First thing's first: KEEP. THIS. SHIT. CIVIL. If you can't talk about race without resorting to childish insults and rude generalizations or getting angry at people who don't see it your way, leave the thread.
With that said, I bring you to what can hopefully be the general thread about race.
First, a few starter questions.
- How, if at all, do you feel your race affects your everyday life?
- Do you believe that white people (or whatever the majority race in your area is) receive privileges simply because of the color of their skin. How much?
- Do you believe minorities are discriminated against for the same reason? How much?
- Do you believe that assimilation of cultures is better than people trying to keep their own?
- Affirmative Action. Yea, Nay? Why or why not?
Also, a personal question from me.
- Why (in my experience, not trying to generalize) do white people often try to insist that they aren't white? I can't count the number of times I've heard "I'm not white, I'm 1/4th English, 1/4th German, 1/4th Scandinavian 1/8th Cherokee, and 1/8th Russian," as though 4 of 5 of those things aren't considered "white" by the masses. Is it because you have pride for your ancestry, or an attempt to try and differentiate yourself from all those "other" white people? Or something else altogether?
edited 30th May '11 9:16:04 PM by Wulf
That is in really awful taste and I hate that I'm laughing.
This is a pretty awful thing, I can't believe it was a mass-deal. From what I've heard it's by some sort of police-known large scale thieving ring and that the perpetrators are not refugees as conservative fear-mongers would have some believe.
The Blog The ArtFrom what I heard on the broadcast I was listening to it seemed like pick-pockets or cons that sort of do stuff all at once as distractions, such as say assaulting a ton of women in a similar time period. I don't recall all the details, I should look up more before trying to state anything as fact. And maybe you should too. We might be able to bring something more concrete back.
The key things that stuck out to me was that people wanted to blame middle eastern refugees when the police claimed to have known of several of the potential culprits so it had nothing to do with them.
The Blog The ArtThe police never did in fairness, they were saying "men of North Africans or Middle Eastern ethnicity", which is an ethnic catagony, same as saying "men of Western European ethnicity".
Ethnically North Africa and the Middle East have a lot the same.
edited 8th Jan '16 3:19:52 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranFrom The New Yorker: The Year of the Imaginary College Student
In a year when college campuses were particularly visible as hotbeds of political activity, O’Keefe’s stunt didn’t make much of a splash. The administrator in the clip seems confused and skeptical, like an actress flubbing her lines, while the real-life Vassar kids caught on camera look mildly inconvenienced rather than incensed. What stands out is that, in contrast to O’Keefe’s other provocations, the clip could have served a variety of political viewpoints. As a parody of campus life, it tapped into a broader suspicion, shared across the ideological spectrum—from right-wing watchdogs to high-minded progressives—that college students these days are absurdly thin-skinned, unduly obsessed with “safe spaces” and political correctness.
It was a rich year for even the casual observer of campus life. There were tales of students seeking “trigger warnings” before being exposed to potentially upsetting class materials. There was a new interest in “microaggressions,” or hurtful, everyday slights rarely uttered with the intention to offend. There was the Northwestern professor whose editorial against “sexual paranoia” resulted in students filing a Title IX suit against her, and the University of Missouri students who sought to bar journalists from a public plaza, which they claimed to be a “safe space” protected from the media. There were the students at Yale who demanded that a residential adviser be reprimanded after she prevailed upon them to be more open-minded about offensive Halloween costumes. And there was the item in the Oberlin school paper about sketchy Asian food, a piece that the New York Times described as evidence of the new “culture war.” Every week seemed to bring additional evidence for the emerging archetype of the hypersensitive college student, spotlighted at the beginning of the school year by the Atlantic, in a cover story about the “Coddling of the American Mind,” and just last weekend, in a Times Op-Ed about the “culture of victimhood.”
Why this surge of interest in campus life, especially as fodder for ridicule? What have college students come to represent to those who presume to inhabit the “real world” that awaits them? These reports and reactions arrive at a moment of heightened scrutiny concerning the usefulness of college itself, in an era of astoundingly high tuitions and fees, and some of them have a whiff of intergenerational condescension, that enduring sense that youth (and critical theory) is wasted on the young. Compared to the scenes of sixties protest that remain most romantically legible in the American imagination, contemporary activism strikes many as low stakes and unfocussed.
