Internalized Racism

Source: Dismantling Racism

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Doing Race Through the Culture Cycle (RaceWorks Series, Video 11)

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Now This How the Health Care System Has Racial Biasesealth Care System Has Racial Biases

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Table of Contents
Internalizations and Socialization
Stereotypes vs Racial Biases
History of Racial Stereotypes
Modern Stereotypes
Stereotype Threat & Racial Imposter Syndrome
Modern Racial Bias
Misrepresentation in Media
Understanding Your Own Bias
Microaggressions
The Anti-PC Movement
The N-Word
Dehumanization
Cultural Appropriation

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Internalizations and Socialization

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Doing Race Through the Culture Cycle (RaceWorks Series, Video 11)

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• Racial Internalizations
  • “Racism not only impacts us personally, culturally, and institutionally. Racism also operates on us mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. When racism targets us, we internalize that targeting; when racism benefits us, we internalize that privileging.” Dismantling Racism, Internalizations
    
• Racial Socializations
  • “Race socialization is defined as specific verbal and non-verbal messages transmitted to younger generations for the development of values, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs regarding the meaning and significance of race and racial stratification, intergroup and intragroup interactions, and personal and group identity.” Chase L.Lesane-Brown, A review of race socialization within Black families

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Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: Understanding The Cycle of Socialization

The Cycle of Socialization helps us understand the way in which we are socialized to play certain roles, how we are affected by issues of oppression, and how we help maintain an oppressive system based upon power. The Cycle is comprised of 3 arrows,3 circles, and a core center. Each of these components represents the following:

1.The beginning of the cycle, depicted by the 1stcircle, represents the situation into which we were born. We have no control over this. We are also born without bias, assumptions, or questions.We are either “lucky” to be born into a privileged situation or “unlucky” to born into an underprivileged situation.

2.The 1starrow represents that fact that our socialization process begins immediately. We are given a pink blanket if we are a girl or a blue one if we are boy. The rules and norms are already in place and we subtly (and in many cases not so subtly) are made aware of the rewards of conforming and the consequences of rebelling.

3.The second circle represents the institutions that help shape our views andbeliefs, and help instill within us prejudice or acceptance.

4.The second arrow represents the way in which the instilling of ideas, beliefs, and behaviors reinforce the cycle of oppression. Behaving differently is not as simplyas most of us think. We are rewarded for good behavior –conforming to the norms and standards. By the same token, we are punished for bad behavior –questioning or rebelling against oppressive societal norms.

5.The third circle represents the devastating result upon all of us that this self-perpetuated cycle of oppression produces.

6.The final arrow represents a point at which we all arrive –the results of the cycle. We are forced to make a decision, even if that decision is to do nothing. Doing nothing isthe easier choice, especially for those who benefit from the perpetuation of the cycle: we are all victims of the cycle and we are all hurt by it. Oppression hurts the oppressed and the oppressor.

7.And finally, it is the wheel that turns or enables any cycle.At the centeror core of the cycle of socialization arefear, misunderstanding, insecurity, confusion, etc.Source:

Source:Adams, M., Bell, L. A., Griffin, P. (1997) Teaching for Diversityand Social Justice, New York: Routledge.Understanding The Cycle of Socialization

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Explicit vs Implicit Racims

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Source: Whites For Racial Equity

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Image Source: Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence (2005). Adapted: Ellen Tuzzolo (2016); Mary Julia Cooksey Cordero (@jewelspewels) (2019); The Conscious Kid (2020)

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Explicit Racism

“Explicit racism is overt and often intentional, for it is practiced by individuals and institutions that openly embrace racial discrimination and hold prejudicial attitudes toward racially defined groups, which they assume to be scientifically identified through genetics.” Quianna Canada

• Overt, intentional, conscious, easy to see
  • Racism, prejudice, stereotypes, discrimination, brutality against racially defined groups

Examples of Explicit or Overt Racism

• Racist policies
  • Legal slavery, Jim Crow, Muslim Ban
• Hate groups and hate crimes
  • KKK, Neo Nazi, Alt-Right, White supremacists, white terrorists
    
• Political groups that publicly attack people of color
  • Trump, Tea Party, nationalists, nativists
• Dehumanizations
  • Conscious stereotypes, racist jokes and slurs, black face

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Implicit Racism

“Implicit Racism, however, is not the opposite of explicit racism but a different, yet no less harmful, form of racism.  Implicit racism, broadly defined, refers to an individuals’ utilization of unconscious biases when making judgements about people from different racial land ethnic groups.  According to a number of observers, implicit racism is an automatic negative reaction to someone of a different race or ethnicity than one’s own.  Underlying and unconscious racist attitudes are brought forth when a person is face with race-related triggers, including preconceived phenotypic (relating to the observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment) differences or assumed cultural or environmental associations.” Quianna Canada

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“Implicit Bias is the process of associating stereotypes or attitudes towards categories of people without conscious awareness.” National Equity Project,

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“Implicit biases come from the culture. I think of them as the thumbprint of the culture on our minds. Human beings have the ability to learn to associate two things together very quickly — that is innate. What we teach ourselves, what we choose to associate is up to us.” Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaj

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• Internalized, unconscious, unintentional, not easy to see
  • Racism, prejudice, racial bias, stereotypes, expectations
  • Attitudes against racially defined groups
  • Shortcuts brains create, without processing, to respond to situations quickly to survive (fight or flight)
    • These shortcuts can be manipulated by stereotypes and systemic racism

Examples of Implicit or Covert Racism

• Unconscious fear, mistrust, or judgment of people of color
  • Police disproportionately pulling over, arresting and shooting unarmed black people
    • More than white people under similar circumstances
  • Juries convicting black defendants
    • More than white defendants under similar circumstances
  • Schools punishing black children
    • Worse than white children under similar circumstances
  • Employers dismissing applicants with non-white names
  • Doctors dismissing black patients pain
• Voting for political parties based on “dog whistles”
  • Law and Order, states rights, welfare queen
• Media stereotypes disproportionately portraying people of color in negative ways
• Believing systems that marginalize people of color are fair
  • Meritocracy, system justification
• Microaggressions

Racism Is Real • BRAVE NEW FILMS

 

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Concepts Unwrapped | Implicit Bias

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National Equity Project: Don’t Talk about Implicit Bias Without Talking about Structural Racism

Implicit bias has been in the news a lot lately. At the National Equity Project, we think it is an important topic that warrants our attention, but it is critical that any learning about implicit bias includes both clear information about the neuroscience of bias and the context of structural racism that gave rise to and perpetuates inequities and harmful racial biases. As leaders for equity, we have to examine, unpack and mitigate our own biases and dismantle the policies and structures that hold inequity in place. We call this leading from the inside-out.

Most work on implicit bias focuses on increasing awareness of individuals in service of changing how they view and treat others. This is important, but insufficient to advancing greater equity of opportunity, experience, and outcomes in our institutions and communities. Rather, in order to lead to meaningful change, any exploration of implicit bias must be situated as part of a much larger conversation about how current inequities in our institutions came to be, how they are held in place, and what our role as leaders is in perpetuating inequities despite our good intentions. Our success in creating organizations, schools, and communities in which everyone has access to the opportunities they need to thrive depends on our willingness to confront the history and impacts of structural racism, learn how bias (implicit and explicit) operates, and take action to interrupt inequitable practices at the interpersonal, institutional and structural level.

We believe the work we need to do begins on the inside — inside of ourselves, inside of our own organizations, and in our own communities. We offer the metaphor of a window and a mirror (developed by Emily Style of the SEED Project) for increasing our equity consciousness and understanding what is needed to take effective leadership for equity. Each of us needs to look in the mirror to notice how our particular lived experiences have shaped our beliefs, attitudes, and biases about ourselves and others. And, with increased knowledge of ourselves, we also need to look out the window to understand how racism, classism, sexism and other forms of systemic oppression operate in our institutions to create systemic advantage for some groups (white, male, heterosexual, cisgender, etc.) and disadvantage for other groups (people of color, women, LGTBQ+ people, etc.) in every sector of community life.

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Kathleen: As a white woman, my own work on implicit bias starts with myself and a look into when and how, despite my twenty five years of working in the “equity” field, my own thoughts and decision making can be impacted by implicit bias. For example, when out for a run recently, I saw a woman who appeared to be Latina walking out of her home. The immediate thought that popped into my head was “housekeeper.” I had to stop and consider, how did that happen? Regardless of my stated and lived commitment to fairness and justice, my close relationships with Latinx friends and colleagues, and my knowledge of implicit bias, my brain made a potentially harmful snap judgment about who someone was.

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Hugh: I am a mixed heritage Latino. Years ago I was co-directing a youth program that focused on what we called “unlearning racism.” We worked with teenagers to develop their consciousness about oppression, build alliances across race, gender and other social identities, and create young leaders who would work to eliminate racism. As adults running this program, we went through intensive training to become conscious of our own racial identities and work to eliminate our biases so that we could help youth eliminate theirs. One hot summer afternoon I was driving to lunch, windows down. I stopped at a red light and I immediately noticed 3 young African American boys crossing the street in the crosswalk in front of my car. They were 6th graders, 11 or 12 years old. As they crossed, one of them looked at me and yelled “go ahead, roll up your windows!” I was livid with him for assuming I would be afraid and roll up my windows out of fear. But as they walked past me and finished crossing the street, I calmed down, stopped staring at them, and was shocked to see that my hand had moved from the steering wheel to the window switch and I was ready to roll up the window. I had moved my hand to roll up the window without conscious awareness that I had done so. Even after all my training and consciousness raising to eliminate racism, my unconscious mind reacted with fear to these young African American boys. How could this happen?

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To understand how this happens, it is important to understand that our brain is like an iceberg with the conscious part of our brain being the smaller part of the iceberg that we can see above the water line, while the larger part of the iceberg, where our unconscious processing takes place, is below the water line. Research shows that the unconscious mind absorbs millions of bits of sensory information through the nervous system per second. Our conscious minds are processing only a small fraction of this information and doing so much more slowly and less efficiently than our unconscious minds. This means that we have a lot going on in our brains that we are not consciously aware of. Have you ever driven all the way home from work, but not had any memory of doing so? Your brain was processing all of the information needed and guiding your decision making for your safe arrival home even when your conscious mind was not active. In order to process all of the information needed to survive, our brain creates shortcuts to quickly assess our environment and respond in ways that keep us safe from danger. For example, if you were walking down a path or on a street and heard a strange noise or a rustling in the bushes, your amygdala would immediately send a danger alert which would activate your fight, flight, or freeze response. This would all happen before you had consciously processed the danger. If we were to count on the much slower processing of our conscious brain in these instances of perceived danger, the human race wouldn’t have survived very long.

How does all of this connect to implicit bias and structural racism? Let’s start with a definition of implicit bias:

Implicit Bias is the process of associating stereotypes or attitudes towards categories of people without conscious awareness.

Note that this is not the same as explicit, conscious racism and other forms of conscious bias which still exist and need to be addressed. Here, we are talking about people who consciously and genuinely believe in fairness, equity, and equality, but despite these stated beliefs, hold unconscious biases that can lead us to react in ways that are at odds with our values. These unconscious biases can play out in our decision making regarding who we hire for a job or select for a promotion, which students we place in honors classes and who we send out of the classroom for behavior infractions, and which treatment options we make available to patients. We know from extensive research that this kind of biased decision making plays out all the time in our schools, in hospitals, in policing, and in places of employment. The question is not if it is happening, it is when is it happening and what can we do about it.

Implicit bias and its effects play out through three keys processes: Priming, Associations, and Assumptions. Priming is a psychological phenomena in which a word, image, sound, or any other stimulus is used to elicit an associated response. Some of the best examples of priming are in product advertising in which advertisers prime us to feel an affinity or emotional connection to a particular brand that leads us to choose that brand over others even when there is actually no difference between the products. We buy Nikes because we are compelled to “Just do it.” We think we are consciously choosing, but our unconscious mind is doing the shopping. But product selection is not the only thing influenced by priming — so are our beliefs, views and feelings about others.

The Associations we hold about groups of people are created and reinforced through priming. Associations occur without conscious guidance or intention. For example, the word NURSE is recognized more quickly following the word DOCTOR than following the word BREAD. We associate two words together because our unconscious mind has been wired to do so. Quick — what do cows drink? Not milk! But we have a strong association in our brain between cows and milk. (Cows drink water.)

When it comes to people, the associations our brain makes works the same way, creating shortcuts based on how we have been primed. The way our brains create shortcuts to quickly make sense of data is innate. How we have been primed to make harmful associations about different categories of people is not, but is rather the result of messaging, policies and practices that have been applied throughout history to include or exclude groups of people.

The United States has a long history of systemic racism — since the founding of the country stories that dehumanized African Americans and Native peoples were used to justify genocide, slavery, racial segregation, mass incarceration, and police brutality. Negative and dehumanizing stereotypes about women and people of color and stories that “other” are rampant in the news media and in popular culture. For example, we have been primed throughout history by our own government, by popular culture, and through the media to think of African American people as less intelligent, aggressive, and more likely to commit crime. We have received unrelenting messages that people who are immigrating to the United States from Central America and Mexico are criminals. Likewise, we have been primed to think of women as less competent, overly emotional, and their bodies as objects to be judged. For every stigmatized group of people, we have been repeatedly exposed to stereotypes that most of us can readily name that have been used to justify policies that have further stigmatized and marginalized.

“Implicit biases come from the culture. I think of them as the thumbprint of the culture on our minds. Human beings have the ability to learn to associate two things together very quickly — that is innate. What we teach ourselves, what we choose to associate is up to us.”

– Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaj

Think back to the autopilot moments we shared in our own stories. Consciously, we knew that the woman coming out of the house was most likely the homeowner, on her way to work, and that the boys crossing the street were simply on their way back to school, but our unconscious brain created shortcuts based on repeated priming about who Latina women and Black boys are — thus producing harmful associations and reactions in both of us. This priming is then reinforced by the current structural arrangements in our communities in which people of color and people living in poverty have been disproportionately cut-off from high quality educational experiences and high-paying jobs. Consider who we most often see cleaning our hotel rooms, busing our tables, and landscaping yards and who we most often see being sent out of classrooms, pulled over by police and jailed. The more we see (or hear) two things together, the stronger the association — this is the way neural pathways are built. Brain cells that fire together, wire together. What associations are being created in our brains based on how we are primed through everyday experiences in our own communities, through news coverage, advertising and other forms of media?

Our brain is scanning our environment for who belongs (and is safe) and who is “other” (and a potential threat or dangerous). Who we come to categorize as belonging or threatening is learned as a result of structural inequities and messaging we have received about categories of people. These harmful associations we carry can lead us to make Assumptions that have life and death consequences for people of color. We saw this when:

• The police were called by a Starbucks manager because she made the association that Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, two African American men, were dangerous, resulting in their arrest when they were simply waiting to meet someone.
• Two Native American young men, Kanewakeron Thomas Gray and Shanahwati Lloyd Gray, drove from New Mexico to go on a college tour at Colorado State University and a white mother who was also on the tour called campus security because they looked like “they don’t belong, they were quiet and creepy and really stand out.” Security came and questioned the young men and confirmed that they were registered for the campus visit, but by the time they were released, the tour had gone ahead without them and they ended up driving home without a tour at all.
• Tamir Rice, a 12 year old African American boy was in a park with a toy gun when police drove up and within two seconds of exiting the vehicle an officer shot and killed him.

These incidents and many more like them sit in a larger context of racial segregation, exclusion, and systemic inequities in which society’s benefits and burdens are distributed unevenly depending one’s race. Professor john powell of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society calls this “structural racialization” — referring to institutional practices and structural arrangements that lead to racialized inequities — as we see in the case of education, health, housing, criminal justice, and even life expectancy in the United States. These two phenomena — structural racialization and implicit bias — work dynamically to hold inequities in place. This is why we believe learning about implicit bias is an important, but an insufficient strategy to advance equity.

“Those who practice leadership for equity must confront, disappoint, and dismantle and at the same time energize, inspire, and empower.”

– Sharon Daloz Parks

Making progress on equity will require us to both mitigate our own biases and change structures. For example, structural inequities in the way we fund our public schools mean that students living in affluent communities (most often majority white) attend highly resourced schools with extensive opportunities for deep learning and extra-curricular activities while students living in neighborhoods in which we have disinvested (often majority people of color) attend schools that are underfunded with fewer academic and extra-curricular opportunities. When these students underperform, the fact of their underperformance reinforces our conscious and implicit stereotypes about their intelligence, the extent to which their parents value education (they do), and their effort. This is an insidious cycle whereby the structural inequities produce inequitable outcomes which then reinforce harmful stereotypes about students of color and students living in poverty and which are then used to justify inequitable practices such as holding low expectations, academic tracking, and punitive discipline in schools.

“Biases not only affect our perceptions, but our policies and institutional arrangements. Therefore, these biases influence the types of outcomes we see across a variety of contexts: school, labor, housing, health, criminal justice system, and so forth….These racialized outcomes subsequently reinforce the very stereotypes and prejudice that initially influenced the stratified outcomes.”

– john powell

As leaders for equity it is our responsibility to look at how our own biases and biases within our organizations contribute to structural inequities and advocate for policies that increase access to economic, educational, and political opportunity. We must expand our notion of success to include diverse perspectives and values. In education, this means providing culturally sustaining opportunities for rigorous intellectual work and healthy social emotional and physical development for all of our young people, not just those born in affluent zip codes. Many schools and school districts are actively engaged in efforts to change structures to mitigate the effects of bias and increase educational equity within schools and across communities. Some examples of these changes include:

• Expanding professional learning opportunities for educators to learn about how systemic oppression operates to increase their awareness of their own cultural frames and gain strategies for building learning partnerships with students whose lived experience is different from their own.
• Eliminating subjectivity in placement decisions for AP/Honors courses by requiring students to “opt out” rather than relying solely on teacher recommendation, thus increasing the numbers of students of color and students living in poverty in high-level courses.
• Implementing policies in which the most experienced and talented teachers are teaching the students with the highest level of academic need, and not the other way around (as is often the case).
• Enacting laws that make it harder for childcare centers to expel preschoolers and creating diversion programs in which School Resource Officers refer students to social service agencies for support, instead of arresting them.
• Changing discipline policies whereby only the most serious negative behaviors are subject to suspension and implementing a system of checks and balances in which a trusted adult is called to the classroom when a behavior challenge arises rather than sending students out of class in order to mitigate racial bias.

Examples of structural changes across schools might include:

• Enacting legislation providing for competitive federal grants to districts to support voluntary local efforts to reduce school segregation.
• Bolstering Fair Housing legislation to reduce discriminatory zoning policies that effectively exclude low-income and families of color from high performing and well resourced schools by banning apartment buildings and other multifamily units in nearby neighborhoods.
• Mandating a federal review of efforts by wealthy and predominantly white school jurisdictions to secede from integrated school districts.

Strong efforts to acknowledge, interrupt, and mitigate the effects of implicit bias will require us to engage in on-going mirror work, exploring our own biases and paying attention to how we are primed to think about categories of people while simultaneously engaging in window work, looking at our current context with a systemic and historic lens so that we can dismantle inequitable policies and structures and create new structures in which we all experience belonging and can thrive.

