Boundaries: Real or Imagined?

Home Owners' Loan Corporation Philadelphia redlining map. Image via Wikipedia

I am thinking of boundaries on a societal level – as in, do boundaries such as racism really exist or is it just some people’s perception that it exists?  In believing it exists, are we actually creating it – strengthening it?  Boundaries that are implicit in our society.  Sometimes boundaries are easy to see, you can point to them and say, “that right there is evidence of racial oppression.”  Some obvious examples of this are enslavement and segregation, but it’s also easy to point out racially oppressive aspects of red-lining, the GI Bill, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and various immigration policies. Discrimination that is codified in law is called de jure.  

In addition, there is discrimination and oppression that is much more difficult to see; it is in behavior, your way of thinking, a worldview.  Nobody has to say it or write it down, but it’s there nonetheless.  That’s called de facto.  Racially oppressive ways of thinking influence and control the way things work in their community – so that things work in their favor.  This is what creates systems of privilege, and the invisible barriers that exist to maintain that privilege.  In so doing, de facto discrimination often comes at a greater detriment than de jure discrimination because it is so difficult to isolate the source. In acknowledging the boundaries, we are allowing ourselves to openly talk about the behaviors and worldviews that enable and maintain racial oppression.  We can finally acknowledge things about ourselves we need to change – old ways of thinking that are causing ourselves harm.

Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow

The university I work for brought in an amazing speaker for our Martin Luther King Jr. Keynote Address: Michelle Alexander.  Professor Alexander works at The Ohio State University where she holds a joint appointment with the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity*.  She also is a  contributor at the Huffington Post and Race Talk.

Image via http://moritzlaw.osu.edu

Her speech was centered around the topic of The New Jim Crow, which is the title of her new book.  She discussed ways in which the criminal justice system has taken over the job that Jim Crow and enslavement started.  Have we come so far since then?  Professor Alexander says no, in fact black men are worse off today than they were in 1850.  She skillfully integrated hard statistics about the war on drugs and the ‘get tough’ policing movement into a larger narrative about the effects of disenfranchisement laws and other policies designed to relegate criminals and felons to a lower societal caste.

Take a look at a recorded speech she made just about a year ago, which is quite similar (but not as polished) as the one she shared tonight:

If you prefer to read rather than watch, catch her over on the Huffington Post:

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years.  Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently are at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared.  Quintupled, in fact.  And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs.  Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

-The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste

Cover via Amazon

This is The New Jim Crow. People of color are rounded up — frequently at young ages — for relatively minor drug offenses, branded felons, and then relegated to a permanent second-class status in which they may be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and subjected to legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. Those who are lucky enough to get a job upon release from prison find that up to 100 percent of their wages may be garnished to pay fees, fines, and court costs as well as the costs of their imprisonment and accumulated child support. What, realistically, do we expect these folks to do? When those labeled felons fail under this system to make it on the outside — not surprisingly, about 70 percent fail within 3 years — we throw up our hands and wonder where they all went. Or we chastise them for being poor fathers and for failing to contribute to their families. It’s a set up. This system isn’t about crime control; it about racial control. Yes, even in the age of Obama.

-Where Have All the Black Men Gone?

Thanks to my university for bringing Professor Alexander to boldly share the truth with us!

* I had the pleasure of doing some copy editing work for the Kirwan Institute’s journal, Race/Ethnicity a few years back.  Great folks doing important work.  

Valuable Intellectual Traits

I am honored to report that I was asked to speak on Critical Thinking to a professional organization.  Very excited about that!  While doing research for my presentation I stumbled on these Valuable Intellectual Traits set forth by the Critical Thinking Community.  Now, I don’t know enough about this website to endorse it, but the traits laid out here caught my interest.  And what better time to improve your intellectual traits than the beginning of a new year!

 

2011 in review

These stats are amazing, especially considering I only know one person who reads this blog!

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,500 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

The Difference Between Race, Ethnicity, and Culture

One of my  most popular posts is The Difference Between Race and Culture (thanks for all the love!).  Here,  I have expanded to include ethnicity.  Please note, this is a very basic introduction and does not include a lot of complex intricacies that are found in the world.