But the alarm about offense-seeking college students may say more about the critics of political correctness than it does about the actual state of affairs. Plenty of evidence suggests that policies regarding microaggressions and trigger warnings aren’t as pervasive as they might seem to those who are not on campus. This is not to say that such policies (or demands for such policies) do not exist, nor to discount the very real pressures they place on teachers who work with difficult material. Is that coddling? Maybe it is. But an educational system built on legacy admissions and de facto segregation, with traditions of grade inflation that perpetuate privilege, is also a form of coddling. It’s understandable that protests about symbols and language strike critics on both the right and the left as being too touchy-feely. But it’s worth asking why the politics of everyday college life, from calls for more inclusive curricula to questions about whether campus buildings should continue honoring racist forefathers, have become so important to people spending their lives far from the classroom.
College once represented a bubble protected from the outside world. Students nowadays come into political consciousness in public, on the Internet, but also in a space—the twenty-first-century American college—that boasts a clear structure of accountability and hierarchy, a place where you might actually walk across campus, knock on a door, and meet a representative of the power structure. The logic of virality that governs life on the Internet has given student activists a sense of common struggle, as well as the means to escalate their grievances with relative ease. The “Ferguson effect” was a term invented to describe how nationwide protests against police brutality would result in a hesitant, overcautious police force. (There is evidence that claims about this effect have been overstated, if the effect even exists at all.) But another effect of the Ferguson protests—and the Occupy movement before it—was to intensify the desire to see injustices in one’s immediate surroundings as part of larger struggles that once might have seemed distant and abstract, to draw connections and recognize broader patterns linking everyday indignities with systemic problems.
This desire to see oneself along a continuum of experience isn’t remarkable in itself. What’s changed is the intense scrutiny from those just beyond the gates, eager to diagnose every gesture as some kind of larger trend. It’s a strange game of gotcha, from progressives wary of political correctness seeking out the juiciest anecdotes to O’Keefe’s mission to find someone at Vassar willing to do something un-American. The recent media coverage of Oberlin’s food fight, for example, seemed remarkably out of proportion to the original complaints. Before social media, grievances about cafeteria food from members of the campus’ tiny sliver of Asian and Asian-American students would have been lucky to make it across campus, let alone the country. But thanks in part to their use of au courant buzzwords like “authenticity” and “appropriation,” the “Oberlin foodies” became national symbols of campus culture wars run amok. Commenters took to the college’s Facebook page, ripping the students as spoiled and leaving an alarming number of racist comments about the Asian appetite for dog. (The comments have since been erased by the page’s moderator.) All of this seemed a strange turn of events, given that the original complaints, from an article in the school paper published with little fanfare a month earlier, didn’t seem to rise above a fairly modest lament.
What many of the cases across the country share in common is a desire by students to hold their institutions accountable in ways both impossibly big and manageably small. Particularly in instances when it is students of color agitating for institutional reform, it’s important to recognize what’s happening right now as the continually unfolding legacy of relatively recent policies designed to promote and insure diversity. At one point in time, institutions might have thought the mere presence of difference was a sufficient aim. But the question today is: Now what? Maybe the efforts of students pushing to fulfill a brochure’s promise of community and belonging feel purely symbolic or naïve. But it’s the most direct kind of response for those who suspect that their own presence may, on some level, be purely symbolic as well.
Working at a college hasn’t predisposed me to sympathizing with present-day students. All of this, from questions about college’s usefulness as pre-professional training to how today’s students confront challenging ideas, concerns me. As many academic critics of the campus wars have noted, one consequence of all these controversies might simply be more deans and administrators, and even more emphasis on the customer satisfaction model of education. Over the past couple of years, friends who have read stories about campus flare-ups have asked me what it’s like to teach kids these days. It’s complicated, I say, when you’re there every day. You see the good and the bad, the careful ideas and the brash whims, the moments of unexplained laziness and the stretches of superhuman vitality, and you remember that it’s all just a part of growing up.