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Individualizing White Negativity vs Generalizing Black Negativity

• White people are taught by society and media:
  • To see themselves as individuals, rather than as part of a racial group
    • When a white person does something wrong its only representative of that person
  • To see black people as part of a racial group, rather than individuals
    • When a black person does something wrong its representative of the racial group
• This perspective
  • Helps create and re-enforce stereotypes and racial bias

“Negative behavior by any Black person became proof of what was wrong with Black people, while negative behavior by any White person only proved what was wrong with that person.” Ibram Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning

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White Supremacy Internalizations

“Racism not only impacts us personally, culturally, and institutionally. Racism also operates on us mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. When racism targets us, we internalize that targeting; when racism benefits us, we internalize that privileging.” Dismantling Racism

• White internalization of white supremacy
  • American institutions, culture, subconscious created a world where, without thinking:
    • Normal, good, beautiful, moral is “white”
    • Different, bad, ugly, immoral is “non-white”
    • Instead of defending white supremacy, white people defend “civility” and “decency” and “way of life”
• Examples of Internalized White Superiority
  • • My world view is the universal world view;
      • My standards and norms are universal
    • My achievements have to do with me
      • Not with my membership in the white group
    • I have a right to be comfortable and if I am not
      • Then whoever is making me uncomfortable is to blame
    • I am not responsible for what happened before
      • Nor do I have to know anything about it
      • I have a right to be ignorant
    • If I have good intentions or I’m nice
      • I can’t be racist

“The idea (ideology) that white people and the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions of white people are superior to People of Color and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions. While most people associate white supremacy with extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis, white supremacy is ever present in our institutional and cultural assumptions that assign value, morality, goodness, and humanity to the white group while casting people and communities of color as worthless (worth less), immoral, bad, and inhuman and “undeserving.” Dismantling Racism

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“Internalized Racist Superiority is complex multi-generational socialization process that teaches White people to believe, accept, and/or live out superior societal definitions of self and to fit into and live out superior societal roles. These behaviors define and normalize the race construct and its outcome: white supremacy.” Crossroads Antiracism

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Dismantling Racism: Internalizations

• Racism not only impacts us personally, culturally, and institutionally.
• Racism also operates on us mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
• When racism targets us, we internalize that targeting; when racism benefits us, we internalize that privileging.
• This page investigates how internalized racism operates.

4  foundations  of  racism

CONSTRUCTED RACIST OPPRESSION ​(affecting People of Color)

• historically constructed and systemic (not just personal or individual)
• penetrates every aspect of our personal, institutional, and cultural life
• includes prejudice against people of color in attitudes, feelings, and behaviors
• includes exclusion, discrimination against, suspicion, fear or hatred of people of color
• sees a person of color only as a member of a group, not as an individual
• includes low expectations by white people for children and adults of color
• people of color have fewer options, choices

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INTERNALIZED INFERIORITY or RACIST OPPRESSION (affecting People of Color)

• carry internalized negative messages about ourselves and other people of color
• believe there is something wrong with being a person of color
• have lowered self-esteem, sense of inferiority, wrongness
• have lowered expectations, limited sense of potential for self
• have very limited choices: either ‘act in’ (white) or ‘act out’ (disrupt)
• have a sense of limited possibility (limited by oppression and prejudice)
• cycles through generations

WHITE PRIVILEGE
​(affecting white people)

• “an invisible knapsack of special provisions and blank checks” (Peggy McIntosh)
• the default; “to be white in America is not to have to think about it” (Robert Terry)
• expect to be seen as an individual; what we do never reflects on the white race
• we can choose to avoid the impact of racism without penalty
• we live in a world where our worth and personhood as white people are continually validated
• although hurt by racism, we can live just fine without ever having to deal with it

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INTERNALIZED WHITE SUPERIORITY
(affecting white people)

• my world view is the universal world view; our standards and norms are universal
• my achievements have to do with me, not with my membership in the white group
• I have a right to be comfortable and if I am not, then whoever is making me uncomfortable is to blame
• I can feel that I personally earned, through work and merit, any/all of my success
• equating acts of unfairness experienced by white people with systemic racism experienced by People of Color
• I have many choices, as I should; everyone else has those same choices
• I am not responsible for what happened before, nor do I have to know anything about it; I have a right to be ignorant
• I assume race equity benefits only People of Color​

For a more in-depth look at white privilege and internalized white superiority, visit the SURJ Political Education website page on
​White Benefits.

Internalized Racist Oppression (IRO) is the internalization by People of Color (POC) of the images, stereotypes, prejudices, and myths promoted by the racist system about POC in this country. Our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, people of our own racial group, or other POC are based on the racist messages we receive from the broader system. For many People of Color in our communities, internalized racist oppression manifests itself as:

• Self-Doubt
• Sense of Inferiority
• Self-Hate
• Low Self Esteem
• Powerlessness
• Hopelessness
• Apathy
• Addictive Behavior
• Abusive and Violent Relationships
• Conflict Between Racial Groups
• Mediocrity

• Violence and the Threat of Violence
• Change in Behavior
• Destruction of Culture
• Division, Separation, Isolation

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VICE: How Internalized Racism Amplifies White Supremacy

“Internalized racism is insidious because it can exist, operate, and negatively affect us without us even knowing it,” Professor E.J.R. David at the University of Alaska Anchorage tells Broadly.

“Some manifestations of internalized racism include denigrating fellow POCs [people of color] and justifying the oppression of POCs. This includes justifying white supremacist systems as necessary and fair, and putting the onus on POCs for their own oppression, reinforcing the racist notion that if POCs just work hard enough, or assimilate enough, or be respectful or civil enough, or be friendly enough, or be strong enough, then things will get better for them.”…

“One of the many damages of internalized racism is that it puts the responsibility of change on the oppressed, instead of on the oppressors and their oppressive systems,” David says. “This way, internalized racism helps maintain the status quo; it keeps the white supremacist systems in place and those who benefit from them in power.”

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Josh Singer: The Difference Between White Supremacy and White Supremacists (Part III)

Defining white supremacy in 16 quotes.

Internalizing Normal and Good vs Abnormal and Bad

No matter how “woke” you consider your family to be, all people who grow up in a society dominated by white supremacy will subconsciously internalize some white supremacist beliefs and biases. It’s not a question of if but a question of how much white supremacy you internalized, how it is subconsciously affecting your reactions to the world and the people around you, and to what extent are you able to course-correct these internalized beliefs.

Quote 13: Dismantling Racism: Racism Defined

“White supremacy is the idea (ideology) that white people and the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions of white people are superior to People of Color and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions. While most people associate white supremacy with extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis, white supremacy is ever present in our institutional and cultural assumptions that assign value, morality, goodness, and humanity to the white group while casting people and communities of color as worthless (worth less), immoral, bad, and inhuman and ‘undeserving.’”

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Quote 14:  Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ): White Supremacy (sic) Culture

Question: Why do you call it white supremacy (sic) culture? Can we call it something else?
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Answer: We get this question a lot when people plan to use the article on white supremacy (sic) culture with their groups and organizations. They express a genuine concern that the term ‘white supremacy (sic) culture’ will turn white people off, make us defensive and less willing to consider how this culture is reproduced. Part of this concern reflects how we’ve been taught by this culture to associate white supremacy with the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other people or groups that actively advocate a racist ideology and viewpoint. We believe it is important to use the term ‘white supremacy (sic)’ culture because the norms, values, and beliefs that our culture reproduces act to reinforce the belief that ‘white’ and people attached to ‘whiteness’ are better, smarter, more beautiful, and more valuable than ‘black,’ or people and communities indigenous to this land, brought here for the purpose of enslavement, or immigrating here from Asia, India, or south of our border. We think it is important to name what is really happening, which is that we live in a culture that reproduces—sometimes overtly and sometimes very subtly—the idea that white is supreme. Those of us who live in this culture, including those of us who fight against racism, swim in this culture and unintentionally and unwittingly reproduce these norms, values, and beliefs. One way to address the genuine concern is to explain why we use the phrase white supremacy (sic) culture to get people to think about it. We are not white supremacists and we are swimming in and affected by a white supremacy (sic) culture.”

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Quote 15: Cornel West: Race Matters

“White supremacist ideology is based first and foremost on the degradation of black bodies in order to control them. One of the best ways to instill fear in people is to terrorize them. Yet this fear is best sustained by convincing them that their bodies are ugly, their intellect is inherently underdeveloped, their culture is less civilized, and their future warrants less concern than that of other peoples.”

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Internalized Racism Part 5, with Dee Watts-Jones

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Stereotypes vs Racial Biases

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Diffen: Bias vs. Stereotype

The difference between bias and stereotype is that a bias is a personal preference, like or dislike, especially when the tendency interferes with the ability to be impartial, unprejudiced, or objective. On the other hand, a stereotype is a preconceived idea that attributes certain characteristics (in general) to all the members of class or set.

If you think that all Asians are smart, or white men can’t dance, that is a stereotype. But if you hire an Asian for a job that also has an equally qualified black applicant because you think blacks are not as smart as Asians, you are biased.

Mometrix Academy: Bias and Stereotype

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Stereotype

• Preconceived idea that attributes certain characteristics to all the members of a race or group
• Often used with a negative connotation when referring to an oversimplified, exaggerated, or demeaning assumption
• Ie. All Asian people are smart

Notre Dame: University Counseling Center

What Are Racial Stereotypes?

Racial stereotypes are automatic and exaggerated mental pictures that we hold about all members of a particular racial group. When we stereotype people based on race, we don’t take into account individual differences. Because our racial stereotypes are so rigid, we tend to ignore or discard any information that is not consistent with the stereotype that we have developed about the racial group.

How Do We Develop Racial Stereotypes?

We develop our racial stereotypes in a variety of ways. On a very simple level, it’s human nature to categorize people. It’s our way of making a complex world simpler. From an early age, we learn to place people and objects into categories. However, when we’re very young, we tend to put less of an emphasis on attributing values to these categories. As we grow older and are influenced by parents, peers, and the media, our tendency to label different racial groups as superior/good or inferior/bad increases significantly. Additionally, the less contact we have with a particular racial group, the more likely we are to have negative feelings about the group. Any negative experiences that we have with a member of a particular group will strengthen our racial stereotypes and create fears about particular races. Based on our fears, we develop an us-versus-them mentality that tends to be self-protective in nature. As a result, we miss opportunities to learn and thrive from our differences.

Are Our Racial Stereotypes Harmful?

Some people might say, “There’s no harm in having racial stereotypes or making racial or ethnic jokes based on stereotypes. People these days are so politically correct and should just loosen up. Anyway, there’s always a kernel of truth in every stereotype.” In some instances, all of the above might be true. However, in most cases, racial stereotypes are harmful because they ignore the full humanity and uniqueness of all people. When our perceptions of different races are distorted and stereotypical, it’s demeaning, devaluing, limiting, and hurtful to others. In some cases, people who are repeatedly labeled in negative ways will begin to develop feelings of inferiority. Sometimes, these feelings of inferiority can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies that perpetuate the stereotype. Racial stereotypes can also foster feelings of hate and aggression that might lead to a false sense of entitlement and superiority. For those individuals who have power, this can lead to their engaging in discriminatory and racist practices.

How Do We Overcome Our Racial Stereotypes?

Because of their harmful effects, we should make a real commitment to try to overcome our racial stereotypes. This can be achieved by first acknowledging that we’re human and that we do harbor racial stereotypes. Next, we should work to become more aware of our inner thoughts and feelings and how they affect our beliefs and actions. When we have a stereotypical thought about a racial group, we should follow it up with an alternative thought based on factual information that discounts the stereotype. We can obtain this factual information by leaving our comfort zones and exposing ourselves to people of different races. We should be willing to engage in honest dialogue with others about race that at times might be difficult, risky, and uncomfortable. We should also seek out media portrayals of different races that are realistic and positive. Attending churches, plays, concerts, and movies that celebrate diversity will also broaden our worldview. As we gain more awareness and knowledge about racial groups, not only will our racial stereotypes lessen, but we will also become better equipped to educate and challenge others about their racial stereotypes. As we change ourselves, we can elicit changes in others through our examples and the quality of our conversations. In doing this, we work to create a society in which all races are valued, appreciated, and embraced.

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Racial Bias

• Conscious or unconscious preference or reaction to another race
• Interferes with the ability to be impartial, unprejudiced, or objective
• Form of discrimination
• Ie. Hiring an Asian person for a job that also has an equally qualified black applicant because you think Asians in general people are than blacks

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Explicit Racial Bias – attitudes and beliefs we have about a person or group on a conscious level (ie. discrimination, hate speech, etc.)

Implicit Racial Bias – the bias in judgment and/or behavior that results from subtle cognitive processes (e.g., implicit attitudes and implicit stereotypes) that often operate at a level below conscious awareness and without intentional control.  (ie. proclivity to not trust, feel threaten from, not hire, or shoot at, a person or group)

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Look Different: Racial Bias

What it is

Racial bias is a form of discrimination, often unconscious, that results in the different and unequal treatment of racial groups.

How it Works

Racial bias happens in many different forms among all racial groups. For example, police are much more likely to pull over black drivers than white drivers – and black people, on average, receive longer jail sentences than whites for committing the same exact offense.

Why it Matters:

Research has suggested that racial bias negatively impacts treatment of people of color, even when biased individuals do not consciously feel any animosity towards people of color. Being aware of the many ways racial bias is expressed in society is an important strategy to challenging racism everywhere. When we allow bias to take root it can escalate, opening the door to prejudice and discrimination.

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Ted Talks: Implicit Bias: Melanie Funchess

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MIC: We All Have Racial Bias

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History of Racial Stereotypes

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• Portugal starts the transatlantic slave trade (1450s )
  • Justifies this African slave system by creating beliefs like
    • “all black people represent one race”, “black inferiority” “black people were beasts”
    • These stereotypes Spread through Europe and America
  • Catholic doctrines allow slavery for non-Christians or “heathens”
    • Created the “uncivilized heathen” stereotype for many people of color
    • 1493 Doctrine of Discovery allowed any land inhabited by non-Christians could be “discovery”, legally conquered, and exploited by Christian rulers
  • European stereotypes used to establish the American colonies
    • Help justify ethnic cleanings of Natives and the enslavement of Africans
    • 18-19^th century scientists & philosophers re-enforce stereotypes
    • Justify constitutional support for white supremacy in the United States
  • Post Civil War
    • These stereotypes expand after the Civil War to help justify and re-enforce the oppression and segregation of people of color after slavery
      • Black codes, Vagrancy laws, Jim Crow, lynching, Convict Leasing, voter suppression, housing discrimination, mass incarceration, war on drugs, modern GOP, etc

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7 Historical Racial Stereotypes of African-Americans

• The racial stereotypes of early American history had a significant role in shaping attitudes toward African-Americans during that time
  • Sambo
    • Simple-minded, docile, jolly, overgrown man child who was happy to serve his master
  • Jim Crow
    • Blackfaced character created for minstrel show who was clumsy, dimwitted, dancing, wisecracking buffoon
  • The Savage
    • The premiere of “Birth of a Nation” during the reconstruction period in 1915 marked the change in emphasis from the happy Sambo and and inept Jim Crow stereotypes to Savage, needed to be tamed through lynching.
    • Beliefs that blacks were “mentally inferior, physically culturally unevolved, apelike ”
      • Supported by Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Scientific Racism
  • Mammy
    • The Mammy was a large, independent woman with pitch-black skin and shining white teeth who lived to serve her white masters, while being tyrant in her own family.
  • Aunt Jemimah
    • Dffers from Mammy in that her duties were restricted to cooking.
  • Sapphire
    • A bossy, headstrong woman who dominated her foolish husband by emasculating him with verbal put-downs
  • Jezebelle
    • Harlot “bad Black girl” epresented the undeniable sexual side of African-American women
    • The creation of the hyper-sexual seductress Jezebelle served to absolve white males of responsibility in the sexual abuse and rape of African-American women
• These stereotypes spread across America through products, stories (children and adult), newspapers, advertisements, schools, laws, politics, entertainment and minstrel shows.

   

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Jim Crow Museum: Negative Racial Stereotypes and Their Effect on Attitudes Toward African-Americans

“As human beings, we naturally evaluate everything we come in contact with. We especially try to gain insight and direction from our evaluations of other people. Stereotypes are “cognitive structures that contain the perceiver’s knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about human groups” (Peffley et al., 1997, p. 31). These cognitive constructs are often created out of a kernel of truth and then distorted beyond reality (Hoffmann, 1986). Racial stereotypes are constructed beliefs that all members of the same race share given characteristics. These attributed characteristics are usually negative (Jewell, 1993).

This paper will identify seven historical racial stereotypes of African-Americans and demonstrate that many of these distorted images still exist in society today. Additionally, strategies for intervention and the implications of this exploration into racial stereotypes will be presented.

Description of the Problem

The racial stereotypes of early American history had a significant role in shaping attitudes toward African-Americans during that time. Images of the Sambo, Jim Crow, the Savage, Mammy, Aunt Jemimah, Sapphire, and Jezebelle may not be as powerful today, yet they are still alive.

Sambo

One of the most enduring stereotypes in American history is that of the Sambo (Boskin, 1986). This pervasive image of a simple-minded, docile black man dates back at least as far as the colonization of America. The Sambo stereotype flourished during the reign of slavery in the United States. In fact, the notion of the “happy slave” is the core of the Sambo caricature. White slave owners molded African-American males, as a whole, into this image of a jolly, overgrown child who was happy to serve his master. However, the Sambo was seen as naturally lazy and therefore reliant upon his master for direction. In this way, the institution of slavery was justified. Bishop Wipple’s Southern Diary, 1834-1844, is evidence of this justification of slavery, “They seem a happy race of beings and if you did not know it you would never imagine that they were slaves” (Boskin, 1989, p. 42). However, it was not only slave owners who adopted the Sambo stereotype (Boskin, 1989). Although Sambo was born out of a defense for slavery, it extended far beyond these bounds. It is essential to realize the vast scope of this stereotype. It was transmitted through music titles and lyrics, folk sayings, literature, children’s stories and games, postcards, restaurant names and menus, and thousands of artifacts (Goings, 1994). White women, men and children across the country embraced the image of the fat, wide-eyed, grinning black man. It was perpetuated over and over, shaping enduring attitudes toward African-Americans for centuries. In fact, “a stereotype may be so consistently and authoritatively transmitted in each generation from parent to child that it seems almost a biological fact” (Boskin, 1986, p. 12).

Jim Crow

The stereotyping of African-Americans was brought to the theatrical stage with the advent of the blackface minstrel (Engle, 1978). Beginning in the early 19th century, white performers darkened their faces with burnt cork, painted grotesquely exaggerated white mouths over their own, donned woolly black wigs and took the stage to entertain society. The character they created was Jim Crow. This “city dandy” was the northern counterpart to the southern “plantation darky,” the Sambo (Engle, 1978 p. 3).

Performer T.D. Rice is the acknowledged “originator” of the American blackface minstrelsy. His inspiration for the famous minstrel dance-and-comedy routine was an old, crippled, black man dressed in rags, whom he saw dancing in the street (Engle, 1978). During that time, a law prohibited African-Americans from dancing because it was said to be “crossing your feet against the lord” (Hoffmann, 1986, video). As an accommodation to this law, African-Americans developed a shuffling dance in which their feet never left the ground. The physically impaired man Rice saw dancing in this way became the prototype for early minstrelsy (Engle 1978). In 1830, when “Daddy” Rice performed this same dance, “…the effect was electric…” (Bean et al., 1996, p. 7). White actors throughout the north began performing “the Jim Crow” to enormous crowds, as noted by a New York newspaper. “Entering the theater, we found it crammed from pit to dome…” (Engle, 1978, p. xiv). This popularity continued, and at the height of the minstrel era, the decades preceding and following the Civil War, there were at least 30 full-time blackface minstrel companies performing across the nation (Engle, 1978).

