by experts that you and people like you represent the height of evolution and everything that it means to be that incredible piece of work that is man. (irony fully intended).
The last four images are from What Does It Mean To Be Human?, a slightly more diverse online exhibit from the Smithsonian linked from NPR. The main sidebar pictures, the iconic Michelangelo Creation of Adam pose, and the majority of the images are still of whites.
Presumably many of you have heard about the controversy that has arisen about a conversation between Laura Schlessinger (aka Dr. Laura) and a female African American caller. Corina C. sent in some links to posts on the topic. Trigger warning for harsh, racist language.
Here’s a recording of the conversation (found at Media Matters) in which Schlessinger responds to the caller’s concerns about comments from her White husband’s friends and relatives by suggesting she is “hypersensitive” and isn’t in a position to be concerned about comments she considered racist because “Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger”:
Selected parts of the transcript:
CALLER: I was a little caught back by the N-word that you spewed out, I have to be honest with you. But my point is, race relations –
SCHLESSINGER: Oh, then I guess you don’t watch HBO or listen to any black comedians.
…
SCHLESSINGER: Yeah. We’ve got a black man as president, and we have more complaining about racism than ever. I mean, I think that’s hilarious.
…
SCHLESSINGER: Chip on your shoulder. I can’t do much about that.
CALLER: It’s not like that.
SCHLESSINGER: Yeah. I think you have too much sensitivity –
CALLER: So it’s OK to say “nigger”?
SCHLESSINGER: — and not enough sense of humor.
…
SCHLESSINGER: …You know what? If you’re that hypersensitive about color and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t marry out of your race. If you’re going to marry out of your race, people are going to say, “OK, what do blacks think? What do whites think? What do Jews think? What do Catholics think?”…And what I just heard from Jade is a lot of what I hear from black-think — and it’s really distressting [sic] and disturbing. And to put it in its context, she said the N-word, and I said, on HBO, listening to black comics, you hear “nigger, nigger, nigger.” I didn’t call anybody a nigger. Nice try, Jade. Actually, sucky try. Need a sense of humor, sense of humor — and answer the question. When somebody says, “What do blacks think?” say, “This is what I think. This is what I read that if you take a poll the majority of blacks think this.” Answer the question and discuss the issue…Ah — hypersensitivity, OK, which is being bred by black activists. I really thought that once we had a black president, the attempt to demonize whites hating blacks would stop, but it seems to have grown, and I don’t get it.
There are a number of things going on here. In Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva discusses the various ways that Whites, in particular, downplay racial discrimination through a number of rhetorical and discursive strategies, several of which Schlessinger draws on in this exchange. For instance, she naturalizes the behavior the caller is concerned about: if you marry someone of another race, you just have to accept that their friends and family are going to consider you a representative of your entire race and constantly interact with you through the lens of your racial/ethnic background. That’s just to be expected, and if it starts to bother you, you’re “hypersensitive.” In fact, you ought to be sure and constantly educate yourself about all social trends as they relate to African Americans, so that if someone has any questions about what “Blacks think,” you can quickly tell them.
Think about the level of mental energy that is being expected here. Schlessinger is saying that it is the responsibility of minorities to know what members of their race/ethnicity think, in the aggregate, about whatever topic anybody else might want to know. I, as a White woman, am not expected to be able to provide, at the drop of a hat, data on Whites’ opinions about anything. (Though I do find that people who find out I’m a sociologist often think I must have insight into every aspect of social life, leading to questions such as, “My sister-in-law likes to _____. What do you think causes that?” or “So what do you think _____ will be like in 50 years?”, neither of which I am usually prepared to address in the middle of getting some potato salad at a picnic or buying a soda at the gas station.) The underlying argument here is that it is minorities’ responsibility to patiently educate Whites about things related to non-Whites, and an unwillingness to take on that role is evidence that you have a “chip on your shoulder.”
Another frame Schlessinger draws on is the minimization of racism: we have a Black president now, so racism’s totally over. What’s your problem?
Schlessinger is also holding all members of a racial group responsible for the actions of any of them. She argues that the routines of some Black comedians invalidates this individual African American woman’s right to be upset by racialized language in any context. It doesn’t matter whether this woman approves of the comedians’ comments — or has ever heard any of them; all African Americans are treated as an undifferentiated group, and the behavior of some revokes the rights of any others to bring up issues they find problematic.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Schlessinger hints at another rhetorical strategy, the “some of my best friends are _____ and thus I can’t possibly be racially prejudiced” argument:
I went out to dinner with three friends after Larry King. One of my friends who is gay is sitting there with another friend who is black, and he looks up and says, “I wonder what the media would do with this? You’re with a black guy and a gay guy.” We laughed, because we all understand what this is really about — censoring a point of view.
So there you have it: a round-up of ways to frame non-Whites as overly sensitive and unilaterally responsible for improving race relations.