NOTE: This information is copyright protected.  DO NOT copy/paste without giving appropriate credit.  An appropriate APA citation for this would be:

Kean, M. (2011). The difference between race and culture. Progressive Scholar blog.  Retrieved from http://progressivescholar.wordpress.com/?p=615

A lot of people confuse ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘culture’ or think they are the same thing. To address the difference, we must start at the fundamental concepts of race and culture. Race is a social construct that is used to categorize and divide people based on physical characteristics, which often leads to conflict and oppression. In short, Race is a label forced on someone based on their skin tone and physical characteristics. A person’s race is externally decided and has nothing to do with culture, intellect, ability, or personality.

Ethnicity, on the other hand, is determined by such attributes as cultural traditions, religion, ancestry, language, and beliefs. Your textbook defines ethnicity as “identity with a group of people who share the cultural traditions of a particular homeland or hearth” (Rubenstein, p. 208). Let’s consider this example. ‘Caucasian’ is considered to be a race, with particular physical characteristics attributed to Caucasians such as a narrow nose, light skin, and straight or wavy hair. Within the Caucasian race, however, you will find many different ethnicities, such as Irish, Finnish, German or French. Also within the Caucasian race, you will find many different cultures and sub-cultures such as punk, gamers, straight edge, bikers – even the military can be seen as its own culture.

Different from race, culture is a system of shared beliefs and values (also known as ‘worldviews’) that may include a shared geographic region, language, religion, spirituality, or livelihoods. Communication style and interpersonal relationships are integral aspects of culture and can vary dramatically from one culture to another. It is important to remember that everyone on earth belongs to at least one culture; not just those groups who are considered ‘civilized’. The majority of culture is unseen, below the surface. The beliefs and values that lie beneath the surface can be the most difficult to change when it is necessary.

People of the same race can have many different cultures among them, and people of the same culture can have many different races among them.
So, someone’s race is determined their physical characteristics and those of their biological family. Culture is all the ways that we express ourselves, how we interact, what we believe in spiritually, and how we perceive things. Culture is not based on physical characteristics but on a person’s way of life. Ethnicity takes into account cultural traditions, language, religion, and place of origin.

References

Banks, J. A., & Banks, C. A. (2007). Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (6th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Manning, M. L., & Baruth, L. G. (2009). Multicultural education of children and adolescents (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Rubenstein, J.M. (2011). The cultural landscape: An introduction to human geography (10th ed.). Prentice Hall.

The Geography of the Recession

If you’ve been reading this blog you’ve probably figured out that I am a geography geek and by now you have also probably guessed that I love all kinds of maps. I love maps because they are visually appealing and they explain information in a way that helps you understand the scale of things.

Check out this video called “The Geography of the Recession” by LaToya Egwuekwe – it is an amazing, and also frightening examination of the rising unemployment rate since the beginning of this recession. On the map, check out the key – yellow is low unemployment, orange and red are medium, and purple is very high unemployment. Let me know your thoughts on the video!

Technology and conquest

Technology was the key for expansion and domination.  Warfare technology was especially vital in this endeavor.  Jared Diamond wrote about this at length in his book “Guns, Germs and Steel” where he identifies those three as the most vital agents of conquest.  Here’s an excerpt from the  PBS website about the show based on the book:

Jared Diamond’s journey of discovery began on the island of Papua New Guinea. There, in 1974, a local named Yali asked Diamond a deceptively simple question:

Image via Wikipedia

“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”

Diamond realized that Yali’s question penetrated the heart of a great mystery of human history — the roots of global inequality.

Why were Europeans the ones with all the cargo? Why had they taken over so much of the world, instead of the native people of New Guinea? How did Europeans end up with what Diamond terms the agents of conquest: guns, germs and steel? It was these agents of conquest that allowed 168 Spanish conquistadors to defeat an Imperial Inca army of 80,000 in 1532, and set a pattern of European conquest which would continue right up to the present day.

Diamond knew that the answer had little to do with ingenuity or individual skill. From his own experience in the jungles of New Guinea, he had observed that native hunter-gatherers were just as intelligent as people of European descent — and far more resourceful. Their lives were tough, and it seemed a terrible paradox of history that these extraordinary people should be the conquered, and not the conquerors.