The “foppish” black caricature, Jim Crow, became the image of the black man in the mind of the white western world (Engle, 1978). This image was even more powerful in the north and west because many people never had come into contact with African-American individuals. It has been argued that “[t]he image of the minstrel clown has been the most persistent and influential image of blacks in American history” (Engle, 1978, p. xiv). Words from the folk song “Jim Crow,” published by E. Riley in 1830, further demonstrate the transmission of this stereotype of African-Americans to society: “I’m a full blooded niggar, ob de real ole stock, and wid my head and shoulder I can split a horse block. Weel about and turn about and do jis so, eb’ry time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow” (Bean et al., 1997, p. 11).

The method of representing African-Americans as “shuffling and drawling, cracking and dancing, wisecracking and high stepping” buffoons evolved over time (Engle, 1978, p. xiv). Self-effacing African-American actors began to play these parts both on the stage and in movies. Bert Williams was a popular African-American artist who performed this stereotype for white society. The response was also wildly enthusiastic as 26 million Americans went to the movies to see Al Jolson in the “Jazz Singer” (Boskin 1986).

The Savage

Movies were, and still are, a powerful medium for the transmission of stereotypes. Early silent movies such as “The Wooing and Wedding of a Coon” in 1904, “The Slave” in 1905, “The Sambo Series” 1909-1911 and “The Nigger” in 1915 offered existing stereotypes through a fascinating new medium (Boskin, 1986). The premiere of “Birth of a Nation” during the reconstruction period in 1915 marked the change in emphasis from the happy Sambo and the pretentious and inept Jim Crow stereotypes to that of the Savage. In this D.W. Griffith film, the Ku Klux Klan tames the terrifying, savage African-American through lynching. Following emancipation, the image of the threatening brute from the “Dark Continent” was revitalized. Acts of racial violence were justified and encouraged through the emphasis on this stereotype of the Savage. The urgent message to whites was, we must put blacks in their place or else (Boskin, 1986).

Old themes about African-Americans began to well up in the face of the perceived threat. Beliefs that blacks were “mentally inferior, physically and culturally unevolved, and apelike in appearance” (Plous & Williams, 1995, p. 795) were supported by prominent white figures like Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Thomas Jefferson. Theodore Roosevelt publicly stated that “As a race and in the mass [the Negroes] are altogether inferior to whites” (Plous & Williams, 1995, p. 796). The ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica published in 1884 stated authoritatively that “…the African race occupied the lowest position of the evolutionary scale, thus affording the best material for the comparative study of the highest anthropoids and the human species” (Plous & Williams, 1995, p. 795). This idea of African-Americans as apelike savages was exceptionally pervasive. For example, in 1906, the New York Zoological Park featured an exhibit with an African-American man and a chimpanzee. Several years later, the Ringling Brothers Circus exhibited “the monkey man,” a black man was caged with a female chimpanzee that had been trained to wash clothes and hang them on a line (Plous & Williams, 1995).

Scientific studies were conducted to establish the proper place of the African-American in society. Scientists conducted tests and measurements and concluded that blacks were savages for the following reasons: “(a) The abnormal length of the arm…; (b) weight of brain… [Negro’s] 35 ounces, gorilla 20 ounces, average European 45 ounces; (c) short flat snub nose; (d) thick protruding lips; (e) exceedingly thick cranium; (f) short, black hair, eccentricity elliptical or almost flat in sections, and distinctly woolly; and (g) thick epidermis” (Plous & Williams, 1995, p. 796). In addition to these presumed anatomical differences, African-Americans were thought to be far less sensitive to pain than whites. For example, black women were thought to experience little pain with childbirth and “…bear cutting with nearly…as much impunity as dogs and rabbits” (Plous & Williams, 1995, p. 796). These stereotypes of the animal-like savage were used to rationalize the harsh treatment of slaves during slavery as well as the murder, torture and oppression of African-Americans following emancipation. However, it can be argued that this stereotype still exists today.

There were four stereotypes for female African-Americans, the Mammy, Aunt Jemimah, Sapphire, and Jezebelle. The most enduring of these is the Mammy. Although this stereotype originated in the South, it eventually permeated every region. As with the Sambo, the Mammy stereotype arose as a justification of slavery.

The Mammy

The Mammy was a large, independent woman with pitch-black skin and shining white teeth (Jewell, 1993). She wore a drab calico dress and head scarf and lived to serve her master and mistress. The Mammy understood the value of the white lifestyle. The stereotype suggests that she raised the “massa’s” children and loved them dearly, even more than her own. Her tendency to give advice to her mistress was seen as harmless and humorous. Although she treated whites with respect, the Mammy was a tyrant in her own family. She dominated her children and husband, the Sambo, with her temper. This image of the Mammy as the controller of the African-American male, was used as further evidence of his inferiority to whites (Jewell, 1993).

Because Mammy was masculine in her looks and temperament, she was not seen as a sexual being or threat to white women (Jewell, 1993). This obese, matronly figure with her ample bosom and behind was the antithesis of the European standard of beauty. Because she was non-threatening to whites, Mammy was considered “…as American as apple pie” (Jewell, 1993, p. 41).

The Mammy stereotype was presented to the public in literature and movies. Possibly the most outstanding example is the Mammy role played by Hattie McDaniel in “Gone with the Wind” (Goings, 1994). The book, published in 1936 by Margaret Mitchell, helped to keep the mythical past of African-Americans in the old South alive. The large number of people whose attitudes were shaped by this portrayal is demonstrated through its phenomenal sales record. The Bible is the only book that rivals “Gone with the Wind” in total sales. Additionally, the movie version remains one of the biggest box-office successes in history. Mitchell’s characters simultaneously won the hearts of Americans and fixed stereotypes of African-Americans in their minds (Goings, 1994).

Aunt Jemimah

The stereotype of Aunt Jemimah evolved out of the Mammy image (Jewell, 1993). She differs from Mammy in that her duties were restricted to cooking. It was through Aunt Jemimah that the association of the African-American woman with domestic work, especially cooking, became fixed in the minds of society. As a result, hundreds of Aunt Jemimah collectibles found their way into the American kitchens. These black collectibles included grocery list holders, salt and pepper shakers, spoon holders, stovetop sets, flour scoops, spatulas, mixing bowls, match holders, teapots, hot-pad holders, and much more (Goings, 1994). Perhaps Aunt Jemimah’s most famous image is in the pancake advertisement campaign. In St. Joseph, Mo., in 1889, Chris Rutt chose “Aunt Jemimah” as the name for his new self-rising pancake mix, because “it just naturally made me think of good cooking.” Obviously, others agreed because the campaign was an instant success. Rutt sold his company to Davis Milling Co., which chose Nancy Green as the Aunt Jemimah products spokesperson. This character developed a loyal following of both blacks and whites. To these people, Aunt Jemimah had become reality. Her face still can be found on the pancake boxes today. Although her image has changed slightly, the stereotype lives on (Goings, 1994).

Sapphire

Sapphire was a stereotype solidified through the hit show “Amos ‘n’ Andy” (Jewell, 1993). This profoundly popular series began on the radio in 1926 and developed into a television series, ending in the 1950s (Boskin, 1986). This cartoon show depicted the Sapphire character as a bossy, headstrong woman who was engaged in an ongoing verbal battle with her husband, Kingfish (Jewell, 1993). Sapphire possessed the emotional makeup of the Mammy and Aunt Jemimah combined. Her fierce independence and cantankerous nature placed her in the role of matriarch. She dominated her foolish husband by emasculating him with verbal put-downs. This stereotype was immensely humorous to white Americans. Her outrageous “…hand on the hip, finger-pointing style…” helped carry this show through 4,000 episodes before it was terminated due to its negative racial content (Jewell, 1993, p. 45).

Jezebelle

The final female stereotype is Jezebelle, the harlot. This image of the “bad Black girl” represented the undeniable sexual side of African-American women (Jewell, 1993). The traditional Jezebelle was a light-skinned, slender Mulatto girl with long straight hair and small features. She more closely resembled the European ideal for beauty than any pre-existing images. Where as the Mammy, Aunt Jemimah and Sapphire were decidedly asexual images, this stereotype was immensely attractive to white males. The creation of the hyper-sexual seductress Jezebelle served to absolve white males of responsibility in the sexual abuse and rape of African-American women. Black women in such cases were said to be “askin’ for it” (Goings, 1994, p. 67).

Stereotypes today

Although much has changed since the days of Sambo, Jim Crow, the Savage, Mammy, Aunt Jemimah, Sapphire and Jezebelle, it can be argued convincingly that similar stereotypes of African-Americans exist in 1998. Author Joseph Boskin states that “…there should be little doubt that aspects of Sambo live on in the White mind and show through the crevices of American culture in subtle and sophisticated ways” (Boskin, 1986, p. 15). However, the predominant modern stereotypes are the violent, brutish African-American male and the dominant, lazy African-American female – the Welfare Mother (Peffley Hurwitz & Sniderman, 1997). Recent research has shown that whites are likely to hold these stereotypes especially with respect to issues of crime and welfare. As political and legislative decisions still are controlled by white males, these negative biases are often expressed through policy formation. There is an obvious trend in this society to discriminate against and deny access to social institutions to African-Americans (Jewell, 1993). A 1997 study conducted by Peffley et al indicated that whites who hold negative stereotypes of African-Americans judge them more harshly than they do other whites when making hypothetical decisions about violent crimes and welfare benefits.

Plous & Williams (1995) were interested in measuring the extent to which whites still hold the racial stereotypes formed in the days of “American Slavery”; however, they noted a lack of current data on this subject. National public opinion surveys do not measure racial stereotypes, yet these authors found some research that indicated that there has been a steady decline in the belief that whites are more intelligent than blacks. Plous & Williams suspected there was reason to doubt this conclusion and conducted their own survey on the current existence of stereotypes. Findings revealed that 58.9 percent of black and white subjects endorsed at least one stereotypical difference in inborn ability. Additionally, whites are 10 times more likely to be seen as superior in artistic ability and abstract thinking ability; and African-Americans were 10 times more likely to be seen as superior in athletic ability and rhythmic ability. Further, 49 percent of subjects endorsed stereotypical differences in physical characteristics such as blacks experience less physical pain that whites and have thicker skulls and skin. Interestingly, African-Americans and those subjects without a high school degree were more likely than others to endorse racial stereotypes (Plous & Williams, 1995). This finding shows how individuals internalize negative self-stereotypes.

Some recent incidents indicating the continued existence of racial stereotypes were noted in the news (Plous & Williams, 1995). In 1991 the Los Angeles police officers who beat African-American Rodney King referred to a domestic dispute among African-Americans as “right out of ‘Gorillas in the Mist’” (Plous & Williams, 1995, p. 812). Similarly, in 1992, the director of Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration resigned after “likening inner-city youths to monkeys in the jungle” (Plous & Williams, 1995, p. 812 ).

Conclusion and Implications

It is important to gauge accurately the level and nature of prejudice and stereotyping of African-Americans in contemporary society if one is to intervene effectively in these areas (Plous & Williams, 1995). However, in order to do this, society as a whole must come to terms with the fact that stereotypes and oppression still exist today. We have made enormous progress since the days of slavery and the stereotypes that supported it. Yet it seems that many people are unaware of the remaining stereotypes, negative attitudes, and oppression of African-Americans. Because stereotypes are so often accepted as the truth, defining the problem is a crucial step of intervention.

It is also important to explore how stereotypes are formed and dispelled in order to intervene in the problem. Many people develop expectations based on their beliefs and are inclined to ignore or reject information that is inconsistent with these beliefs. These individuals look for information that supports stereotypes. Therefore, encouraging people to recognize information that is consistent with stereotypes may be helpful in dispelling damaging stereotypes within society.

It is, then, essential to provide people with information that challenges stereotypes. Because the media’s portrayal of African-Americans has been and still is conducive to the formation of stereotypes, interventions in this area are a good place to start. Currently, African-Americans are over-represented as sports figures (Peffley et al, 1997). Reevaluation of the content of television commercials, magazine advertisements, movies, plays, cultural events, museum exhibits, and other media reveals where African-American representation needs to be increased. There is nothing wrong with the image of the African-American athlete. However, it is the portrayal of this image at the exclusion of other positive images that leads to stereotyping (Hoffmann, 1986).

Finally, educating people about damaging, inaccurate stereotypes is recommended. Small focus groups involving individuals of different races could be organized through agencies, schools, universities or churches. Discussion of racial stereotypes and attitudes in a safe format would allow people to explore and possibly discard stereotypes. Individuals can reassess their own prejudices and biases and effect a change within themselves. Through a non-judgmental process of exploration, the possibility that people who believe and perpetuate stereotypes do so not out of hate but as a means of protecting themselves can be considered. They may do so out of ignorance, habit or fear rather than maliciousness. By suspending our disbelief and seeing each person as an individual rather than through the eyes of a preconceived stereotype, we can begin this change on the individual level. As a result, resolution on the community and societal levels can occur.

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Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” Black Stereotypes in Media Montage

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Wikipedia: Minstrel show

“The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American form of entertainment developed in the early 19th century. Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that mocked people specifically of African descent. The shows were performed by white people in make-up or blackface for the purpose of playing the role of black people. There were also some African-American performers and all-black minstrel groups that formed and toured under the direction of white people.

Minstrel shows lampooned black people as dim-witted,^[1] lazy,^[1] buffoonish,^[1][2] superstitious, and happy-go-lucky.^[1]

Minstrel shows emerged as brief burlesques and comic entr’actes in the early 1830s in the Northeastern states. They were developed into full-fledged form in the next decade. By 1848, blackface minstrel shows were the national artform, translating formal art such as opera into popular terms for a general audience.^[3]

By the turn of the 20th century, the minstrel show enjoyed but a shadow of its former popularity, having been replaced for the most part by vaudeville. The form survived as professional entertainment until about 1910; amateur performances continued until the 1960s in high schools and local theaters. The genre has had a lasting legacy and influence and was featured in a television series as recently as the late 1970s. Generally, as the civil rights movement progressed and gained acceptance, minstrels lost popularity.

The typical minstrel performance followed a three-act structure. The troupe first danced onto stage then exchanged wisecracks and sang songs. The second part featured a variety of entertainments, including the pun-filled stump speech. The final act consisted of a slapstick musical plantation skit or a send-up of a popular play.

Minstrel songs and sketches featured several stock characters, most popularly the slave and the dandy. These were further divided into sub-archetypes such as the mammy, her counterpart the old darky, the provocative mulatto wench, and the black soldier. Minstrels claimed that their songs and dances were authentically black,^[4] although the extent of the black influence remains debated. Spirituals (known as jubilees) entered the repertoire in the 1870s, marking the first undeniably black music to be used in minstrelsy.

Blackface minstrelsy was the first theatrical form that was distinctly American. During the 1830s and 1840s at the height of its popularity, it was at the epicenter of the American music industry. For several decades it provided the means through which American whites viewed black people. On the one hand, it had strong racist aspects; on the other, it afforded white Americans a singular and broad awareness of what some whites considered significant aspects of black culture in America.^[5][6]

Although the minstrel shows were extremely popular, being “consistently packed with families from all walks of life and every ethnic group”,^[7] they were also controversial. Integrationists decried them as falsely showing happy slaves while at the same time making fun of them; segregationists thought such shows were “disrespectful” of social norms as they portrayed runaway slaves with sympathy and would undermine the southerners’ “peculiar institution“.^[8]”

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AJ+:Racism in Advertising

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Examples of Historic Stereotypes that are Prevalent Today

Inferiority of People of Color

Before the 1400s the slave trade was mainly focused on East European Slavs (this is the origin of the word slaves). By the 1400s the Slavs had built better fortifications and Africa became the main area of operation for slave traders. In the early 1440s, Portugal began the first African only slave trade that would later become the transatlantic slave trade.

Prince Henry commissioned writer Gomes Eanes de Zurara to document the first voyage to sub saharan Africa to siege slaves directly, rather than buying from Northern African slave traders. Prince Henry wanted Gomez to glorify Portugal bringing Christianity to Africa, while dehumanizing Africans to justify enslaving them. Gomes writes the Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, in 1453, which depicts black people as inferior beasts and slavery was an improvement over freedom in Africa. He wrote, “They live like beasts. They had no understanding of good but only knew how to live in beastial sloth.” Gomes combined all the different ethnic groups that Prince Henry captured and combined them into one group “black people” and described this group as inferior.

These ideas of “all black people representing one race”, “black inferiority”, “black people were beasts” spread throughout Europe as more European countries entered the slave trade. These racist beliefs became common beliefs across European , expanded by other intellectuals, and carried across Atlantic by European immigrants to help justify slavery in the new world.

White colonialist continue to preserve and expand the stereotypes that people of color were inferior to justify the brutal enslavement of Africans, the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, and the marginalization of Asian Americans.  These stereotypes remained prevalent in the US society after the civil war up to the present, to help justify institutional racism, the marginalization, dehumanization and oppression against all people of color to maintain white supremacy.

Criminality of People of Color

The stereotype that black people and native Americans were violent savages that had to be controlled, especially around white women, help justify oppressive slave codes, brutal treatment of slaves, and slave patrols to control slaves and genocide for Native Americans.  After the Civil War white supremacist continued the criminal stereotypes of black people to justify institutional racism, black codes, Jim Crow, segregation and lynching.  These stereotypes later helped justify the rise of mass incarceration against black people, violent crackdown on civil rights activist, and falsely criminalizing and scapegoating immigrants.

Politicians soon learned to take advantage of white resentment from these stereotypes by using dog whistles like “law and order” and “illegal immigration” to code explicit racism into more socially acceptable policies to vote for.  Nixon, Clinton, Bush and Trump all used dog whistles to gain votes from the white backlash of these stereotypes.

Further Reading

• Brennan Center for Justice: Racism & Felony Disenfranchisement: An Intertwined History
• Know Your Rights Camp: A Brief History Of The Idea Of The Black Male Criminal
• NCBI: From “brute” to “thug:” the demonization and criminalization of unarmed Black male victims in America
• Wikipedia: Criminal stereotype of African Americans
• Everyday Feminism: 4 Racist Stereotypes White Patriarchy Invented to ‘Protect’ White Womanhood
• NY Times: The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant

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Welfare Queen (lazy and abusing the system

This stereotype begin in early forms of welfare programs (Mothers Pensions (early 1900s) The New Deal’s Aid to Dependent Children program (1935), Aid to Families with Dependent Children (1962), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program (1996)) where there was a lot of public support for this programs in the beginning when they were focused on white people who “deserved” help. When various civil rights efforts forced these programs to stop discrimination against black people in need, public “white” support would always change from “helping people in need” to being “taken advantage of by people color”. Once black people were allowed to participate in these programs, white supremacist politicians used these stereotypes to create ways to exclude them through discriminatory suitability tests, work requirements, and things like block grants which would shift the ability to discriminate to states with more freedom to discriminate.

