All this activity will no doubt excite students of color to pursue change, and, if I remember anything about my student days, the vast majority of that pursuit will be for programs that teach students and faculty how to see past stereotypes.
The important thing to remember is that stereotypes have their roots in demographics, and demographics have their roots in policy and practice.
Let’s just consider the stereotypes of scientific Asians and athletic Blacks that MIT is now struggling with.
We can draw a straight line between the 1965 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which ended an 80-year ban on immigration from Asian countries by letting my people in, but only if we were professionals, especially in the sciences. Before that policy change, the primary Asian stereotype was not about the model minority, but rather of the yellow peril.
The Black stereotypes stem from centuries of disinvestment in public education for Black kids in particular, as well as from the War on Drugs and the often unwritten policies of employers only to hire Blacks in menial jobs.
So, campus activists take note – if you want to challenge stereotyping on your campus, move beyond the standard demands – usually to punish the most obvious racists and make the whole campus sit through diversity training. Look instead toward the practices and policies related to hiring, curricular review and, of course, admissions. Those are the things that will change campus demographics, the key to challenging stereotypes. Preparing to defend affirmative action while creating new pipelines for kids of color to get to college seem like a good place to start.
Since, the pop singer and her royal baldness have enjoyed more than a week of massive news coverage. That’s just about as many news days Beyonce has gotten for her recent Sports Illustrated debut which made her only one of two black women in history to solo-cover-shoot the magazine that has long set the tone for who’s sexy and who’s, well--better suited for snatching green balls bouncing across tennis courts.
Between these two mega stars, one can clearly see that hair plays a bigger role in our culture than we’re ready to give credit to.
But I’d argue that Britney’s real news story was not her hair while Beyonce’s news story should have been.
The main crux of my argument lies in our social construction of femininity and its subsequent shortage of freedom of hair expression that exists for the spectrum of women along the color line.
When Britney, made famous for huffing and puffing over a mike sheds her locks, she becomes a paragon of mental problems? Her latest behavior, running around town banging on cars, is more indicative.
When Beyonce swirls her booty with the same might she does her long locks of fake, blond weaved-hair, she becomes a statue of beauty.
Both the taboo and the norm are very narrow parameters for women to work within.
Further, Spears’ hair scandal says a lot about expectations of femininity for white woman, and indirectly, that those expectations are not held for black women.
Today, it’s much more acceptable for a black woman to sport shorter hair—because its tandem to our expectation that she is also strong and prone to militant outbursts.
But at the same time, it’s only when black women wear European hair weaves that they are able to become pop culture news stories, sit on Oprah’s couch, and appear on the Red Carpet.
For black women, weaves are touted as our solution to our problem of un-femininity, for white women, their baldness is seen as an indicator of their personal problems.
Ultimately, a woman remains tied to her hair that binds her identity to her sexuality; and if she strays too far, she’s treated like an abomination of femininity, an embarrassment to her people.
Together, Britney and Beyonce show this. And also that to the extent a woman can achieve long, luscious European hair—is also the extent we view her as rational, sexable, and ultimately, female.
Recently, I conducted a hair experiment where I transformed my afro to a long and straight weave to see how it would change my perception of self. You can read the full conclusion of that trial here. I consider it the contextual bridge that connects me to the stars...
Just ahead of Sunday night's ceremony, I've been doing some thinking about this "historic" year for Black people at the Oscar's. With a record 5 nominations, a chorus of voices (including Newsweek) are arguing, again, that barriers are being broken.
I wrote Race for the Oscars, posted over at COLORLINES, to argue that getting behind the glam of the red carpet and symbolism historic firsts, we see a Hollywood still fractured along the color line. A preview:
And I am Telling You, I Don’t Buy It.
It’s true; Oscar night does play an important symbolic role. Awarding Black actors allows Hollywood a moment to exhale. A brief period to release the nasty burden of criticism surrounding a highly inequitable film industry while rehearsing popular stereotypes and congratulating roles that comfort anxieties held by the larger society.
Black people, in turn, look to one of our own receiving the award as a mark of progress; if we are accepted and applauded on the red carpet, why not off? The gleam of Oscar is a welcome distraction from the truth that life for Black folks in Hollywood and beyond is cause for more rage than rejoicing.
This is the first of I-Narratives about race and culture RaceWire plans to run several times a month.
In this piece, Sonny Suchdev, an activist and member of Outernational, a progressive 5-member band, writes about the time he crumpled to pieces in a New York subway after having his turban ripped off his head by a stranger.
When I was in the fifth grade, a classmate yanked off my dastar, my turban, on the playground one day, perhaps because it seemed funny to him. I will never forget how I felt walking around school the rest of the day with the black cloth of my dastar hanging off my joora, a Punjabi word for bun, because I didn’t know how to put it back on. Humiliated. Enraged. So so alone.
Now seventeen years later it’s the same shit.