UPDATE: The comments section is closed. There were still a lot of people commenting, but much of it had descended into name-calling and accusations, and I can’t keep up with all of them to catch the truly offensive ones. I may reopen comments in 48 hours after a cooling-off period.
U.S. unemployment numbers only begin to describe how U.S. workers have suffered in this recession. The Pew Research Center has some additional data on this experience.
Twenty-six percent of full-time workers who became re-employed currently only work part-time. Thirteen percent moved from part-time to full time work. So, among the employed, there are 13 percent fewer full-time workers.
Americans who lost their jobs and became re-employed during this recession say that they’re making about the same, that the benefits are about equal, and many like their new job better:
Still, the re-employed are more likely than the still-employed to say that they are overqualified for their current job:
People that moved from full- to part-time work are significantly less likely to be satisfied with their new position:
Forty-seven percent of part-time workers would like a full-time job:
The term “underemployed” refers to this 47 percent of the population. Men, young people, the less educated, lower income, and non-whites are more likely to be underemployed:
White people should worry about racism. They should worry about racism because it’s wrong. But if that’s not enough of a motivation, they should worry about it for their own damn good. Philip Cohen of Family Inequality shows us how so with a discussion of a recent paper published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
The Figure below illustrates the percentage of black (grey bar) and white (white bar) residents who went into end-stage renal disease (kidney failure; ESRD) before ever seeing a doctor specializing in kidneys (a nephrologist). As we move from left to right, the zip codes in which patients live becomes increasingly populated by black people.
What we see is that, in any given neighborhood, black people are always less likely to get access to a kidney specialist before their kidneys fail; but also that white people living in a neighborhood with a higher percentage of blacks are less likely than whites in a more white neighborhood to see a specialist. So much so that whites living in neighborhoods that are more than 50% black are less likely to see a specialist than blacks living in neighborhoods that are less than 25% black.
Cohen specifies that…
…the relationship still holds even when individual socioeconomic status, and local-area socioeconomic status, are controlled. So it’s not just a poverty effect.
Somehow places that are “blacker”, even when they are not poor, are serviced with inferior health care compared to places that are “whiter.” And everyone suffers for it (though not necessarily equally).
There are 332 faces in this month’s issue of Seventeen. I counted a face as a head with at least one visible eye. That is, backs of heads and disembodied mouths or eyes were not included in my data. I researched the races of the models and celebrities that I could identify. Those whose race I could not determine with reasonable certainty I’ve excluded from my data, making for 319 surveyed faces.
Keiles was also surprised by the fact that, compared to the U.S. population, there were many models who identified as bi-racial. My guess is that it’s because advertisers think (and perhaps know, but I’m not sure) that models whose identities are hard to discern appeal to a larger array of audience members who may see themselves in what is otherwise an “ambiguous” appearance.
Any ideas as to why white Hispanics are particularly underrepresented? Is it possible that white Hispanic models simply identify publicly as “white”? Other ideas?
Keiles finds a similar patterns when she looks by gender and by whether it was Seventeen content or advertiser content:
This week six black teenagers died in the Louisiana Red River (story). They were wading in waist deep water when one, 15-year-old DeKendrix Warner, fell off an underwater ledge. He struggled to swim and, one by one, six of his cousins and friends jumped in to help him and each other. Warner was the only survivor. The family members of the children watched in horror; none of them knew how to swim.
This tragedy draws attention to a rarely discussed and deadly disparity between blacks and whites. Blacks, especially black women, are much less likely than white people to know how to swim. And, among children, 70% have no or low ability to swim. The figure below, from the International Swimming Hall of Fame, shows that 77% of black women and 44% of black men say that they don’t know how to swim. White women are as likely as black men, but much less likely than black women to report that they can’t swim. White men are the most confident in their swimming ability.
This translates into real tragedy. Blacks are significantly more likely to die from drowning than whites (number of drownings out of 100,000):
Why are blacks less likely to learn to swim than whites? Dr. Caroline Heldman, at FemmePolitical, argues that learning to swim is a class privilege. To learn to swim, it is helpful to have access to a swimming pool. Because a disproportionate number of blacks are working class or poor means that they don’t have backyard swimming pools; while residential segregation and economic disinvestment in poor and minority neighborhoods means that many black children don’t have access to community swimming pools. Even if all of these things are in place, however, learning to swim is facilitated by lessons. If parents don’t know how to swim, they can’t teach their kids. And if they don’t have the money to pay someone else, their kids may not learn.
I wonder, too, if the disparity between black women and men is due, in part, to the stigma of “black hair.” Because we have racist standards of beauty, some women invest significant amounts of time and money on their hair in an effort to make it straight or wavy and long. Getting their hair wet often means undoing this effort. Then again, there is a gap between white men and white women too, so perhaps there is a more complicated gender story here.