Politicians soon learned to take advantage of white resentment from these stereotypes by using dog whistles like “Welfare Queen” to code explicit racism into more socially acceptable policies to vote for. Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Trump all used dog whistles to gain votes from the white backlash of these stereotypes. This was especially prevalent during Reagan’s presidency when the media played a key role in fostering and reinforcing racist stereotypes and negative controlling images African Americans who relied on welfare. The idea of the “Welfare Queen”– an African-American woman who allegedly lived lavishly on welfare money was a powerful radicalized controlling image perpetuated by President Reagan. This contributed to a national sentiment of primarily white people’s hostility toward welfare, and this was the same hostility that caused the demise of Aid to Families with Dependent Children in the 1990s.

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The Root: Why Do We Continue to Embrace Pointless Stereotypes?

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The Atlantic: How Watermelons Became a Racist Trope

Before its subversion in the Jim Crow era, the fruit symbolized black self-sufficiency.

It seems as if every few weeks there’s another watermelon controversy. The Boston Herald got in trouble for publishing a cartoon of the White House fence-jumper, having made his way into Obama’s bathroom, recommending watermelon-flavored toothpaste to the president. A high-school football coach in Charleston, South Carolina, was briefly fired for a bizarre post-game celebration ritual in which his team smashed a watermelon while making ape-like noises. While hosting the National Book Awards, author Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) joked about how his friend Jacqueline Woodson, who had won the young people’s literature award for her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, was allergic to watermelon. And most recently, activists protesting the killing of Michael Brown were greeted with an ugly display while marching through Rosebud, Missouri, on their way from Ferguson to Jefferson City: malt liquor, fried chicken, a Confederate flag, and, of course, a watermelon.

While mainstream-media figures deride these instances of racism, or at least racial insensitivity, another conversation takes place on Twitter feeds and comment boards: What, many ask, does a watermelon have to do with race? What’s so offensive about liking watermelon? Don’t white people like watermelon too? Since these conversations tend to focus on the individual intent of the cartoonist, coach, or emcee, it’s all too easy to exculpate them from blame, since the racial meaning of the watermelon is so ambiguous.

But the stereotype that African Americans are excessively fond of watermelon emerged for a specific historical reason and served a specific political purpose. The trope came into full force when slaves won their emancipation during the Civil War. Free black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons, and in doing so made the fruit a symbol of their freedom. Southern whites, threatened by blacks’ newfound freedom, responded by making the fruit a symbol of black people’s perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public presence. This racist trope then exploded in American popular culture, becoming so pervasive that its historical origin became obscure. Few Americans in 1900 would’ve guessed the stereotype was less than half a century old.

Not that the raw material for the racist watermelon trope didn’t exist before emancipation. In the early modern European imagination, the typical watermelon-eater was an Italian or Arab peasant. The watermelon, noted a British officer stationed in Egypt in 1801, was “a poor Arab’s feast,” a meager substitute for a proper meal. In the port city of Rosetta he saw the locals eating watermelons “ravenously … as if afraid the passer-by was going to snatch them away,” and watermelon rinds littered the streets. There, the fruit symbolized many of the same qualities as it would in post-emancipation America: uncleanliness, because eating watermelon is so messy. Laziness, because growing watermelons is so easy, and it’s hard to eat watermelon and keep working—it’s a fruit you have to sit down and eat. Childishness, because watermelons are sweet, colorful, and devoid of much nutritional value. And unwanted public presence, because it’s hard to eat a watermelon by yourself.  These tropes made their way to America, but the watermelon did not yet have a racial meaning. Americans were just as likely to associate the watermelon with white Kentucky hillbillies or New Hampshire yokels as with black South Carolina slaves.

Soon after winning their emancipation, many African Americans sold watermelons in order to make a living outside the plantation system. (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper)

This may be surprising given how prominent watermelons were in enslaved African Americans’ lives. Slave owners often let their slaves grow and sell their own watermelons, or even let them take a day off during the summer to eat the first watermelon harvest. The slave Israel Campbell would slip a watermelon into the bottom of his cotton basket when he fell short of his daily quota, and then retrieve the melon at the end of the day and eat it. Campbell taught the trick to another slave who was often whipped for not reaching his quota, and soon the trick was widespread. When the year’s cotton fell a few bales short of what the master had figured, it simply remained “a mystery.”

But Southern whites saw their slaves’ enjoyment of watermelon as a sign of their own supposed benevolence. Slaves were usually careful to enjoy watermelon according to the code of behavior established by whites. When an Alabama overseer cut open watermelons for the slaves under his watch, he expected the children to run to get their slice. One boy, Henry Barnes, refused to run, and once he did get his piece he would run off to the slave quarters to eat out of the white people’s sight. His mother would then whip him, he remembered, “fo’ being so stubborn.” The whites wanted Barnes to play the part of the watermelon-craving, juice-dribbling pickaninny. His refusal undermined the tenuous relationship between master and slave.

Emancipation, of course, destroyed that relationship. Black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons during slavery, but now when they did so it was a threat to the racial order. To whites, it seemed now as if blacks were flaunting their newfound freedom, living off their own land, selling watermelons in the market, and—worst of all—enjoying watermelon together in the public square. One white family in Houston was devastated when their nanny Clara left their household shortly after her emancipation in 1865. Henry Evans, a young white boy to whom Clara had likely been a second mother, cried for days after she left. But when he bumped into her on the street one day, he rejected her attempt to make peace. When Clara offered him some watermelon, Henry told her that “he would not eat what free negroes ate.”Newspapers amplified this association between the watermelon and the free black person. In 1869, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper published perhaps the first caricature of blacks reveling in watermelon. The adjoining article explained, “The Southern negro in no particular more palpably exhibits his epicurean tastes than in his excessive fondness for watermelons. The juvenile freedman is especially intense in his partiality for that refreshing fruit.”

Perhaps the first printed illustration of the racist watermelon trope, c. 1869. (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper)

Two years later, a Georgia newspaper reported that a black man had been arrested for poisoning a watermelon with the intent of killing a neighbor. The story was headlined “Negro Kuklux” and equated black-on-black violence with the Ku Klux Klan, asking facetiously whether the Radical Republican congressional subcommittee investigating the Klan would investigate this freedman’s actions. The article began with a scornful depiction of the man on his way to the courthouse: “On Sabbath afternoon we encountered a strapping 15th Amendment bearing an enormous watermelon in his arms en route for the Court-house.” It was as if the freedman’s worst crime was not attempted murder but walking around in public with that ridiculous fruit.

The primary message of the watermelon stereotype was that black people were not ready for freedom. During the 1880 election season, Democrats accused the South Carolina state legislature, which had been majority-black during Reconstruction, of having wasted taxpayers’ money on watermelons for their own refreshment; this fiction even found its way into history textbooks. D. W. Griffith’s white-supremacist epic film The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, included a watermelon feast in its depiction of emancipation, as corrupt northern whites encouraged the former slaves to stop working and enjoy some watermelon instead. In these racist fictions, blacks were no more deserving of freedom than were children.

As mass-produced pianos and sheet music became popular in the late nineteenth century, so did “coon songs,” popular tunes that mocked African Americans for their lazy, shiftless, childish ways. (Courtesy Brown University Library)

By the early twentieth century, the watermelon stereotype was everywhere—potholders, paperweights, sheet music, salt-and-pepper shakers. A popular postcard portrayed an elderly black man carrying a watermelon in each arm only to happen upon a stray chicken. The man laments, “Dis am de wust perdickermunt ob mah life.” As a black man, the postcard implied, he had few responsibilities and little interest in anything beyond his own stomach. Edwin S. Porter, famous for directing The Great Train Robbery in 1903, co-directed The Watermelon Patch two years later, which featured “darkies” sneaking into a watermelon patch, men dressed as skeletons chasing away the watermelon thieves (à la the Ku Klux Klan, who dressed as ghosts to frighten blacks), a watermelon-eating contest, and a band of white vigilantes ultimately smoking the watermelon thieves out of a cabin. The long history of white violence to maintain the racial order was played for laughs.

It may seem silly to attribute so much meaning to a fruit. And the truth is that there is nothing inherently racist about watermelons. But cultural symbols have the power to shape how we see our world and the people in it, such as when police officer Darren Wilson saw Michael Brown as a superhuman “demon.” These symbols have roots in real historical struggles—specifically, in the case of the watermelon, white people’s fear of the emancipated black body. Whites used the stereotype to denigrate black people—to take something they were using to further their own freedom, and make it an object of ridicule. It ultimately does not matter if someone means to offend when they tap into the racist watermelon stereotype, because the stereotype has a life of its own.

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Modern Stereotypes

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Common Modern Racist Stereotypes

• Black males are violent/criminal/sexual predators
• Black females are Welfare queens
• Criminal immigrant
• Muslim terrorist
• Black people have thicker skin
  • Feel less pain
• Absent black father
  • black family dysfunction
• “White” is the best beauty standard
• White terrorist vs black victim
• Crack vs opioid addicts
• Misogynoir
  • The Sassy Black Woman
  • The Hypersexual Jezebel
  • The Angry Black Woman
  • The Strong Black Woman

Source: From Privilege to Progress

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Examples of Racial Bias

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People of Color Using all the Welfare Benefits Stereotype

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  Immigrant Violent Crime Stereotype

NY Times: The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant

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Black Criminal Stereotype

Source: society6.com/jonathanedwards

• Creation of the Black Criminal Stereotype
  • Justifications for European brutality during African colonization and enslavement
    • Blacks were heathens, beasts, criminals that needed to be “civilized”
    • Endorsed by Catholic church – Doctrine of Discovery, etc
  • After slavery ended these stereotypes were used to continue the marginalization, brutalization, and defacto enslavement of black people
    • Black codes, Vagrancy laws, Jim Crow, lynching, Convict Leasing, voter suppression, KKK, etc
    • Lynching justify on belief black people were criminals that needed to be controlled violently
    • Housing discrimination created markets that devalued black people lower due to stereotypes
    • “Law and order” racist policies based on black criminal stereotypes fuel the rise of mass incarceration
• Today, many white people have some form of black criminalization
  • White people frequently call cops on innocent black people
    • Police arrest, assault or kill black people at disproportionately higher rates when called
    • Juries convict black people at high rates, while acquitting white cops at high rates
    • Judges sentence black people to longer sentences
  • Media often demonizes black victims, while praising cops for keeping white people safe
    • Black victims are often victim blamed
  • Schools suspend black students at disproportionately higher rates

“Part of this suspicion arises from commonly held stereotypes of black people as being criminal and black behavior as being deviant. As a result, black people in these “white spaces” are forced to justify their presence, and face consequences when that justification isn’t accepted by others.” Elijah Anderson – Yale sociologist

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20/20 ABC News: Children & The Psychology of White Supremacy (2007)

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Racial Stereotypes of Voters

Everyday Feminist: Here’s Your Proof That White Americans Don’t Face Systemic Racism

“For one, a startling number of Americans – 49% – think that “discrimination against whites” is “as big a problem as discrimination against” black people and other people of color. Research by The Washington Post corroborates this poll: “Whites now think bias against white people is more of a problem than bias against black people.”

Before you start blaming Trump supporters for these results, a recent poll of 16,000 Americans revealed that Clinton supporters, too, have some serious work to do. For example, 20% of Clinton supporters described Black Americans as “less intelligent” than White Americans. And, not so long ago, two Black women exposed the racism of “progressives” when they dared interrupt Bernie Sanders at a rally in Seattle.

This is a problem all across the board.”

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White Adult Stereotypes of Youth of Color

• 2018 Harvard National study of 1022 white adults working or volunteering with youth:
  • High levels of negative racial stereotypes toward non-whites of all ages among white adults
  • Highest levels of negative attitudes were toward blacks across all stereotypes measured
    • Lazy, unintelligent, violent and having unhealthy habits
    • Native American, and Hispanic/Latinx seen as similarly negative on several stereotypes
  • White adult stereotypes most pronounced toward adults
    • But seen even toward young children aged 0-8 years
  • Black children were seen less negatively than black adults
    • But more negatively than children from other racial groups
      • Except for Native American and Hispanic/Latinx
    • Young black children aged 0-8 years
      • 3x more likely to be rated as being lazy than white adults
    • Young black children almost
      • 2x as likely to be rated as unintelligent or violence-prone compared with white children of the same age
    • Black teenagers and Native Americans almost
      • 10x more likely to be considered lazy than white adults
    • Black and Hispanic/Latinx teens were between
      • 5 to 2x more likely to be considered violence-prone and unintelligent than white adults and white teens

“these findings are highly concerning given the strong scientific evidence that negative racial attitudes are associated with poorer quality care and services and with disparities in health, education and social outcomes. That these negative attitudes have been found toward even young children aged 0-8 among adults who work or volunteer with them has serious potential consequences for these children’s outcomes throughout life.” Lead author Naomi Priest

Source: PLOS: Stereotyping across intersections of race and age: Racial stereotyping among White adults working with children

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Stereotype Threat & Racial Imposter Syndrome

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Stereotype Threat

“Stereotype threat is a situational predicament in which people are or feel themselves to be at risk of conforming to stereotypes about their social group.” Wikipedia

• Stereotype threat
  • Risk of confirming negative stereotypes about an individual’s racial, ethnic, gender, cultural group
    • Can cause negative outcomes such as lower scores/lower emotionally wellness
  • Coined by researchers Claude Steele & Joshua Aronson
    • Performed experiments that showed:
      • black college students performed worse on standardized tests than their white peers when they were reminded before taking the tests
        • That their racial group tends to do poorly on such exams
      • When their race was not emphasized
        • Black students performed similarly to their white peers
      • Don’t have to believe in a stereotype to be self-fulfilling

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APA:  Stereotype Threat Widens Achievement Gap

Reminders of stereotyped inferiority hurt test scores

“A growing body of studies undercuts conventional assumptions that genetics or cultural differences lead some students – such as African Americans or girls – to do poorly on standardized academic tests and other academic performances. Instead, it’s become clear that negative stereotypes raise inhibiting doubts and high-pressure anxieties in a test-taker’s mind, resulting in the phenomenon of “stereotype threat.” Psychologists Claude Steele, PhD, Joshua Aronson, PhD, and Steven Spencer, PhD, have found that even passing reminders that someone belongs to one group or another, such as a group stereotyped as inferior in academics, can wreak havoc with test performance.

Steele, Aronson and Spencer, have examined how group stereotypes can threaten how students evaluate themselves, which then alters academic identity and intellectual performance. This social-psychological predicament can, researchers believe, beset members of any group about whom negative stereotypes exist.

Steele and Aronson gave Black and White college students a half-hour test using difficult items from the verbal Graduate Record Exam (GRE). In the stereotype-threat condition, they told students the test diagnosed intellectual ability, thus potentially eliciting the stereotype that Blacks are less intelligent than Whites. In the no-stereotype-threat condition, the researchers told students that the test was a problem-solving lab task that said nothing about ability, presumably rendering stereotypes irrelevant. In the stereotype threat condition, Blacks – who were matched with Whites in their group by SAT scores — did less well than Whites. In the no stereotype- threat condition-in which the exact same test was described as a lab task that did not indicate ability-Blacks’ performance rose to match that of equally skilled Whites. Additional experiments that minimized the stereotype threat endemic to standardized tests also resulted in equal performance. One study found that when students merely recorded their race (presumably making the stereotype salient), and were not told the test was diagnostic of their ability, Blacks still performed worse than Whites.

Spencer, Steele, and Diane Quinn, PhD, also found that merely telling women that a math test does not show gender differences improved their test performance. The researchers gave a math test to men and women after telling half the women that the test had shown gender differences, and telling the rest that it found none. When test administrators told women that that tests showed no gender differences, the women performed equal to men. Those who were told the test showed gender differences did significantly worse than men, just like women who were told nothing about the test. This experiment was conducted with women who were top performers in math, just as the experiments on race were conducted with strong, motivated students.

What the Research Means

Psychologist and educators are, through this innovative research, coming to understand the true nature of one of the barriers to equal educational achievement. Although psychologists such as Steele, Aronson and Spencer concede that test-score gaps probably can’t be totally attributed to stereotype threat, the threat appears to be sufficiently influential to be heeded by teachers, students, researchers, policymakers and parents. At the very least, the findings undercut the tendency to lay the blame on unsupported genetic and cultural factors, such as whether African Americans “value” education or girls can’t do math.

Through careful design, the studies have also shown the subtle and insidious nature of stereotype threat. For example, because stereotype threat affected women even when the researchers said the test showed no gender differences – thus still flagging the possibility – social psychologists believe that even mentioning a stereotype in a benign context can sensitize people.”

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Threat of Stereotypes | Social Experiments Illustrated | Channel NewsAsia Connect

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Racial Imposter Syndrome

Imposter syndrome is defined as the feeling of inadequacy or phoniness that make one believe they are undeserving of success” BuzzFeedVideo

Imposter syndrome can also refer to

“when people with biracial and multi-ethnic identities feel like imposters of one or more of their identities because they don’t fit neatly into any one category.” DiversityEdu

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Inside Higher Ed: Feeling Like Impostors

“Minority college students often face discrimination and report higher rates of depression and anxiety than their white peers — and there’s another factor that could exacerbate those feelings.

A new study out of the University of Texas at Austin and published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology suggests that the impostor phenomenon in some cases can degrade the mental health of minority students who already perceive prejudices against them.

Those who suffer from impostor feelings cannot grasp or believe in their successes, even if they’re high achieving — leading them to feel like frauds. In the 1970s, impostor syndrome was first considered a trend among women who were advancing professionally, according to the American Psychological Association. Many experts have discussed the influence of impostor syndrome on minority and female academics, though the University of Texas study focused on undergraduate students.

The authors surveyed 332 minority undergraduate students from a Southwestern university. The institution’s identity was shielded in the study to ensure student anonymity. Black, Asian and Latino students were included in the study. All the racial groups were represented relatively equally.

In three separate tests, the students were asked to evaluate their own competency — related to impostor feelings — how often they experience discrimination, and their mental health.

As the study authors predicted, black students who dealt with significant “impostorism” also reported higher levels of anxiety, as well as depression related to discrimination they perceived. Among Asian students, more impostor-related feelings were associated with increased depression and anxiety, but not related to any racism they perceived.

The authors could not explain why with Latino students, the trends essentially reversed — those Latino students with more impostor-related feelings didn’t suffer from much anxiety or depression. Those who did indicate they were anxious or depressed did not have many impostor-related thoughts.

The authors guessed that Latino students, hyperaware of certain stereotypes, did not internalize impostor-related feelings in the same way as other minority students. They also cited fatalism, a popular concept in some Latino cultures in which people believe they cannot control their destinies.

“It is possible that among this sample of Latino/a American students, having low impostor feelings was associated in some way to fatalism (e.g., ‘People are going to think whatever they want to about me and there is nothing I can do about it’),” the authors wrote.

The study’s findings led its authors to recommend that in counseling, clinicians should explore specifically if students of color are grappling with these feelings.”

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Women Of Color Share Their Imposter Syndrome Stories

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NPR: ‘Racial Impostor Syndrome’: Here Are Your Stories

“It’s tricky to nail down exactly what makes someone feel like a “racial impostor.” For one Code Switch follower, it’s the feeling she gets from whipping out “broken but strangely colloquial Arabic” in front of other Middle Easterners.

For another — a white-passing, Native American woman — it’s being treated like “just another tourist” when she shows up at powwows. And one woman described watching her white, black and Korean-American toddler bump along to the new Kendrick and wondering, “Is this allowed?”

In this week’s podcast, we go deep into what we’re calling Racial Impostor Syndrome — the feeling, the science and a giant festival this weekend in Los Angelesthat’s, in some ways, all about this.