To examine the reasons for European success, Jared realized he had to peel back the layers of history and begin his search at a time of equality – a time when all the peoples of the world lived in exactly the same way.

To get a little philosophical, I want to pose some questions: Is conquest necessarily a good thing?  Why was it important for a country like Britain to have a massive empire – in other words, why is expansion necessary to be seen as “thriving”?  Can’t a country or nation thrive without colonizing other places?  

Wetback, the Undocumented Documentary

It is often easy to forget about the impact of immigration on the individuals and families that experience it when the political conversation is all about building walls, border control and the new laws in places like Arizona and Mississippi. I recently saw an eye-opening documentary called “Wetback” which offers a first-person perspective of undocumented workers. It’s available on Netflix, here!

 

Image via IMDB

 

What it means to be a colony

America began as a colony of England in the 16th Century. At this time in history, European countries were busy at work colonizing areas – you may have heard this called the Age of Discovery. This era in history was focused on European powers competing with each other for the control of “new” territories (new to the Europeans, anyway). What often gets lost in the story of European expansion is the stories of all the indigenous people that were colonized by the European empires, and did not appreciate the Europeans “discovering” their long-established cultures.

Some of these European powers included the Portuguese Empire, Spanish Empire, French Empire, and British Empire. In addition to the negative effects on the indigenous cultures, the European demand for labor in its new colonies is what prompted the African enslavement system across the Atlantic. This devastating holocaust had a hard-hitting and long-lasting affect on Africa and Africans. The enslavement caused a depopulation, societal disruption and destruction of Africa, especially West Africa; a loss of youth and skilled personnel; and economic devastations among other repercussions.

Some positive aspects of colonialism are: technological advancements, medical advances and new institutions in the colonized area. Some negative aspects include: spread of diseases, social oppression and exploitation, enslavement and genocide of the natives by the colonizers. Do the positives outweigh the negatives?

If you’d like to learn more here are some resources:
The impact of the slave trade on Africa by Elikia M’bokolo

Slavery in Africa

Slave trade: a root of contemporary African Crisis by Tunde Obadina

As an anti-racist how do you, if at all, reject your privilege?

A question was posed to me on twitter from @journalproject: “As an anti-racist how do you, if at all, reject your privilege?”

My answer is too long for 140 characters…..

I see privilege as having multiple levels.  There is systemic privilege that I have because I live in a culture where European-American people dominate the media, business, real estate, banking, and education. Everywhere I go I see people who look like me, products that are designed for my skin tone and hair texture.  When I walk into a business I am less likely to be assumed to be a drug user, a criminal, a thug, or -insert negative stereotype here-.  I am assumed to be at least somewhat intelligent & capable just because I’m white. I feel that there is very little I can do in my day-to-day existence that rejects this systemic privilege.  It is infused through everything I do and see as a European-American in a culture dominated by European-American standards and ideals.

Then there is individual privilege, and what one chooses to do with it. Most European-Americans are blissfully unaware that they even have privilege; they see themselves succeeding and assume it is solely because of their hard work and sacrifice. The problem with this is that it gives an unrealistic view of oppressed groups and it ignores the centuries of policies and laws that were solely advantageous to white people.

Having white privilege has allowed me to be educated in private schools and maintain a good GPA even though I didn’t try very hard. It has probably gotten me into more than one job that I wasn’t completely qualified for. I have never been stopped for ‘driving while white’, and I’ve never had a problem finding greeting cards, toys, or hair care products that reflect my identity. These are things I cannot individually change; I can only be aware and educate others.

So how do I reject my privilege?  I reject it by speaking out when people make racist comments.  I reject it by acknowledging that my culture, my physical characteristics, and my language are not superior to anyone else’s. I reject it by believing a person of color when they tell me they’ve experienced discrimination. I reject it by pursuing a career where I educate young people about systems of oppression and privilege. I reject it by reminding myself that I got where I am today not because I’m a super genius but because the system was created so that I would succeed and others would not. I reject it by valuing the voices of people of color, by acknowledging that they have said everything I could ever say about white privilege and oppression (and much more eloquently than I could), and being okay with the fact that people of color need their own safe space that I am not allowed into.

Off the cuff, that’s how I reject my privilege.