These are my initial guesses at explaining the disparities. Your thoughts?
UPDATE: In the comments, Carolyn Dougherty reminded me that just last year there was an egregious racist incident at a private swim club in Philadelphia (CNN).
Abby Kinchy sent in a link to a story at Colorlines about where waste from BP’s Gulf oil leak is being disposed of. Nine landfills have been approved as disposal sites. Robert Bullard, who studies environmental racism (particular how toxic waste dumps are often located in neighborhoods where racial/ethnic minorities are over-represented), posted his calculations of the racial makeup of the areas surrounding these nine landfills over at Dissident Voices. This map from Colorlines shows the location of the landfills, the amount of waste (which includes “oily solids,” waste from the cleanup, and so on) sent there, and the percentage of people living within a 1-mile radius that are People of Color:
I looked up the % who aren’t non-Hispanic Whites for each state (as of 2008), just to provide some context:
LA: 38.1
MS: 41.3
AL: 31.6
FL: 39.7
So if we compare the neighborhoods simply to the % of POC in each state, there are 3 in LA, 1 in AL, and 1 in FL that have an over-representation of non-Whites and/or Hispanics. On the other hand, 3 landfills are in neighborhoods with racial/ethnic minority populations significantly below the state overall. This, of course, is a very rough measure, since different racial groups are not evenly spread across a state. I just wanted to provide at least some background info.
According to a story at the Miami Herald, operators of the landfills say there is no danger:
…operators of the landfills insist the BP garbage is not unprecedented and is suitable for the type of landfills they’ve selected: disposal sites that take household waste, as well as “special waste” like contaminated soil. They note much of the waste is generated by the cleanup operation itself: soiled cleanup coveralls, gloves, sandwich wrappers and drink containers.
They point out that the BP waste makes up a tiny amount of the material taken to these landfills each day.
However, residents are concerned because the landfills are regular municipal landfills, not designated for toxic waste (since the EPA has not categorized the waste as hazardous). The Associated Press discovered problems, including a truck that was leaking and left a trail of tar balls behind it, waste in containers that were not lined with the protective liners BP is supposed to use, and uncovered containers, including one in a state park that was leaking liquid from the previous night’s rain. The AP concluded, “…the handling and disposal of oily materials was haphazard at best.”
I’m not an environmental toxicologist, so whether or not the waste is hazardous or whether the landfills can keep it from seeping into groundwater is, obviously, beyond my ability to judge. I’m more interested in perceptions of risk and confidence in experts. There are distinct differences by gender and race, with women and non-Whites expressing higher concern about environmental pollution/dangers and higher perceptions of risk compared to men and Whites. In fact, White men stood out from all other groups, rating potential environmental risks significantly lower than every other group. In the U.S., the gender gap is not explained by differences in scientific knowledge.
Given these differences, discussions of environmental safety and risk are often very contentious. Experts in both the private and public sector are disproportionately White men. Regardless of scientific knowledge, they may underestimate the risks involved compared to how women with the same scientific knowledge would (I don’t have similar data on how scientific knowledge might affect the racial gap). Science doesn’t just provide us with objective facts; researchers and those applying their findings must interpret the data. Individuals with the exact same level of expertise may interpret the same data on the hazardousness (or lack thereof) of a particular type of waste very differently, without anyone being intentionally deceptive or more clearly biased.
And not all groups have equal faith in science or, more specifically, the people engaged in scientific research. Scientists in the 1800s used supposed objective measures to prove that Whites were superior to non-Whites (and, thus, to justify slavery) and conducted the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in which they allowed Black men to suffer and die of syphilis just to see what happened despite having a cure available. And the hazards of materials or pollutants often aren’t immediately apparent and may become clear only later (or may differ for adults and children, or due to cumulative exposure over time, etc.), which scientific analyses may not predict.
I’m not arguing that scientists studying the toxicity of the BP oil waste don’t have any useful information about whether or not it poses any danger to human health, or that data doesn’t help us come to more accurate judgments than we would if we didn’t take such information into account. However, in situations such as these that may be framed, particularly by scientists themselves, as an example of uninformed public opinion vs. fact-based expertise, the differences in interpretations and the fears of local residents despite assurances by researchers may be based in a number of factors that make the story, and conflicts over perceptions of risk, much more complex than it might at first appear.
Sources:
James Flynn, Paul Slovic, and C.K. Mertz. 1994. “Gender, Race, and Perception of Environmental Health Risks.” Risk Analysis 14(6): 1101-1107.
Bernadette C. Hayes. 2001. “Gender, Scientific Knowledge, and Attitudes toward the Environment: A Cross-National Analysis.” Political Research Quarterly 54(3): 657-671.
Paul Mohai. 1997. “Gender Differences in the Perception of Most Important Environmental Problems.” Race, Gender & Class 5(1): 153-169.
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