Here’s how we got started down this track. A couple months ago, listener Kristina Ogilvie wrote in to tell us that “living at the intersection of different identities and cultures” was like “stumbling around in a forest in the dark.”

She asked, “Do you hear from other listeners who feel like fakes?”

Good question. So we took it to our audience, and what we heard back was a resounding “yes.”

We got 127 emails from people who are stumbling through that dark, racially ambiguous forest. (And yes, we read every single one.)

Here are excerpts drawn from a few of the many letters that made us laugh, cry and argue — and that guided this week’s episode.

Let’s start with Angie Yingst of Pennsylvania:

“My mother is a Panamanian immigrant and my father is a white guy from Pennsylvania. I’ve always felt liminal, like I drift between race and culture. When I was young (20s) and living in the city, I would get asked multiple times a day where I was from, where my people were from, because Allentown, Pennsylvania, clearly wasn’t the answer they were looking for … It always felt like the undercurrent of that question was, ‘You aren’t white, but you aren’t black. What are you?’

“But truthfully, I don’t feel like I fit with Latinas either. My Spanish is atrocious and I grew up in rural PA. Even my cousin said a few weeks ago, ‘Well, you aren’t really Spanish, because your dad is white.’ Which gutted me, truly. I identify as Latina. I identify with my mother’s culture and country as well as American culture. In shops, I’m treated like every other Latina, followed around, then ignored at the counter. I married a white guy and had children who are blonde and blue eyed, and I’m frequently asked if I’m the nanny or babysitter. And white acquaintances often say, ‘You are white. You act white.’ And I saltily retort, ‘Why? Because I’m not doing your lawn, or taking care of your kids? You need to broaden your idea of what Latina means.’ ”

Jen Boggs of Hawaii says she often feels like a racial impostor, but isn’t quite sure which race she’s faking:

“I was born in the Philippines and moved to Hawaii when I was three. … I grew up thinking that I was half-Filipina and half-white, under the impression that my mom’s first husband was my biological father. I embraced this ‘hapa-haole’ identity (as they say in Hawaii), and loved my ethnic ambiguity. My mom wanted me to speak perfect English, so never spoke anything but to me. After she divorced her first husband and re-married my stepdad from Michigan, my whiteness became cemented.

“Except. As it turns out, my biological father was a Filipino man whom I’ve never met. I didn’t find out until I tried to apply for a passport in my late twenties and the truth came out. So, at age 28 I learned that I was not half white but all Filipina. …

“This new knowledge was a huge blow to my identity and, admittedly, to my self esteem. ‘But I’m white,’ I remember thinking. ‘I’m so so white.’ After much therapy, I’m happy and comfortable in my brown skin, though I’m still working out how others perceive me as this Other, Asian person.”

Indigo Goodson’s mom is Jamaican and her dad is African-American. She wrote about the way people’s perceptions of her change based on where she lives:

“Culturally we grew up as Jamaican as two California-born black American children could have in the Bay Area. … We ate mostly Jamaican food (prepared by both our mother and father), our Jamaican family lived with us growing up, and it was my mother that told us Anansi stories and other tales or sayings popular in Jamaica.

” … Both my parents are black, so no one ever asked ‘What are you?’ … But then when folks would meet my mum they would say things like, ‘Oh I thought you were black!’ or ‘You do look Jamaican!’ And I would tell people I’m still black and clearly Jamaicans look like black Americans because we are both the descendants of enslaved West Africans. Now that I live in New York City, where if you’re black people assume you are first generation Caribbean, I often have to remind people that my dad is black American and so am I.”

Helen Seely is originally from California. She told us what it’s like for her to interact with different groups as a light-skinned biracial woman:

“White people like to believe I’m Caucasian like them; I think it makes their life less complicated. But I don’t identify as 100% white, so there always comes a time in the conversation or relationship where I need to ‘out’ myself and tell them that I’m biracial.

“It’s a vulnerable experience, but it becomes even harder when I’m with black Americans. It may sound strange — and there are so many layers to this that are hard to unpack — but I think what it comes down to is: they have more of a claim to ‘blackness’ than I ever will and therefore have the power to tell me I don’t belong, I’m not enough, that I should stay on the white side of the identity line.

“You know that question we always get asked? ‘What are you?’ Well, I still don’t know. I’ve never had an answer that I can say with confidence; I still don’t know what I’m allowed to claim.”

Natalia Romero echoes some of those feelings. Her family left Colombia for the U.S. when she was 9 years old, and she says that while she doesn’t consider herself white, she gets treated like she’s white all the time:

“My mother doesn’t speak English and so when I am home all we speak is Spanish and act like a bunch of rowdy, tight knit Colombians … I grew up experiencing what many poor young immigrants face — bad schools, hunger, poverty, a lack of resources — but eventually managed to pay my way through college and work now as a musician and teacher, often very white communities.

” … When people talk about the current political climate, they speak to me as if I were white, not someone who is terrified of the hatred of Latinx and Hispanic people, someone who walks around with my green card in my wallet, knowing that until I am a citizen (which I morally have a huge problem with) I am not safe. I exist and inhabit these white spaces, but my experience is not white. My experiences comes from being the sole English speaker in my house at age 9 and having to speak for my parents at the bank, at school, in apartments. My experience is from pretending my youngest sister wasn’t part of our family because the apartment complex only allowed 4 people to a 1 bedroom apartment and we couldn’t afford a 2 bedroom one. I come from a place where people speak poorly of Latinx people around me not realizing I am one … ”

Everyone’s story is different, and as is discussed on the podcast, we’re still learning how to talk about identities that fall outside of our traditional understandings of race in the United States. Luckily, for those who are confused, you’re in good company.”

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Modern Racial Bias

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• Police more likely to pull over, arrest and shoot black people
  • 60% black people report they/family member have been unfairly treated by police
  • Black people compared to white people are:
    • 3x as likely to be stopped
    • 2x as likely to be arrested
    • 4x as likely “to experience the threat or use of force during interactions with the police.”

• Juries are more likely to convict black people
  • Black people are 20% more likely to be sentenced to prison than white people
• Judges are more likely to give longer sentences to black people
  • Compared to white people, black people are
    • 21% more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences
    • Likely to receive sentences that are 10% longer once convicted
• Employers are more likely to interview white sounding names on resumes
  • Even when job applicants with the same resumes:
    • white-sounding names get called back about 50% more than black sounding names
• Black students are 3x more likely to be suspended than white students
  • Even when their infractions are similar
    • Black Girls are suspended 6x more than white girls for similar offenses

Sources: 7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism Is Real, The New Progressive: The Ultimate White Privilege Statistics & Data Post, 2017 NPR/Harvard/RWJF

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Examples of Racial Bias

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Racial Bias in Children: Doll Test

• 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark designed the “doll tests”
  • To study the psychological effects of segregation on African-American children
  • The results were included in the Brown v. Board of Education case and the Supreme Court’s Decision
• The Supreme Court declared that separate but equal in education was unconstitutional
  • Because it resulted in black children having “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community
• The “doll tests” have been done many times since on both white and black children
  • With same results every time

Doll Test

CNN: Inside the AC360 doll study

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Racial Bias of Police

The Economist: Measuring racial bias in police forces

• Young black boys/men, ages 15-19, are 21 times more likely to be to be shot and killed by the police than young white boys/men.
• Blacks are less than 13% of the U.S. population, and yet they are 31% of all fatal police shooting victims, and 39% of those killed by police even though they weren’t attacking.
• A 2007 U.S. Department of Justice report on racial profiling found that blacks and Latinos were 3 times as likely to be stopped as whites, and that blacks were twice as likely to be arrested and 4 times as likely “to experience the threat or use of force during interactions with the police.”

Source: The New Progressive: The Ultimate White Privilege Statistics & Data Post

Stanford Alumni: A Hard Look at How We See Race

• 2008 Police Experiment (Jennifer Eberhardt)
  • Police were subliminally shown black or white faces
    • Then asked to identify a blurry image as it came into focus over 41 frames
  • On average
    • Participants primed w/ black faces could identify weapon 9 frames sooner
      • than those primed with white faces could (middle-right).

Photo: Courtesy Jennifer Eberhardt
In one experiment, subjects were subliminally shown black or white faces, then asked to identify a blurry image as it came into focus over 41 frames. On average, participants primed with black faces could identify a weapon nine frames sooner (middle-left) than those primed with white faces could (middle-right).”

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Open Carry Advocates Challenge Police Bias in Oregon

Further Reading

CBS: We asked 155 police departments about their racial bias training. Here’s what they told us.

Atlantic: Can Cops Unlearn Their Unconscious Biases?

Campaign Zero: Racial Bias Training

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Implicit Racial Bias in Court Cases

• Blacks are 21% more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences.
• Blacks are 20% more likely to be sentenced to prison than whites.
• Once convicted, black offenders receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the same crimes.

Source: The New Progressive: The Ultimate White Privilege Statistics & Data Post

• A black person and a white person each commit a crime, the black person has a better chance of being arrested. Once arrested, black people are convicted more often than white people. And for many years, laws assigned much harsher sentences for using or possessing crack, for example, compared to cocaine. Finally, when black people are convicted, they are more likely to be sent to jail. And their sentences tend to be both harsher and longer than those for whites who were convicted of similar crimes. And as we know, a felony conviction means, in many states, that you lose your right to vote. Right now in America, as many as 13% of black men are not allowed to vote.

Source: 7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism Is Real

Further Readings

NY Times: To Curb Bad Verdicts, Court Adds Lesson on Racial Bias for Juries

NBC: Connecticut will be first state to collect prosecutor data to study racial bias

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Racial Bias in healthcare

• NCBI 2016 study found
  • Stereotypes
    • Medical students believe Africans-Americans felt less pain than whites
    • Students/residents thought black skin was thicker
  • Bias
    • Doctors are more likely to believe white people about their pain and prescribed pain medications than black people
• A 2018 NPR/Harvard/RWJF survey:
  • 33% of black women were discriminated against because of their race when going to a doctor or health clinic
  • 21% of black people avoided going to a doctor out of concern they would be racially discriminated against

How Does Implicit Bias Affect Health Care?

Now This: How the Health Care System Has Racial Biases

New York Times: Myths about physical racial differences were used to justify slavery — and are still believed by doctors today.

The excruciatingly painful medical experiments went on until his body was disfigured by a network of scars. John Brown, an enslaved man on a Baldwin County, Ga., plantation in the 1820s and ’30s, was lent to a physician, Dr. Thomas Hamilton, who was obsessed with proving that physiological differences between black and white people existed. Hamilton used Brown to try to determine how deep black skin went, believing it was thicker than white skin. Brown, who eventually escaped to England, recorded his experiences in an autobiography, published in 1855 as “Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England.” In Brown’s words, Hamilton applied “blisters to my hands, legs and feet, which bear the scars to this day. He continued until he drew up the dark skin from between the upper and the under one. He used to blister me at intervals of about two weeks.” This went on for nine months, Brown wrote, until “the Doctor’s experiments had so reduced me that I was useless in the field.”

Hamilton was a courtly Southern gentleman, a respected physician and a trustee of the Medical Academy of Georgia. And like many other doctors of the era in the South, he was also a wealthy plantation owner who tried to use science to prove that differences between black people and white people went beyond culture and were more than skin deep, insisting that black bodies were composed and functioned differently than white bodies. They believed that black people had large sex organs and small skulls — which translated to promiscuity and a lack of intelligence — and higher tolerance for heat, as well as immunity to some illnesses and susceptibility to others. These fallacies, presented as fact and legitimized in medical journals, bolstered society’s view that enslaved people were fit for little outside forced labor and provided support for racist ideology and discriminatory public policies.

Over the centuries, the two most persistent physiological myths — that black people were impervious to pain and had weak lungs that could be strengthened through hard work — wormed their way into scientific consensus, and they remain rooted in modern-day medical education and practice. In the 1787 manual “A Treatise on Tropical Diseases; and on The Climate of the West-Indies,” a British doctor, Benjamin Moseley, claimed that black people could bear surgical operations much more than white people, noting that “what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.” To drive home his point, he added, “I have amputated the legs of many Negroes who have held the upper part of the limb themselves.”

These misconceptions about pain tolerance, seized upon by pro-slavery advocates, also allowed the physician J. Marion Sims — long celebrated as the father of modern gynecology — to use black women as subjects in experiments that would be unconscionable today, practicing painful operations (at a time before anesthesia was in use) on enslaved women in Montgomery, Ala., between 1845 and 1849. In his autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” Sims described the agony the women suffered as he cut their genitals again and again in an attempt to perfect a surgical technique to repair vesico-vaginal fistula, which can be an extreme complication of childbirth.

Thomas Jefferson, in “Notes on the State of Virginia,” published around the same time as Moseley’s treatise, listed what he proposed were “the real distinctions which nature has made,” including a lack of lung capacity. In the years that followed, physicians and scientists embraced Jefferson’s unproven theories, none more aggressively than Samuel Cartwright, a physician and professor of “diseases of the Negro” at the University of Louisiana, now Tulane University. His widely circulated paper, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” published in the May 1851 issue of The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, cataloged supposed physical differences between whites and blacks, including the claim that black people had lower lung capacity. Cartwright, conveniently, saw forced labor as a way to “vitalize” the blood and correct the problem. Most outrageous, Cartwright maintained that enslaved people were prone to a “disease of the mind” called drapetomania, which caused them to run away from their enslavers. Willfully ignoring the inhumane conditions that drove desperate men and women to attempt escape, he insisted, without irony, that enslaved people contracted this ailment when their enslavers treated them as equals, and he prescribed “whipping the devil out of them” as a preventive measure.

Today Cartwright’s 1851 paper reads like satire, Hamilton’s supposedly scientific experiments appear simply sadistic and, last year, a statue commemorating Sims in New York’s Central Park was removed after prolonged protest that included women wearing blood-splattered gowns in memory of Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy and the other enslaved women he brutalized. And yet, more than 150 years after the end of slavery, fallacies of black immunity to pain and weakened lung function continue to show up in modern-day medical education and philosophy.

Even Cartwright’s footprint remains embedded in current medical practice. To validate his theory about lung inferiority in African-Americans, he became one of the first doctors in the United States to measure pulmonary function with an instrument called a spirometer. Using a device he designed himself, Cartwright calculated that “the deficiency in the Negro may be safely estimated at 20 percent.” Today most commercially available spirometers, used around the world to diagnose and monitor respiratory illness, have a “race correction” built into the software, which controls for the assumption that blacks have less lung capacity than whites. In her 2014 book, “Breathing Race Into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics,” Lundy Braun, a Brown University professor of medical science and Africana studies, notes that “race correction” is still taught to medical students and described in textbooks as scientific fact and standard practice.

A 19th-century spirometer, used to measure the vital capacity of the lungs. Getty Images

Recent data also shows that present-day doctors fail to sufficiently treat the pain of black adults and children for many medical issues. A 2013 review of studies examining racial disparities in pain management published in The American Medical Association Journal of Ethics found that black and Hispanic people — from children who needed adenoidectomies or tonsillectomies to elders in hospice care — received inadequate pain management compared with white counterparts.

A 2016 survey of 222 white medical students and residents published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that half of them endorsed at least one myth about physiological differences between black people and white people, including that black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than white people’s. When asked to imagine how much pain white or black patients experienced in hypothetical situations, the medical students and residents insisted that black people felt less pain. This made the providers less likely to recommend appropriate treatment. A third of these doctors to be also still believed the lie that Thomas Hamilton tortured John Brown to prove nearly two centuries ago: that black skin is thicker than white skin.

This disconnect allows scientists, doctors and other medical providers — and those training to fill their positions in the future — to ignore their own complicity in health care inequality and gloss over the internalized racism and both conscious and unconscious bias that drive them to go against their very oath to do no harm.

The centuries-old belief in racial differences in physiology has continued to mask the brutal effects of discrimination and structural inequities, instead placing blame on individuals and their communities for statistically poor health outcomes. Rather than conceptualizing race as a risk factor that predicts disease or disability because of a fixed susceptibility conceived on shaky grounds centuries ago, we would do better to understand race as a proxy for bias, disadvantage and ill treatment. The poor health outcomes of black people, the targets of discrimination over hundreds of years and numerous generations, may be a harbinger for the future health of an increasingly diverse and unequal America.

Bias In Medicine: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TATSAHJKRd8&fbclid=IwAR0kxDBktZYj4jJDYTYa6IFgBvmmRzRE3uhjgGJOR8i4r9Y-hvcQatHwSvA

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Racial Bias in Voices: Linguistic Profiling

• “linguistic profiling”
  • Documented by John Baugh, a linguist at Washington University
  • Late 1980s Baugh made hundreds of phone calls to landlords
    • Who listed apartments in the San Francisco area
  • He greeted each landlord with the same line:
    • “Hello, I’m calling about the apartment you have advertised in the paper”
  • He alternated between using an
    • African-American accent
    • Mexican-American accent
    • His natural accent
    • what he called professional standard English
• Landlords in white areas far less responsive with his black or Latino accent
  • One white community, landlords offered to show him the apartment
    • 70% of the time when he used his standard-English voice
    • Less than 30% of the time when he spoke in a black or Latino dialect.
  • Baugh’s research proved racism extends further thanface-to-face interactions

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DYSA Linguistic profiling — John Baugh

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Talking White/Code Switching

Code Switching

• Code-switching
  • Interacting in different ways depending on social context
    • Due to structural inequality and centuries of segregation
      • different cultural norms & ways of speaking emerged forwhites/blacks
    • Because dominant culture is white
      • Whiteness internalized into institutions as natural, normal, legitimate
    • There’s more incentive for people of color to code-switch
      • To adapt to the dominant culture to improve their prospects
    • White people rarely feel this same pressure in their daily lives

Source: Culture on the Edge: Whose Switch is a Switch?

The Cost of Code Switching | Chandra Arthur | TEDxOrlando

Further Reading

Business Insider: ‘Sorry to Bother You’ is right — minorities are judged by the sound of their voice, and there’s science to prove it

Daily Beast: Black And Biracial Americans Wouldn’t Need To Code-Switch If We Lived In A Post-Racial Society

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Racial Bias in Schools

Black students represent 16% of student enrollment but:

• they make up nearly 50% of suspensions
• three times more likely to be suspended than white students even when their infractions are similar
• black students represent 16% of student enrollment
• black students are half as likely as white students to be assigned to gifted programs, even when they have comparably high test scores

Black Girls are suspended 6x more than white girls for similar offenses

PUSHOUT: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

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Let Her Learn: A Toolkit to Stop School Push Out For Girls of Color

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Let Her Learn:  Join the Fight to Stop School Pushout

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NeaToday: When School Dress Codes Discriminate

“While a dress code is supposed to make the school environment more conducive to learning, it frequently does the opposite…

‘White Male Default’

Kutzer says that she will only “dress code” students if their clothing is clearly so tight it is uncomfortable. Her school follows “standard school attire,” (SSA) so students wear uniforms. On laundry day, however, some students show up without. Other student’s families can’t afford to keep up with their growing children, so their uniforms are ill-fitting.

“We are told by our administrators to send non-compliance issues to the office, but I only refer kids who are clearly wearing too tight or uncomfortable clothing, and I send them to the nurse, who keeps a stash of extra clothing for this type of situation,” explains Kutzer.

The high school attended by her daughter, however, uses a dress code policy rather than the SSA. Kutzer noticed that it essentially targets female and minority students—the focus being on on parts of the female anatomy, like backs, shoulders, and legs.