Consider the trajectory of the typical twenty-something, born in the early nineties, a product of the test-oriented No Child Left Behind educational model. This hypothetical student came of age during the Obama era, with a new understanding of America’s future demographics, at a moment when the narrative of a red and blue America was firm orthodoxy. This student’s first Presidential election may involve Donald Trump. Identity politics, in the world this student knows, are no longer solely the province of minorities who have been pushed to the margins. The same ideas about inclusivity and belonging that spark campus revolt also underlie the narratives of grievance and decline animating supporters of Trump and the Tea Party. Within this context, where large swaths of the so-called real world have already surrendered to cynicism, perhaps direct action and protests, even in the name of seemingly minor causes, are the only politics that still makes sense.
It is tempting to conclude that what is happening is simply a rerun of what always happens, this time in the age of aggregation. But I’m not sure what we accomplish by insisting that nothing new is going on, or by suggesting that students simply try harder to belong. It seems similarly unhelpful to belittle an archetype, questioning the sources of their esteem or reading their motives in bad faith. The imaginary college student is a character born of someone else’s pessimism. It is an easy target, a perverse distillation of all the self-regard and self-absorption ascribed to what’s often called the millennial generation. But perhaps it goes both ways, and the reason that college stories have garnered so much attention this year is our general suspicion, within the real world, that the system no longer works. Their cries for justice sound out of step to those who can no longer imagine it. Maybe we’re troubled by these students’ attempts to imagine change on so microscopic a level. Maybe they interest us as a litmus test for the political future—one with different frontiers and more vociferous demands. There is a naïve idealism at the heart of student protest, which might be desperate or loud but never as cynical as the world that necessitated it. Today’s youth should be understood in terms of the choices available to them, not the world they’ve inherited. Let college kids be, many of us say, for they are no weirder than we were. It’s a comparison meant to be generous, since past generations, we think, turned out more or less O.K. This flatters the old, not the young.
Portland Community College prepares for White History Month
White History Month, set for April, is intended to be an academic effort to help establish the causes and origins of racism.
The name, however, has evoked speculation and chatter on social media.
“We’re trying to force a more nuanced discussion of society as it exists and how that society privileges people from a certain background and disadvantages people from other backgrounds,” Abe Proctor, PCC’s Community Relations Manager, tells KOIN.
He says it is an effort to broaden everyone’s perspectives of the world and to try to open eyes to the reality that different cultures and different races have differing experiences and vastly different outcomes when it comes to wealth, health and quality of life.
“The intent isn’t to cast blame on anyone but rather to look at the context of racism and how it affects everyone,” Proctor says.
The month long initiative will be blended in with regular coursework.
I am totally certain that this will not promote an unhealthily narrow black and white worldview among students. No Pun Intended BTW.
Good intentions unfortunately tend to eclipse execution (and forethought for that matter) when trying to "fix" an institution. (see. Zero Tolerance policies)
edited 20th Jan '16 7:14:36 PM by nervmeister
Actually the name seems to be Whiteness History Month.
https://www.pcc.edu/about/diversity/cascade/whiteness-history-month/
I'm reserving judgement until April rolls around and we get to see this in action, however the college's page leaves me a little skeptical.
Like the PCC says, this isn't going to be a month devoted to the celebration of a group but instead looking at it's ugly side. Unless they're careful they may end with the implicit message that racism only comes in one flavor.
edited 20th Jan '16 6:52:08 PM by FalseDichotomy
That said, the definition of 'whiteness' is an interesting topic that's highly relevant to American history, from migrant integration (remember when the Irish weren't white?) to the elaborate terminology for people who had black folks somewhere in their family trees (entire volumes could be written about the kind of culture that would feel the need to create the word 'octoroon'). It's pretty significant in the modern world, too, with the ongoing dispute over Hispanic racial status and Barack Obama, the son of a black man and a white woman, being 'America's first black president'.
What's precedent ever done for us?A few days ago, this
question in a Writer's Block thread sparked a small discussion about the lack of ethnic characters when their ethnicity doesn't matter to the work they're in, and also whether or not aracial characters contribute to that trend. It's not a very long discussion, but the posts start growing in size up to a wall of text I spend the day writing yesterday (although to be fair internet grues ate it and I had to rewrite the whole thing). Here are a few excerpts from the first four comments on that discussion:
Remember, kids: Viewers Are Geniuses and vagueness can be just fine.
("casted" seems to have existed since the 16th Century... reminds me of some "mistakes" in Portuguese that have been happening for centuries...)