[To submit your own I-Narratives, email: Malena Amusa at mamusa@arc.org]
Most people think of San Francisco as the hub for gay folks and liberal politics, i.e. this isn’t the place to come if you’re a homophobe or racist. But that’s begun to change in a new way. The Bay Area is now home to the anti-immigrant group the Minutemen. The group, which is mostly concentrated in the South along the U.S.-Mexico border, has opened a local chapter, the Golden Gate Minutemen. Down South, they’re known for harassing and attacking immigrants.
But in case you’re worried that these folks are heading North with their racism, their local leader Charles Birkman says the Minutemen are screened for racist tendencies and violence prior to admission.
Wow, and we thought they were admitted based on their tendencies for racism and violence.
Now, if we can screen the Minutemen for racism, can we do that with Bush?
The Applied Research Center has invited Winona La Duke, Angela Glover Blackwell, Juan Gonzales and Rinku Sen to discuss the Future of Racial Justice at the FACING RACE conference this year in New York, March 22-24.
But before the panelists get going on this subject, we want to hear from you:
What issues of racial justice are you most concerned with? What's overdone, what's not done enough? Answer in this blog's comment section and we'll use your response to shape the conversation at FACING RACE.
Too few people know that in Miami, behind the seductive backdrop of celebrity clubs and relentless sunshine, is a stormy fight of hundreds of poor people, many people of color, to find affordable housing.
Gentrification is just half the story. Government-sponsored companies set to build affordable homes folded on their promises leaving hordes of folks out of quality living. The Miami Herald exposed the housing debacle last summer in a series of hard-cracking investigative reports. Housing authorities squandered millions of dollars in unlawful bundling of funds, the Herald found, resulting in residually homeless populations.
Today, shantytowns have been erected in parts of Miami by homeless people who refuse to be displaced from their areas. Take a tour here:
In addition, Black and Latino tensions are rising, according to folks I spoke with covering housing and employment. But more on that later.
Joseph Phelan of the Miami Workers Center who wrote a piece for RaceWire in December about Miami’s dirty big secrets, will steer more news our way on the movement for housing. So far, he had this to say:
"What is bubbling out of control is the local governments corruption, downright mistreatment of poor Black and Latino people and a building boom that is displacing historic Black communities and Latino neighborhoods. The Miami Workers Center is trying to focus on the need and ability to unite in the face of racial tensions to build a solid movement for racial and economic justice."
While RaceWire finds out why one Miami journalist said the city is set to produce the next L.A. riots, do check “House of Lies,” the Herald’s multi-part report on this debacle of inequality and greed.
It might at the very least change your vacation plans...
Right after reports of students throwing black-face parties in dis-honor of Mr. Luther King Jr.'s birthday, news came out that some at a Silicon Valley university hosted a "South of the Border" romp where "students showed up dressed as Hispanic janitors, gardeners, gangbangers and pregnant teens."
Despite rebuke from the university's president Paul Locatelli, not much has been done.
I say, let's just go with it. Give all these nice young leaders a vacation to our very real, militarized border. Make them cross. Then let's heap insults on them and their kids while the huge majority of their new "frat" works at a poverty wage. Also, can we threaten at every moment to take away their second-class citizenship?
But the big hype this around was the conspicuous absence of Sen. Barack Obama (who has made appearances in the past) who blew off the gathering, instead flying to Springfield, Ill. to make a speech.
Here, famed Prof. Cornel West, author of Race Matters explains why Obama's absence should be a reminder that the man is, ahem, a politician. I know, it's an ugly word to describe the Great Black Hope, but according to West we need to get used to the idea that The Obama is only willing to go so far to court Black votes.
Though President's Day would be a fitting moment for RaceWire to flip the script an go neocon for a day, don't let this title fool you.
Taking Black History Month as his starting point, longtime Guardian correspondent Gary Younge makes a great argument in The Nation for a comprehensive telling (actually, retelling) of "White History". Younge, in fact, firmly supports the Blackening of our shortest month, even while pointing to its intrinsic shortcomings:
Setting aside twenty-eight days for African-American history is insufficient, problematic and deserves our support for the same reason that affirmative action is insufficient, problematic and deserves our support. As one means to redress an entrenched imbalance, it gives us the chance to hear narratives that have been forgotten, hidden, distorted or mislaid.
But perhaps more importantly, he argues that all Americans, and particularly white Americans, should reject the mythology presented in history books and go deeper to understand the real story of white people in this country. A Black history lesson makes little sense without a real discussion of the collective responsibility white folks share in a system made successful through racism and imperialism.
When it comes to excelling at military conflict, everyone lays claim to their national identity; people will say, "We won World War II." By contrast, those who say "we" raped black slaves, massacred Indians or excluded Jews from higher education are hard to come by. You cannot, it appears, hold anyone responsible for what their ancestors did that was bad or the privileges they enjoy as a result. Whoever it was, it definitely wasn't "us." This is one more version of white flight--a dash from the inconveniences bequeathed by inequality.