“Targeting styles of clothing that are mostly associated with a particular minority group is discriminatory. When styles such as ‘sagging pants’ are the issue, we are putting a burden predominantly on black males,” says Kutzer.

She calls this the “white male default,” a common trend for school dress codes. “Dressing as most white young men do seems to be what is encouraged.’

In 17-year-old Maddie Reeser’s Baltimore City public school, it’s the black girls at her school who are the most frequently dress coded—a double discrimination. “My white friends rarely get sent to the office, but my black friends do quite often,” says Reeser.

Another student said she brought up this issue to a male administrator, who told her it was “because white girls don’t have as much to show.” The student says this comment made her feel uncomfortable, let along failing to address the inequality.

Despite the fact that Reeser’s school has a uniform, she and her peers still faced the same issues that Belsham described at her Duval County school. “The rule should be based on the clothes, not how they fit, because it’s different for each person,” says Belsham.

Despite the rules being the same for every girl, teachers end up enforcing the rules more strictly with black females, and in a way that is humiliating.

Many dress codes can cause black students to fall behind academically, according to a 2018 National Women’s Law Center study. Looking at public schools in the District of Columbia, the report found that three in four D.C. public high school dress codes say students can be pulled out of class or school for dress code violations.

“It’s outrageous that girls are losing critical class time simply for what they are wearing,” said NWLC Education Fellow and report co-author, Kayla Patrick. “This sends a disturbing message to all students: What a girl looks like is more important than what she learns and thinks. No girl should ever have to forfeit her education because her shirt is the wrong color or she has a hole in her jeans.”

Dress Code Discrimination

• A 2018 study by the National Women’s Law Center found that
  • Black girls often singled out by unfair dress codes
    • Which can cause them to fall behind in school
• Targeting styles associated with a particular minority group is discriminatory
  • Styles such as ‘sagging pants’ are putting a burden predominantly on black males
  • White male default is the common trend for school dress codes
    • Dressing as most white young men do seems to be what is encouraged

6-year-old boy with locs turned away by school

The Psychology of Black Hair | Johanna Lukate | TEDxCambridgeUniversity

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Black Women Share Their Hair Stories ft. Amandla Stenberg

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“California lawmakers have passed a bill protecting Black people from hair discrimination, potentially making it the first state to do so.

The state Assembly passed the CROWN Act on Thursday, two months after it passed in the state Senate. It now heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk for signing.

The legislation, proposed by state Sen. Holly Mitchell (D), a Black woman, would outlaw policies that punish Black employees and K-12 students for wearing their natural hair. Workplaces and public schools would be prohibited from enforcing grooming policies that disproportionately affect people of color, specifically Black people who wear braids, dreadlocks and Afros.

Historically, Black men and women are reprimanded in workplaces and classrooms nationwide for wearing hairstyles unique to their culture. Society has often viewed what’s acceptable for Black people through a white, Eurocentric lens, labeling locs and Afros as unprofessional or “unkempt.”

“Eurocentric standards of beauty have established the very underpinnings of what was acceptable and attractive in the media, in academic settings and in the workplace,” said Mitchell. “So even though African Americans were no longer explicitly excluded from the workplace, Black features and mannerisms remained unacceptable and ‘unprofessional.’”

Mitchell proposed the bill after Chastity Jones, a Black woman from Alabama, asked the U.S. Supreme Court last year to hear her case about a company that rescinded her job offer because she would not cut her dreadlocks.

Under the California Fair Employment and Housing Act, it’s illegal to discriminate in employment practices based on certain protected categories, including race. Mitchell’s bill would provide that the definition of race under this law also include traits historically associated with race, such as hair texture and protective styles.

California would become the first state to ban natural hair discrimination. New York City implemented such a ban in February, saying hairstyles are protected under the city’s anti-discrimination laws because trying to control Black hair is considered a form of racism.”  The Conscious Kid

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Further Reading

NBC: New York is second state to ban discrimination based on natural hairstyles

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Black Body Shaming

The scholarship of Sabrina Strings and Amy Farrell have made clear the ways in which Western racial heirarchies have been mobilized to stigmatize fatness through associating it with Blackness and Indigeneity. This allowed fatness to enter social consciousness stereotyped as inferior, as ugly, as unintelligent—an extension of the stereotypes placed on Black & Indigenous embodied subjects in order to justify global anti-Blackness, enslavement, genocide & disposession.
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These white supremacist values of not only thinness but lightness as a moral virtue persist today and are the primary justifications for fat stigma, under guises of health or—for those who are more honest with themselves—Western beauty ideals.
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Centuries after these legacies, navigating them differently herself, fat, Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet Audre Lorde asked her readers “What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face? What woman’s terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?” This is a question we must continue to ask ourselves: both those in fat community whose politics do not extend beyond body size, as well as thin queers and people of color who are not challenging their own internalized fatphobia, of the fatphobia of their peers and community.
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Fat liberation is not a temporal location where we all ‘feel beautiful’ or ‘love our bodies’. Fat liberation is a horizon where embodied difference is embraced as value neutral, where bodily heirarchies founded on anti-Blackness, Indigenous dispossession and Western values are undone. Fat liberation, like Black liberation, is all of our work, and cannot be achieved without a fundamental social reorganization that values Black & Indigenous sovereignty.
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To hear more, listen to this episode of @womanofsizepod featuring yours truly!

Source: Caleb Luna

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Wear Your Voice Mag: White Supremacy, Colonialism and Fatphobia are Inherently Tied to Each Other

Everything that we know about “obesity” is an indictment on white supremacy, and everything about who we listen to regarding it is bullshit. The centering of whiteness, especially white women, in the “Body Positivity Movement” recently led Rebel Wilson to tell an egregious lie about being the first fat woman to star in a romantic comedy and then block every Black person who tried to tell her the truth, that plus-sized Black women have starred in romantic comedies before. Women like Queen Latifah and Mo’Nique. But Rebel doubled down.

Fat White Women like Rebel Wilson don’t see Fat Black Women as forces of body positivity or plus-size representation because they view Blackness in itself as “large”. Blackness is already big, vast, and something they want to confine, so they make it both a boogie man and a invisibility cloak. They see Blackness as being beastlike, so to be large and Black isn’t defying expectations. In an odd way, it makes our fatness nonconsequential to them, because for them, their bodies defy the dainty expectations of a white, Western femininity. To them, that is braver than being fat and Black. Welcome to the politics of “taking up space.”

That’s why they call the cops on small Black children and clutch their purses when they see even small framed Black men. That’s why they won’t acknowledge when large Black women already did something they’re calling themselves brave and pioneering for just now doing. They take space from us to make room for themselves. Our bravery doesn’t count. It can’t count when even the smallest parts of us are a threat.

There’s a “historical view of Black Women as bodies without minds that underlies their invisibility” (Thompson, A Hunger So Wide and Deep, 15). Black women are painted as simultaneously enormous and non existent, our vastness is an enigma that is demonized through purposeful misperception that aims to project the thought that we lack a certain level of conscious deliberacy to understand and liberate the space our existence takes up. Black as big, as beast, as fat, is seen as a default experience for us. In the minds eye of white women like Rebel Wilson, that “default” lacks validity on the rubric of bravery.

Fat Black women are tired of our bodies and experiences paving roads and painting it with blood just for white women like Rebel Wilson to trapeze down the pathway and ask if the stories she walks over “really” count. They do. Fat Black Women are the original recipients of “fat bitch” retorts when we dare exercise our right to choose and our right to exist. Whether it was fighting off slave owning forefathers, white men that would later be called medical pioneers for infringing on our largeness and reproductive organs, white women that gawked at our physiques while their accompanying men dreamed of other ways to violate us.

Fatphobia is indelibly tied to anti-Blackness. Fat Black women are assigned roles where other people bring “purpose” to us to determine our usefulness, never an autonomous validity. The mammy archetype which bleeds over to freudian sexual fetishism around fat Black femme bodies is another agent that makes our presence on a socio-political front more amenable for erasure and labor. Perhaps this image of impressionability is a result of how fat Black women have had to attempt to diminish themselves in order to navigate certain social and systemic scenes.

“The one thing that I do recognize in myself is the need to soften myself for white comfort. I am a fat dark black woman and to some white people that in itself is threatening. So I make sure I’m friendly as to not make them uncomfortable, because when white people are uneasy we pay for it in blood. On the flip side of that I’m seen as a mammy to some white people. Someone they can cast their cares on and be overly comfortable with because I only exist to pacify their fragile feelings and labor them on my back all the way to the promise land.” Brandi Wharton, founder of Magical Fat Black Femmes.

In all of its ironies, Fat Black Women work overtime to account for our demonization and devaluation only to continue to be pushed aside even within narratives that not only involve us, but have us as their catalytic origin. Marginalizing and dehumanizing largeness is unequivocally connected with Blackness, as often times indigenous Africans, whether on the continent or internationally trafficked to be enslaved, are seen as larger, more brutish, more primitive, more able to carry profitable workloads within the intimate and overarching manifestations of capitalism.

In the western world, the attitudes on largeness have always been reactive to Blackness. The more we assimilated, the more we took upon these attitudes that fatness was something separate from ourselves, from our society, and our understanding of our bodies. Now that we are seeing more fat white people, the same way that we are seeing more white drug addicts, we are calling to reform the social treatment of, and change the ways that we approach these fat people, without spending as much necessary time to dissect the root: imperialism and capitalism as they collude with and for whiteness. Dismissal of the root cause is what propels fat white women of shallow understanding (like Rebel Wilson and Tess Holliday) to the limelight of a body positivity movement that has turned to ultimately uphold white ideals. Their whiteness softens the public’s apprehension to praising fat bodies.

Fatness is seen as a character flaw, same as addiction; something that needs reform. It is likened to drug abuse, but the abhorred substance is assumed to be food. There are, of course, parallels between the way that people use food and how they use drugs, as methods of self-medicating. There are also parallels in who we believe are qualified to speak upon these experiences, and it is rarely ever people that experienced the brunt of this phenomenon. Or if they have experienced it, they aim to get a spokesperson that seems to have transcended such oppression(s), like formerly fat people.

There were times, and in lesser known ways still existing in certain areas, where fatness was not seen as a reason for ostracism, but a reason for celebration and symbolizing the best that humans have to offer: wealth. In absurd opposition to the way Western forms of capitalism views fatness as a failure (despite the characteristic gluttony of the 1%), in pre imperialist economies, wealth was still prized and (women especially) being of large size was seen as a harbinger aesthetic of comfortable and enviable financial ability.

Pre-Abrahamic/colonial times in Africa, and even in Pagan European beliefs, fatness was seen as a symbol of fertility and beauty as well as wealth. Signifying  abundance, happiness of life, the ability of progression and survival. The Crusades of Christianity as a tool of the insidious construct of whiteness worked to replace global indigenous beliefs and the body acceptances within them, instead linking our bodies, their abilities and avatars, with sin.

“The oldest known images and figures of deity in the mother-loving world, were of fat, black, knotty haired femme figures. We know this. And I ain’t talking a lil’  fat. I’m talking big titties, on belly, on thighs! Everything just-a touchin’ and hugging up on itself…IN ADDITION TO the ASS (which is ever so objectified and isolated in the current culturally agreed upon concept of beauty. Big ass is sexy, but let the back or thighs that support the Ass be big TOO, and the whole sex factor goes out the window? Bish, thats petty, sterile, surgical, separatist european elitist thinking if you ask me).” Daizy October Latifah, The Afro Mystic, Black Belt Hoodoo Practitioner

The time of fatness as a fall from divinity and a life well-lived is as much of an indictment on Abrahamic religions (namely Christianity) as it is capitalism. Especially since Christianity has been used as one of the four horsemen of anti-Blackness. Deviation from indigenous belief, that has always been more humane and progressive than white employment of Christianity, was a purposeful tool in the societal disconnect from the fat Black body. Insidious enough to even encroach upon the psyche of many Black people, some who believe that we’ve always been “bigger”, but “not that big”. Not noticing that we have always been “that big” and their views on our in-group largeness is merely symptomatic of internalized anti-Blackness.

“‘Our ancestors weren’t obese…’

This ancestor says otherwise. I found this photo taken by Napoleon Bonaparte and it’s from the late 1800s. Fuck the photographer, and all gratitude and love for this ancestral mother. [Magical Fat Black Femmes] always been here and we always will be.” Courtney Alexander, Dust II Onyx Tarot Deck creator

The idea of fat immobile bodies that are a drain on society and need to be eradicated is concurrent and congruent with the idea that Black bodies are a burden and need to be eradicated. Since they cannot rid the world of large bodies, they’ll attempt to colonize our understating of those bodies and to continue to push Blackness into a infinite abyss. For all their revisionist attempts, Black fatness has always been here, and is here to stay.

Some customs praising fatness still exist. Within the Efik people, along with some other Nigerian ethnicities, “fattening” is often a pre marriage custom for girls to undergo to enhance their allure as brides. During fattening the girls are fed foods high in fat and are promoted to live more sedentary lives than they did prior. “Fattening” is seen as something that both prepares pelvic areas for possible childbirth and as a way to have the girls turned women exude status. Status being of someone that is well taken care of and is of wealthy means.

“Among the Ibibio people and Efiks of Cross River state, it is compulsory for a girl to be fattened, no matter how short the period of seclusion might be. It is commonly said that no matter how charming, succulent and beautiful a girl might look or how rich and wealthy her parents might be, no eligible son of Ibibio land dares marry a girl that is not fattened. It is always a thing of pride for a girl to be fattened in Ibibioland before marriage so that she can fit in well among other fattened ladies as a wife… They do discuss their life experiences about fattening seclusion as house wives. It will also be a thing of mockery and reproach among relations and friends of the husband whose wife is not fattened.”

This fattening tradition, a custom carried over from pre-colonial times, upholds fatness as a physical attribute that is not ostracized, but celebrated, expected, and a rite of inclusion.

Our current metrics of who is deserving of visibility deviates from that remnant of bodily inclusion.

People that are thinner, smaller, whiter, and more aligned to imperialist conventional beauty standards tend to either completely miss, or not spend enough time expounding upon the fact, that everything we know about our bodies are white-centered. We are seen as unqualified to not only interpret our exclusive experiences as fat people, but also the experiences that we share with others. At several rallies, marches, panels, etc, around feminism, blackness, LGBTQ+ concerns, poverty, fat people are taken less seriously when they speak about issues.

Just as our society does not trust fat people, it does not trust Black people to speak about our marginalization as a phenomenon that lives within reason and logic. The litmus for which empiricism is measured is white. Women like Rebel Wilson will expect me to watch her on screen and think that I, a black fat queer woman should be grateful that a fat white woman “bravely chartered” territories that my grandmother and her mothers already chartered for me, and themselves.

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Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years.

There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago.

Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals―where fat bodies were once praised―showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority.

The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

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Back to Top

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Misrepresentation in Media

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Root: Throw Away the Script: How Media Bias Is Killing Black America”

““Biased coverage perpetuates a dangerous cycle, by helping to create and affirm explicit and implicit biases in the minds of audiences,” Robinson tells The Root. “People in everyday situations—personal and professional—then act out those biases, treating black people as if the media’s stereotypes are real.”

If institutionalized racism is the poison, then mainstream media is the hypodermic needle that pushes it deeply into the veins of society, rendering the humanity of black people invisible. And an increased awareness tells us that some media professionals don’t even realize they’re dealers. Relying on a well-worn template that frames black people as thugs and cultural malignancies by default is not news; it is propaganda that serves only to reaffirm for many Americans what they think they know about black people.

And as long as media continues to stick to a script influenced by racial bias, our communities will continue to pay the price.”

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Leigh Donaldson: When the Media Misrepresents Black Men, the Effects are Felt in the Real World

In a 2011 study, Media Representations & Impact on the Lives of Black Men and Boys, conducted by The Opportunity Agenda, negative mass media portrayals were strongly linked with lower life expectations among black men. These portrayals, constantly reinforced in print media, on television, the internet, fiction shows, print advertising and video games, shape public views of and attitudes toward men of color. They not only help create barriers to advancement within our society, but also “make these positions seem natural and inevitable”…

…What we are also seeing play out among both white and black people is a hyped view of black boys and men being coupled with criminality and violence, a lack of empathy for black men and boys in trouble, less attention being paid to the bigger picture of social and economic disparity and increased public support of more rigorous approaches to social ills, such as police aggression and longer jail sentences…

…Media images and words are known, according to the Opportunity Agenda study, to have the greatest impact on the perceptions of people with less real-world experience. People who have never interacted with a black family in their communities more easily embrace what the media tells them. The most negative impact is upon black individuals themselves. Derogatory portrayals can demoralize and reduce self-esteem. In worst case scenarios, black boys and men actually internalize biases and stereotypes and, through their behavior, reinforce and even perpetuate the misrepresentations. They become victims of perception…

…Not only does the media’s reluctance to provide more balanced perspectives of our African-American male population worsen cultural division among all people, it enables judges to hand out harsher sentences, companies to deny jobs, banks to decline loans and the police to shoot indiscriminately.

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Yes! Magazine: 10 Examples That Prove White Privilege Exists in Every Aspect Imaginable

6. I Have the Privilege of Soaking in Media Blatantly Biased Toward My Race

Everyday Feminism writer Maisha Z. Johnson deepened my understanding of this bias that rears its unwelcome, White-loving head, for example, in pictures that humanize White killers while simultaneously dehumanizing victims of Color:

Two sets of pictures, one with and one without mugshots—for the same crime, covered by the same reporter (on the same day)—further illustrate this bias:

And these biases are besides a media that, according to Vanity Fair, continue to be overwhelmingly whitewashed (not to mentioned malewashed, straightwashed, and youthwashed).

If you are still not convinced, check out actor Dylan Marron’s website, Every Single Word, through which the Venezuelan American has edited mainstream movies so that only the characters of color speak. Even the two-hour-and-19 minute-movie, Noah—set in a region filled with Brown people—is reduced to just eleven seconds.

More proof is just one Google image search away. Google “beauty” and count the people of color. Here’s what my search found (and notice the glaring lack of Idris Elba images):

And if the media are not blatantly biased, remember that they are covering a blatantly biased country, one that views the epidemic of heroin, used overwhelmingly by White people, as a “health problem” instead of a “crime problem.”

Apparently, the addictions of White people merit a “gentler war on drugs,” not the three-strikes laws and mandatory minimums that have devastated Black and brown communities.”

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The Problem w/ White Beauty Standards | Decoded | MTV News

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Colorism/Shadism

Teaching Tolerance: “What’s ‘Colorism’?”

“Within-group and between-group prejudice in favor of lighter skin color—what feminist author Alice Walker calls “colorism”—is a global cultural practice. Emerging throughout European colonial and imperial history, colorism is prevalent in countries as distant as Brazil and India. Its legacy is evident in forums as public as the television and movie industries, which prefer to cast light-skinned people of color, and as private as the internalized thoughts of some Latino, South-Asian or black parents who hope their babies grow up light-skinned so their lives will be “just a little bit easier.”