Plus, minorities don't just want to be in "race-related" stories. A lot of black Americans are sick of seeing their only stories as either slavery stories or civil-rights stories. Asians are sick of being immigrants or gangsters. Native Americans are sick of being earth-worshiping Noble Savages.
[...]
edited 21st Jan '16 8:51:17 AM by Victin
Sharysa has hit the nail on the head when it comes to writing, casting calls, etc. because of the culture some of us have been raised in cultures where "White" becomes the "default generic normal" regardless of ambiguity, "a-racial descriptions", or intent and everything else is "different" or "special" and comes with whatever preconceived notions one might have of people of those races.
I mean I'm a black dude and the first characters I designed that weren't based on myself or actual friends trended towards white mostly, despite being black and having lived in not only in the USA but also Egypt and Botswana. It took years of critical thinking and consideration to shake me out of it.
For those that may have grown up with, say, anime, without any awareness that they came from Japan the designs make some naive youth also think everyone is white. And that just adds on to the effect.
It's sort of why attempts at "a-racializing" things don't work that well. There has got to be an effort to make everyone else around enough that there is no singular preconceived "default" for a person, it can just be anyone unless specifically stated otherwise. Until then, having something clarifying racial intent, if there is any, is the way to go.
The Blog The ArtI’m the most magnanimous motherfucker you know.
We sort of take for granted the vast indignities associated with the TSA’s version of security theater at our airports. It’s absurd, and demonstrably ineffective, but nobody wants to miss their flight over the stupidity, so we all just play along with it.
The thing is, for those of us who fly while brown, there is always someone in the security line with us who thinks we’re a threat. In my experience, it’s seldom the TSA agents themselves. They’re either well-trained enough, or too bored, to actually do much other than constantly “randomly” picking out brown folks for a secondary screening. They won’t personally accost us because it would slow down the line.
But our fellow passengers? They feel like they’re being heroic when they carefully scrutinize my iPhone charger in my bag. I’ve literally lost count of the number of times another guy (it’s always a man) in line asks me to account for the external battery pack I typically carry for my smartphone. These dudes want to be the hero who caught me in the TSA security line.
You have to think about what these people are saying when they scrutinize me, or every other brown person, in an airport security line. They’re clearly saying: I think you would kill me, and you, and all the people on this plane, including the children. Now, they never quite have the temerity to say it out loud. Instead, they just exchange that meaningful nod with the TSA agent, hoping to get me pulled out for a secondary screening.
And honestly, I’m pretty good-natured about it. I fly at least once a month, and they’re all round trips, so let’s call it maybe 26 flights a year—one every other week. Now imagine, if every other week a stranger said, “I think you intend to kill children.” Could you laugh it off three times in a row? Four? Eight? Because if you have the extraordinary patience to be able to ignore it, or laugh along, or quietly acquiesce to letting strangers indicate to your face that they think you’re secretly a duplicitous, lying, child murderer in waiting, then you’ll just be asked to do it again on your next flight.
I am particularly even-keeled by temperament, so I can endure as many as 12 consecutive accusations of intending to kill children before I get indignant. “I’m a father,” I might think. Or “I’m a New Yorker, how dare you think that of me?” Let alone, “I don’t even have a religion to be an extremist member of, and white supremacists are the most common terrorist killers in America anyway!” None of those responses are welcomed by the TSA.
So that one time in twelve that I get mad at the portentious nod from a fellow passenger, I just quietly fume and have my flight ruined, maybe my day ruined, by the awful injustice of it all. When that doesn’t work, I confront the reality that if I did actually articulate how furious I am, I would be the one kicked off, and not my horrible lying accusers.
And yet, I still fly, because I have to for my work and to accomplish the things I would like to achieve. I never lash out, even when I know that a stranger’s silent accusation of me is motivated by their malice and not even an attempt at protecting themselves. I never, ever get righteously angry about it and try to get them kicked off my flight, because that wouldn’t work anyway.
That’s why I’m the most magnanimous motherfucker you know. You’re welcome.
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Historical fiction for which part of the world? Because a World War II Unterseeboot would be unlikely to have a gay Jewish Sassy Black Woman amongst its crew, sure, but medieval Europe, for instance, tends to get depicted as way more lily-white than it actually was. The kingdoms of North Africa in particular were huge trading partners.

(OT pagetopper)
edited 6th Jan '16 3:51:58 PM by Know-age