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Further Reading

PEW: Hispanics with darker skin are more likely to experience discrimination than those with lighter skin

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Misogynoir

• Combines
  • “misogyny” – contempt or prejudice against women
  • “noir” – French word for black
• Particular racialized sexism towards black women
  • Coined by the queer Black feminist Moya Bailey
  • Only applicable to Black women
  • Particular racialized sexism against black women
    • Convergence of anti-Blackness and misogyny
• Common Misgynoir Tropes
  • The Sassy Black Woman
    • Dehumanizes black women to catch phrases and comedic actions
  • The Hypersexual Jezebel
    • Shames black sexuality and victim blames white sexism and rape culture
  • The Angry Black Woman
    • Discredits legitimate discomfort by assuming black women just like to complain/be angry
    • Values white comfort above black discomfort
    • “It’s a tactic used in order to belittle our valid anger by portraying it as an inherent character flaw, rather than a justified reaction to circumstances.” Kesiena Boom, 4 Tired Tropes That Perfectly Explain What Misogynoir Is – And How You Can Stop It
  • The Strong Black Woman
    • Forces black women to carry everyone’s emotional labor while hiding their own

What “Misogynoir” Means . . . and Why It Has to End

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Source: michaelabalogun

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Philogynoir: Misogynoir | What is it?

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“The “Angry Dark Skin Friend” (Yeah, Let’s talk about that…)

There’s a common pattern in many forms of black media where there are 2 black female characters who are friends or sisters, one being lighter in skintone, while the other is darker. Even though darkskin and lightskin women form friendships all the time, the way they’re commonly depicted in Black Media is what stands out and perpetuates certain stereotypes:

1. in the film/show/etc, the main character/focus of the 2 is typical the lighter skin woman

2. this makes the darker skin woman the “sidekick”

3. the lighter skin woman is portrayed as prettier, nicer, “classier”, more reserved, and/or overall more likeable and desirable

4. the darker skin woman is portrayed as shady, mean, loud, desperate, abrasive, aggressive, and/or overall less attractive (many would say “ghetto”)

These photos show just a few examples that came to my mind…

Coming to America (1988) – The darker skin sister was more desperate for a man, chasing after Prince Akeem, Simi, and even her sister’s ex-fiancé. In the frame of society’s norms, this would be seen as “fast”, “tacky” or lacking in morals, which would therefore, make her less fitting to be a wife.

House Party (1990) – The darker skin friend (AJ Johnson) was the louder, more outgoing friend who was ready to date both Kid & Play, whereas Tisha Campbell’s character was more timid, and ended up being Kid’s “better suited” love interest.

Martin (1992-1997) – Once again, Tisha Campbell is playing the main female character, Gina Waters, and love interest to the main character, Martin Payne. While Gina is depicted as a kinder, classier, professional, “wifey” type, her best friend/assistant Pamela James, played by Tichina Arnold, is depicted as a loud, angry, man-less, berating black woman with “buckshots” and “beedeebees” in her “horse” hair, who was constantly butting heads with Martin.

Proud Family (2001-2005) – Penny, the lighter skin girl, was the main character with Dijonay, the darker skin girl, as the friend/sidekick. Dijonay had a less “traditional” name, as did her many siblings, was portrayed as louder, having more attitude, and was constantly chasing after Sticky, a boy who not only didn’t want her, but preferred the lighter skin friend, Penny.

Rick Ross’ Music Video for “Aston Martin Music” (2010) – In the early portion of the video, we see a young Ricky out on the block with other neighborhood kids, dreaming about owning a luxury car one day. Among the kids there’s 2 young girls, one darker skin and the other lighter skin. While the darker skin girl is quick to berate him and tear down his dreams of ever being that successful, raising her voice and waving her finger in his face, the lighter skin girl is quick to reassure him and support his dream. Once again, this display reaffirms the stereotype of darker skin women being mean, bitter, and angry, while lighter skin women are kinder, sweeter, and happier.” Ron Jouri Soujiro Johnson

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AJ+ Is The ‘Strong Black Woman’ Stereotype Hurting Black Women?

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Patriarchy and White Supremacy

• Widespread rape of slaves of color
  • White patriarchy created hypersexual black women stereotypes to cover up their mass sexual violence
    • By claiming they were the victims of oversexed black women
  • “aggressive hypersexual African femininity portrayals served both to exonerate White men of their inhumane rages and to mask their human attractions to the supposed beast-like women” Ibram Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning
• While using narratives protecting white women’s “purity”
  • As a major justification for enforcing white supremacy
    • Through slavery, the lynching of 1000s, miscegenation laws, enslaving their own mixed race children for profit, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and the systemic racism still felt today
• Hypersexual stereotypes still used today to discredit WOC
  • Patriarchy used to enforce white supremacy
  • “Like raped prostitutes, Black women’s credibility had been stolen by racist beliefs in their hypersexuality.” Ibram Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning

“rape was not merely a result of sexual desire and opportunity, or simply a form of punishment and racial domination, but instead encompassed all of these dimensions as part of the identity of white masculinity” Rachel A. Feinstein, When Rape was Legal

Ocasio-Cortez responding to the Daily Caller, a white “conservative” media outlet (founded by a white supremacist propagandist, Tucker Carlson) releasing a fake nude picture of Rep AOC to discredit her progressive activism

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Further Reading

Everyday Feminism: 4 Racist Stereotypes White Patriarchy Invented to ‘Protect’ White Womanhood

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Misrepresentation in Children’s Media

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Vox: I never noticed how racist so many children’s books are until I started reading to my kids

“But a lot of these books, 35 years on, are startlingly racist, sexist, or culturally insensitive. I was enjoying our chapter-a-day of A Cricket in Times Square, for example, until I got to the stereotypical Asian dialect of the cricket-cage seller. I finesse this by simply refusing to read the dialogue in the spirit it’s intended — in our house, Sai Fong sounds like a middle-aged woman with a West Virginia accent and pretty good grammar.

The Five Chinese Brothers, a tale of five identical brothers with slits for eyes, illustrated with broad watercolor strokes of yellow, joined Little Black Sambo in the drawer. In The Secret Garden, Mary’s maid says to her, “I thought you was a black too,” and Mary stamps her foot and says, “You thought I was a native! You dared! You don’t know anything about natives! They are not people. …” I skipped that whole book, setting it on a shelf for later, noting that it would have to be accompanied by an appropriate conversation about colonialism and ugly views of native peoples. Of the very few titles on my childhood bookshelf that featured minority characters, only Corduroy and A Snowy Day have stayed in our rotation.

Even the stories about families — wholesome, all-American families — I now see through a different prism. A large number of the books I read in the ’70s and ’80s were written in the ’50s and ’60s. A surprising number equip the mother of the story with an apron and a broom, and confine her activities to the kitchen: In Bread and Jam for Frances, Frances’s mother is clad in a ruffled apron, tirelessly preparing all the meals Frances won’t eat. Lyle the Crocodile cooks with Mrs. Primm, also in an apron, while Mr. Primm looks on.

Harry the Dirty Dog is tended to by a mistress with a broom, in an apron. Sylvester’s mother, also armed with an apron and a broom, stands by the dad in the wing chair. Ramona Quimby’s mother begins the series as a housewife in 1955; in the mid-’70s she goes back to work; by the mid-’80s she’s pregnant again and quits. (Evidently Mrs. Quimby starts with the problem with no name, transitions to The Second Shift, and finishes with the opt-out revolution.)

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Atlantic: Why the lack of diversity in children’s literature is damaging

All the mothers in the kitchen and dads in wing chairs present a fantasy world of white, four-person families, so far removed from my own only-child, single-working-mother childhood that I internalized the books (and the era’s TV shows) as normal and us as the aberration. This seems to be how many children who don’t see themselves represented in the dominant culture respond: Young adult novelist I. W. Gregorio is a founding member and VP of development for We Need Diverse Books. She told me that the lack of Asian characters in her childhood books, coupled with growing up in a predominantly white town, meant that she accepted that erasure as normal.

“I turned to books to figure out how to navigate life and relationships,” Gregorio said. “And as a result of reading so many books with white characters, I internalized that role. I became a ‘banana’: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Self-hating.”

Varian Johnson, who wrote The Great Greene Heist and is black, says, “You walk into a bookstore and it’s a sea of white. It’s tough when you’re not represented out there in the world—it makes you feel very strange about yourself, like you don’t matter.”

Johnson reports that seeing a photo of Walter Dean Myers, author of young adult classics like Monster, was a revelation: ‘It was the first time I saw that, oh, black people can care about and write books too.”

Children’s books are indeed relentlessly white. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin, reports that roughly 3 percent of children’s books published in 2014 were about Africans or African Americans; about 8 percent were about any kind of minorities. Lest you think this is due to so many kids’ books featuring trains and badgers and crocodiles, the director, Kathleen Horning, addresses those concerns here: In 2013, about 10 percent of books about human beings (as opposed to trains or badgers) featured people of color.

Those numbers don’t reflect any improvement over the past couple of decades, either. Horning told me, “The numbers have been fairly stagnant over 20 years. They go up one year and down the next. We haven’t seen a steady increase.”

Getting my boys to read books that feature minority protagonists can be challenging, simply because there aren’t that many: In a search through our local bookstore’s children’s section, I found several books that explicitly addressed race as a theme, but very few that depicted black children, for example, just doing ordinary things.

And while there’s no shortage of books featuring female protagonists, it might be a hurdle to convince my boys to read Little Women instead of My Side of the Mountain, a “boys’” book. The YA writer Shannon Hale notes that when she speaks at school assemblies, the administrations often will grant girls permission to attend her lectures, but not boys. For male authors writing books with male protagonists, the school will allow both boys and girls to attend.

Hale writes: “[T]he idea that girls should read about and understand boys but that boys don’t have to read about girls, that boys aren’t expected to understand and empathize with the female population of the world … this belief leads directly to rape culture.” It’s not a far leap to imagine that white children reading only about white children will stunt their empathy for people of other races.”

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The Racist History of Cartoons

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Dr. Seuss was also kind of racist | New York Post

SLJ New Study Published on Racism and Dr. Seuss

Research on Diversity in Youth Literature (RDYL) has published a new study on racism in Dr. Seuss books. In “The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books,” published in the February issue of RDYL, researchers Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens looked at 50 books and more than 2,200 characters written by Theodor Geisel over 70 years “to evaluate the claims that his children’s books are anti-racist,” according to the paper.

Dr. Seuss’s stories—such as The Sneetches and Horton Hears a Who!—are often considered to be tales of tolerance and acceptance. Even those who admit to racist depictions in some early political cartoons often excuse Theodor Geisel as a man whose behavior was a “product of his time.” They speak of him as someone who rejected those racist or anti-Semitic beliefs later in life. Ishizuka [who is a cousin of SLJ executive editor Kathy Ishizuka] and Stephens put the legend to the test by thoroughly examining the texts and character depictions.

The researchers looked at how and to what extent non-white characters are depicted in Dr. Seuss’ children’s books.

“We designed our study to provide important insights into the manner and extent to which White characters and characters of color are portrayed, and assess their implications to the development and reinforcement of racial bias in young children,” the paper said.

What the authors found did not support Dr. Seuss’s most ardent supporters:

“In the fifty Dr. Seuss children’s books, 2,240 human characters are identified. Of the 2,240 characters, there are forty-five characters of color representing two percent of the total number of human characters. The eight books featuring characters of color include: ​The Cat’s Quizzer: Are YOU Smarter Than the Cat in the Hat?;Scrambled Eggs Super!; Oh, the Places You’ll Go!; On Beyond Zebra; Because a Little Bug Went Ka-choo; If I Ran the Zoo; And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street; ​and​ Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? “Of the forty-five characters of color, forty-three are identified as having characteristics aligning with the definition of Orientalism. Within the Orientalist definition, fourteen people are identified by stereotypical East Asian characteristics and twenty-nine characters are wearing turbans. Characters aligned with Orientalism are sometimes attributed an ethno-racial identity, but are generally situated within a colorblind lens, often from an unspecified nationality, race, or ethnicity. Only two of the forty-five characters are identified in the text as “African” and both align with the theme of anti-Blackness. “White supremacy is seen through the centering of Whiteness and White characters, who comprise 98% (2,195 characters) of all characters. Notably, every character of color is male. Males of color are only presented in subservient, exotified, or dehumanized roles. This also remains true in their relation to White characters. Most startling is the complete invisibility and absence of women and girls of color across Seuss’ entire children’s book collection.”

When humans weren’t involved, the findings weren’t any more positive.

“In addition, some of Dr. Seuss’ most iconic books feature animal or non-human characters that transmit Orientalist, anti-Black, and White supremacist messaging through allegories and symbolism. These books include ​The Cat in the Hat​; ​The Cat in the Hat Comes Back​; ​The Sneetches​; and ​Horton Hears a Who!”

In posting the paper on social media, the researchers wrote, “Almost every book and biography on Seuss’s work to-date has been done by white researchers. As scholars of color, this article is unique in that it is written by members of groups Seuss explicitly degraded and dehumanized across his hundreds of racist works. We also write from our positionality as scholar-parents of children of color, and discuss how that informs our work and advocacy—not only a personal level, but a national policy level.”

This research builds on previous work by the paper’s authors. They are not the only scholars to look at the issue of Dr. Seuss and racism. In 2017, Kansas State University English professor Phillip Nel published a book Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism in Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books, which examines The Cat in the Hat ’s roots in blackface minstrelsy.

As more have broached the topic, objections have surfaced and some changes have been made in reading programs. Last year, the National Education Association’s national Read Across America program moved away from its decades-old familiar Dr. Seuss theme to focus on diversity.

The entire RDYL paper is available to download for free. RDYL is a peer-reviewed, online, open-access journal hosted by St. Catherine University’s Master of Library and Information Science Program and University Library. It is published twice a year.

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Media Representation: Hollywood

• Top grossing films of 2014
  • 1% of the speaking roles went to White Americans
  • 5% went to Black Americans #OscarsSoWhite
• Latinx Americans
  • 6% of the population
    • make up just 4.9% of speaking roles.
• Race in the Writer’s Room Study
  • A study of 1,678 first-run episodes from all 234 series airing on 18 broadcast, platforms during the 2016-17 television season found:
    • 91% of show runners (person with creative control) are white
    • 86% of writers are white
    • 2/3 of shows had no black writers at all
    • 17% of shows had just one black writer
    • The ultimate result of this exclusion is
      • The widespread reliance on black stereotypes to drive black character portrayals
        • Where black characters even exist at all
          • at best, “cardboard” characters, at worst, unfair, inaccurate and dehumanizing portrayals

Source: Hollywood Color of Change

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Color of Change: Race in the Writers’ Room: How Hollywood Whitewashes the Stories that Shape America

“This study considered 1,678 first-run episodes from all 234 of the original, scripted comedy and drama series airing or streaming on 18 broadcast, cable, and digital platforms during the 2016-17 television season. The report demonstrates that the executives running television platforms today—both traditional networks and emerging streaming sites—are not hiring Black showrunners, which results in excluding or isolating Black writers in writers’ rooms and in the creative process.

Over 90% of showrunners are white, two-thirds of shows had no Black writers at all, and another 17% of shows had just one Black writer. The ultimate result of this exclusion is the widespread reliance on Black stereotypes to drive Black character portrayals, where Black characters even exist at all—at best, “cardboard” characters, at worst, unfair, inaccurate and dehumanizing portrayals. Many other studies have shown how dangerous inaccurate portrayals can be—resulting in warped perceptions about Black people and Black communities that perversely inform the decisions of doctors, teachers, voters, police, judges and more.

The report also highlights a pattern of excluding women and people of color in hiring showrunners and writers, and clearly suggests that current industry “diversity” programs are not working to either create success tracks for talented people of color in the industry, or create the range of authentic representations and stories on television that we need to sustain a healthy society.

KEY FINDINGS

While the report presents many striking findings, a few stand out, providing an overall picture of the problem of Hollywood executives excluding people of color and women. For additional findings (e.g., the severe lack of Black writers on crime procedural shows), read the full report.

1. While two-thirds of all shows across 18 networks did not have any Black writers, and another 17% had just one Black writer, not all networks are the same with respect to exclusion.

AMC stands out as having the worst inclusion problem overall: both women and people of color, both showrunners and writers. Eight networks excluded Black showrunners and writers the most, while CW and CBS were notable for generally including women and people of color, while excluding Black talent specifically.

2 On the whole, the industry does not include people of color—91% of showrunners are white, and 86% of writers are white. 80% of showrunners are men.

3. Showrunner exclusion is particularly troubling because it leads to writer exclusion—while all Black showrunners include white writers in their rooms, white showrunners tend to exclude Black writers, with 69% of white showrunner shows having no Black writers at all.

4. As part of this first-of-its-kind study, we have created a definitive chart that breaks down inclusion and exclusion practices across 18 individual networks that have tremendous influence over the television landscape and the thoughts, feelings and perceptions of millions of viewers.

Writers Room Project Full Report

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Root: Cast of “Black Panther” on Why Black Superheroes Matter

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Further Readings

The Opportunity Agenda: Media Representations and Impact on the Lives of Black Men and Boys

Color of Change: NOT TO BE TRUSTED, Dangerous Levels of Inaccuracy in TV Crime Reporting in NYC

Prime Suspects: The Influence of Local Television News on the Viewing Public

HuffPost: 25 Times White Actors Played People Of Color And No One Really Gave A S**t

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Back to Top

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Misrepresentation in News

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• Black families represent 59% of the poor portrayed
  • but account for just 27% of Americans in poverty
• Whites families make up 17% of the poor portrayed
  • but make up 66% of the American poor
• Black people represent 37% of criminals shown in the news
  • but constitute 26% of those arrested on criminal charges
• White people represent 28% of criminals shown in the news
  • But constitute 77% of crime suspects
• Black people 3x more likely portrayed dependent on welfare
  • than white people
• Black fathers are shown spending time with their kids
  • almost half as often as white fathers

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WP: News media offers consistently warped portrayals of black families, study finds

If all you knew about black families was what national news outlets reported, you are likely to think African Americans are overwhelmingly poor, reliant on welfare, absentee fathers and criminals, despite what government data show, a new study says.

Major media outlets routinely present a distorted picture of black families — portraying them as dependent and dysfunctional — while white families are more likely to be depicted as sources of social stability, according to the report released Wednesday by Color of Change, a racial justice organization, and Family Story, an advocate of diverse family arrangements.

“This leaves people with the opinion that black people are plagued with self-imposed dysfunction that creates family instability and therefore, all their problems,” said Travis L. Dixon, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who conducted the study.

Such stereotypes fuel political rhetoric and inform public policy, such as Congress’s consideration to “gut social safety net programs,” he said. Stricter work requirements, drug testing and other welfare restrictions are likely to be supported by a public exposed to inaccurate portrayals of black families, the report said. Legislators can point to media coverage of black families in their zeal to further limit welfare programs and say, “It’s all their fault. They just need to get their ducks in a row,” Dixon said.

Poverty and welfare were not always stigmatized in the media as a predominantly black issue, the report said. White men who benefited from the anti-poverty programs in the 1920s and 1930s were typically thought of as having “run into hard luck” and just needed the support to “help them through the tough times,” it said.

Over time, however, political leaders and the media have “worked to pathologize black families in the American imagination to justify slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, widespread economic inequity and urban disinvestment — as well as to gain and maintain political and social power,” wrote Nicole Rodgers, founder of Family Story.

Researchers reviewed more than 800 local and national news stories and commentary pieces published or aired between January 2015 and December 2016, randomly sampling the most highly rated news programs for each of the major broadcast and cable networks. Those included ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

Also included in the study: newspapers of national influence such as The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune as well as regional newspapers, conservative websites such as Breitbart, and Christian news sources like the Christian Post.

The study concluded both ideologically driven news sources as well as traditional newspapers and broadcasts furthered false narratives about black families, helping to shape public assumptions that they are “uniquely and irrevocably pathological and undeserving,” Dixon said.

Black families represent 59 percent of the poor portrayed in the media, according to the analysis, but account for just 27 percent of Americans in poverty. Whites families make up 17 percent of the poor depicted in news media, but make up 66 percent of the American poor, the study said.

Black people are also nearly three times more likely than whites to be portrayed as dependent on welfare, the study showed. Black fathers were shown spending time with their kids almost half as often as white fathers.

Blacks represent 37 percent of criminals shown in the news, but constitute 26 percent of those arrested on criminal charges, the study said. In contrast, news media portray whites as criminals 28 percent of the time, when FBI crime reports show they make up 77 percent of crime suspects.

“There are dire consequences for black people when these outlandish archetypes rule the day: abusive treatment by police, less attention from doctors, harsher sentences from judges,” Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, wrote in the report.

Dixon said racial tropes of the absentee black father or family dysfunction were frequently invoked during new shows featuring political commentary. Pundits were often allowed to spout inaccurate generalizations about black families without being challenged by hosts.

“Let’s say the actual topic was the Black Lives Matter movement and police citizen interactions,” Dixon said. “This idea of the problematic black family would keep coming up, almost out of nowhere, even if the topic was not about the black family.”

The report makes several recommendations for the news industry, including setting stronger standards for sourcing information and experts, providing greater social and historical context, and including people of color in setting editorial standards.

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Myth of the Absent Black Father

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AJ+: The Myth Of The Absent Black Father

Daily Kos: The absent black father myth—debunked by CDC

We’ve been told, quite frequently and repeatedly that the problems in the black community that we’ve seen in Ferguson and Baltimore recently are not the fault of biased, paramilitary, paranoid and violent policing (even if the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that black people are three times more likely to be subject to law enforcement uses of force). They are not the fault of racist red-lining that created these impoverished neighborhoods in the first place. They are not the fault of bigoted lending and hiring practices that create roadblocks for those attempting to escape those neighborhoods. And the fact that black students are disciplined, suspended and expelled far more easily and quickly for the same or lesser offenses, isn’t the problem. None of that is the problem. Nope. All of that is just too bad. Life is tough all over. Lots of people have got lots of problems. No, instead we’ve heard that the welfare benefits in Baltimore are “too lucrative,” because when you give people nothing they somehow get more, somewhere. That businesses won’t invest in these neighborhoods until something is done about those darn teachers unions. That it’s because of “too many gay marriages.” That ISIS is using Baltimore to recruit blacks. And, of course, when all else fails, blame Obama. But what we’ve heard the most, is that the real problem is the Breakdown in the Black Family™. That too many black fathers have abandoned their children, allowing them to be raised by the streets like feral cats. They don’t learn morals, and they don’t learn values—so naturally police have to shoot them down like rabid, foaming dogs. Even when they’re unarmed. Even when they have their backs turned and are simply running away. It’s all just their own fault really. If only black fathers would spend as much time and energy on their kids as white fathers do. If only… Well, someone—the Centers for Disease Control—actually went to trouble of checking just how involved in their lives all fathers are, whether or not they are married to the mother of their children or live with them. What they found was that, in reality, black fathers are actually more attentive to their children than other fathers generally are.

Imagine that? Details over the flip.

Some of the relevant highlights from the CDC study as posted at Think Progress.

Considering the fact that “black fatherhood” is a phrase that is almost always accompanied by the word “crisis” in U.S. society, it’s understandable that the CDC’s results seem innovative. But in reality, the new data builds upon years of research that’s concluded that hands-on parenting is similar among dads of all races. There’s plenty of scientific evidence to bust this racially-biased myth. […] Although black fathers are more likely to live separately from their children—the statistic that’s usually trotted out to prove the parenting “crisis”—many of them remain just as involved in their kids’ lives. Pew estimates that 67 percent of black dads who don’t live with their kids see them at least once a month, compared to 59 percent of white dads and just 32 percent of Hispanic dads. And there’s compelling evidence that number of black dads living apart from their kids stems from structural systems of inequality and poverty, not the unfounded assumption that African-American men somehow place less value on parenting. Equal numbers of black dads and white dads tend to agree that it’s important to be a father who provides emotional support, discipline, and moral guidance. There’s one area of divergence in the way the two groups approach their parental responsibilities: Black dads are even more likely to think it’s important to financially provide for their children.

So, of course, parents should be involved in the lives of their children. Of course they should help guide them, give them a sense of morality, goals and direction. But that doesn’t require that the father necessarily be married to the mother. People like Donald Trump have certainly made that obvious. The nuclear family myth has long ago been blown into small dust-like bits. Many of us live in extended and blended house-holds within which we’ve all learned to adapt, and function and even thrive. Perhaps it’s time we stopped flogging the simplistic notion that all that truly plagues the black community is a lack of weddings. 12:03 PM PT: To be fair and complete, as pointed out in the comments, there is a significant difference in the rate of single-parent families across racial lines as this chart from the KidCount Datacenter shows here:

However this is actually the rate of marriages across racial groups and not a direction correlation to the percentage of those who are living with, or living apart from their children as noted in the CDC report.

Definitions: Children under age 18 who live with their own single parent either in a family or subfamily.
In this definition, single-parent families may include cohabiting couples and do not include children living with married stepparents. Children who live in group quarters (for example, institutions, dormitories, or group homes) are not included in this calculation.

This really is a difference in the rate of marriages, so it is isn’t really a perfect correlation for those living with, or apart, from their children. Here’s a couple snap shots from the Census Bureau on Children Living with a single or both parents regardless of marriage.

These do show a difference in the percentage of children living with one parent (the mother only) vs two parents between White (18%), Latino or Hispanic (24%) and Black (50%) households. But what’s interesting is the percentage who live with their father only (White – 3.8%, Hispanic – 3.0%, Black – 4.3%) which is also higher. Does this invalidate the CDC analysis? Well, no. There is a lower marriage rate among black people and that does seem to have an effect on how many of them are living with vs living apart from their children. But the level of involvement, of parenting, across racial lines from men in either of those two living situations – is not that significantly different. In fact, more Black fathers who live apart from their children in most measurements are actually far more involved in their children’s lives [in some cases by nearly a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio] which may be a direct result, and/or offset, to the fact that far more of them are in that situation percentage-wise.

5:11 PM PT: Couple more thoughts:

One of the problems with the assumption that a Nuclear Family is the “best” family for raising children is the reality that not all biological parents provide the best guidance, example, or have the best of relationship with each other. Things can turn abusive, violent and sometimes deadly.  Quite often the weapons used in this disputes, is a gun.

Firearms were used to kill more than two-thirds of spouse and ex-spouse homicide victims between 1990 and 2005.2
Domestic violence assaults involving a firearm are 12 times more likely to result in death than those involving other weapons or bodily force.3
Abused women are five times more likely to be killed by their abuser if the abuser owns a firearm.4A recent survey of female domestic violence shelter residents in California found that more than one third (36.7%) reported having been threatened or harmed with a firearm.5 In nearly two thirds (64.5%) of the households that contained a firearm, the intimate partner had used the firearm against the victim, usually threatening to shoot or kill the victim.6

So that’s one reason why some moms and dads shouldn’t live together.

Another factor on the “Nuclear Family” ideas is the fact that many of these studies don’t take into account the impact of the extended family, grand-parents, uncles, aunts, older siblings and cousins can have on the child-rearing processes.  Parenting sometimes takes more than just the actual parents themselves, particular when both of them need to work to make end-meet, and there are other day-care and babysitting issues that need to be addressed. Two out of our last three serving Presidents were raised in single-parent homes with the support of extended family, so clearly – it’s not hopeless.

Lastly it strikes me that there can be inherent problems at looking at an internal proportional number, when the external proportion may be at an far larger differential.  To wit: there are almost five times as many White people in America as they are Black.  So if you were to take the single-parent percentages for each and multiply them against the numbers of actual children involved what you would see is this:

Hispanic Children in Single-Parent Households: 28.6% x 16.3 Million = 4.66 Million

Black Children in Single-Parent Households: 54.7% x 11.2 Million = 6.12 Million.

[Corrected] White Children in Single-Parent Households: 22.1% x 55.9 Million = 12.3 Million.

So even with an almost twice as high internal percentage of single-parent households, the external percentage is that there are still only one third one half as many black children living in that situation as there are white, and when you add this greater quantity of white “at risk” youth to the CDC data it seems that the quality of some of that white parenting may not be quite a strong.

But we don’t really hear much about the single-parenting crisis of absent White Fathers, now do we? And we don’t see our jails filled to the brim with the failed results of these millions of white single-parent households even with a 2:1 gap in actual numbers, instead we see it filled far more frequently, with black men who afterward can’t really be good, attentive Fathers anymore, now can they? And perhaps that, excessive incarceration, is the source for the internal percentage differential in the first place.

Wed May 13, 2015 at 1:26 PM PT: I’ve gotten some pushback on twitter claiming I have failed to “debunk” the Black Father Myth.  Well, part of the point of a myth is that it itself isn’t really “proven” in the first place.  For example even some of the links provided by naysayers in the comments don’t necessary make that case when describing the better outcomes that are typically associated with the children of married couples.

Is it simply because they have, on average, higher family incomes? (Two earners are better than one, and one household is cheaper to run than two.) Or are two committed spouses better able to provide consistent parenting? Is it marriage itself that matters, or is marriage the visible expression of other factors, that are the true cause of different outcomes? And if so, which ones?

It is usually using the disparity in marriage rates among the races that people usually draw the conclusion that there is a “crisis” in black families, and that their is a deficit in black fathers.  Those numbers as I previously showed in my first update are as follows:

White Single Families: 25% Hispanic Single Families: 42% Black Single Families: 67%

People usually look at these numbers alone and go “Aha, there’s your problem“, but I think this is a gross oversimplification of far more complex real life situations.  I showed this in the second part of that update when I noted that not being married doesn’t really mean that the parent is “absent” as a good percentage of families may live together but remain unmarried.

Single Parent Living Arrangements White 22.1% Hispanic 28.6% Black 54.7%

So as you can see although the figures don’t change much from married White couples with children to cohabiting but unmarried parents, it drops 14% for Hispanics and 13% for Blacks.  Another issue I addressed in the 2nd update which is rarely addressed by those who fault marriages alone as being the big problem with Black child-rearing is the issue of blended families.  There are many cases which the married/unmarried statistic fail to address when the mother may not be living with or married to the father, but is instead living with and/or married to someone else.

There are no recent estimates on the percentage of children residing in blended families.

These statistics underestimate the number of U.S. blended families, because…

To date, government reporting of population figures indicate families in which the child resides. So if the child lives with a divorced, single parent and the other nonresident parent has remarried, the child is not included in the calculations as being a member of a blended family.Estimates suggest that many children living in a “single parent household” (as designated by the Census Bureau) are actually living with two adults. Thus, their best estimates indicate that about 25% of current blended families are actually cohabiting couples.

And…

40% of married couples with children (i.e., families) in the US are stepcouples (at least one partner had a child from a previous relationship before marriage; this includes full and part-time residential stepfamilies and those with children under and/or over the age of 18). The percentage of all married couple households is 35%. (Karney, Garvan, & Thomas, 2003)

All of this means that the census bureau’s data of “living arrangements” can be off by as much as 25% when dealing with blended families situations and even their much lower figures of Hispanic and Black single parent living arrangements could in fact be far, far lower than shown.

So the bottom line issue, once we get back to the CDC figures on how much fathers across the various races actually do the real working of parenting rather than just being nearby or within the same house – can we definitively say that qualitative difference proportionally overwhelms the quantitative [but grossly incomplete] data that proponents of the “Black Fathers Suck” faction seem to espouse?

I don’t know.

Frankly, because the data is incomplete and there isn’t as far as I can tell a breakdown of blended families by race, I honestly can’t tell. And that’s why I didn’t get into this subject in more detail earlier, it’s a wash.  But the incompleteness of the data also shows that absent Black Fathers Myth, isn’t proven either. In fact without full, complete, and accurate numbers – it can’t be proven.

However, what the CDC info does show is that pound for pound, on a family by family average basis Black fathers are generally more attentive to their children whether the live with them or apart from them, and even using the Census Bureau numbers there are far more White Children “at risk” from their less attentive and absent fathers than there are Black. Shouldn’t that be the larger concern if missing fathers truly are the “crisis” some people claim it is?

Vox: Debunking the most pervasive myth about black fatherhood

There’s a very pervasive myth about black fathers: that they’re more often than not absent from their children’s lives. But if you look at the data, it turns out the truth is far more complicated than the ugly stereotype suggests.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow previously took on this myth. Blow started with the basis for much of the idea: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data that showed 71.5 percent of black, non-Hispanic children in 2013 were born to unmarried women, compared with 29.3 percent of white, non-Hispanic children.

But as Josh Levs pointed out in his new book All In, 2.5 million of 4.2 million black fathers — or about 59.5 percent — live with their children. Levs’s numbers suggest that it’s not true, as the CDC figures suggests, that 71.5 percent of black dads are absent from their homes — but rather that many of them are simply unmarried.

And when black fathers do live with their children, they’re just as, if not more, likely to be involved in their kids’ everyday lives. Blow cited CDC data that showed black fathers are more likely than their white and Hispanic counterparts to feed, eat with, bathe, diaper, dress, play with, and read to their children on a daily basis. While some of the differences in the data aren’t statistically significant, the figures indicate that black dads are at least as likely to remain involved in their children’s lives as those of other races

Still, the same CDC data shows black men are nearly three times as likely as white men to have at least one child they don’t live with — but Blow pointed to policy-driven issues that may be driving the disparity. For example, a previous report by Justin Wolfers, David Leonhardt, and Kevin Quealy for the New York Times found there are 100 black women not in jail or prison for every 83 non-incarcerated black men. So mass incarceration has actually drained 1.5 million black men — many of whom are young and of marrying age — from their communities, making it more difficult for black women to find committed partners of the same race.

All of the data paints a more nuanced view of black fatherhood than the stereotypes suggest. It’s not an issue of laziness, inability to commit to family, or another inherent flaw in black culture, as some people may suggest. There are real systemic issues at play — and most black fathers do seem to be trying make the future bright for their kids.

Further Reading

NY Times: The dangerous myth of the ‘missing black father’

Miami Herald: Don’t believe the ‘absent’ myth. Black fathers are present and accounted for in their kids’ lives.

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Black vs White Criminals Representation

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Francis Maxwell: How The Media Covers White Terrorists vs BLACK Victims

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1. Show White People’s Accomplishments
   • And People of Color’s Alleged Crimes
2. Choose Charming Photos of White Victims
   • And ‘Incriminating’ Photos of Victims of Color
3. Empathize With Motivation for White Person’s Violence
   • And Demonize People of Color’s Motivations
4. Emphasize That a Hateful White Person Acted Alone
   • While Casting People of Color as Stereotypes of Their Race
5. Humanize the ‘Troubled’ Lives of White Suspects
   • Dehumanize People of Color Suspects and Victims
6. Use Innocence and Youth to Humanize White Suspects
   • And Treat Young Victims of Color as Older and Guilty
7. They Discredit Justice Movements for People of Color
   • And Give Rioting White People a Pass
8. They Put Victims of Color at Fault
   • And White Suspects in Self-Defense Mode

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Everyday Feminism: 8 Ways the Media Upholds White Privilege and Demonizes People of Color

Are you paying attention to how the media gives you information?

Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman who had spoken out against police violence, died in police custody on July 13 after a routine traffic stop.

Local authorities ruled her death a suicide.

The people who knew Bland are skeptical of that version of events, and a newly released video showing a Texas state trooper aggressively arresting her has cast widespread doubt. We don’t know the details, but some of the relevant information was already filled in before Bland’s death.

Like the fact that the county where Bland died has a vicious history of racism that includes the district attorney’s office and the standing sheriff, who was fired from his previous post for racism.

Like the statistics that show how police target people of color for stops, arrests, and incarceration, and are far more likely to use force against them.

Like the fact that Bland was a Black woman living in a country, state, and county where racist violence has been weaved into everyday life since the day Bland was born, and for centuries before that.

But one media outlet chose to frame the narrative this way: “Woman Found Dead in Jail Cell Had Prior Run-Ins With Law.”

It’s true – Sandra Bland had been pulled over like this before. Several of those “run-ins” were citations for unpaid traffic tickets. Her last encounter with police was the fatal one, but like other people of color who are targets, it wasn’t the only one. 

If you weren’t paying attention, you might think a dangerous hardened criminal – not the real Sandra Bland – had just died in jail.

Were you paying attention when the media told you about last month’s racist mass murder in Charleston, South Carolina?

On June 17^th, a white man seeking to kill Black people walked into Emanuel AME Church, sat through Bible Study with the congregants, and then massacred all of them but one. He stole nine innocent lives.

While the mainstream media that so many of us consume covered that much, it didn’t have a complete analysis of why this happened – and that’s not enough.

Dylann Roof acted on his belief in white supremacy. And on inspiration from George Zimmerman, the man who was acquitted for killing unarmed Black teenager Travyon Martin. And further on complicit support from friends who did nothing when they heard him tell racist jokes and talk about starting a “race war.”

He acted on the anti-Black hatred and fear generated from stereotypes of Black people as sexual predators. On strategies of white supremacist groups active in the US today – strategies that have continued with arson attacks on multiple Black churches since the massacre.

He acted on biases that the media perpetuates every day.

This was a mass murder supported by a white supremacist system that intersects with our daily lives. Unfortunately, he’s not the last to violently lash out with this support.

So after incidents like the attacks against the Charleston congregants and Sandra Bland, we need to pay attention to how the media participates in this dangerous system, and demand some crucial changes.

To have any hope of preventing and healing from this type of horrendous violence, we have to deliberately and ferociously take on the racism that prevails in our country to allow this to happen.

But the way we get our information about tragedies like this one skews our beliefs about what happened, why, and what we should do about it.

Most of us get information from the mainstream media – which blatantly feeds us a biased distortion of the truth, with the wrong information, favoritism toward white people (whether they’re murderers or not), and the demonization of people of color (whether they’re victims or not).

If you think of the news as simply reporting what you need to know, then you’re missing the fact that it’s reinforcing a basic idea of white supremacy: that white people are more valuable than people of color.

It’s just like other instances of racism – sometimes it’s obvious and you can easily point out that it’s wrong. But a lot of the time, it’s subtle, playing right into the implicit biases you don’t even know you have to make you believe in ideas you don’t even realize are racist.

It’s a disgusting manipulation of the public that lets everyday racism go unchecked.

So instead of buying into the media’s biases as people of color lose their lives to racist violence, let’s pay attention to the following examples of how the media upholds white privilege.

1. They Show White People’s Accomplishments – And People of Color’s Alleged Crimes

We rely on the media to provide the details of who suspects and victims are.

This CBS News story on theater shooter James Holmes described his academic achievements and polite manners – a “typical American boy.”

Regardless of what defines someone’s story if they make it on the news – whether they’ve committed a heinous act or fallen victim to violence – we’re all dynamic human beings made up of more than a single incident. We’ve all had accomplishments and made mistakes.

So the media chooses which parts of our lives to show – and their choices often humanize white people while villifying people of color. 

For instance, young white men responsible for horrible mass shootings are often given the “brilliant loner” treatment. Headlines describing killers like Adam Lanza and James Holmes as “smart,” “quiet,” and “nice” are common.

On the other hand, when young people of color are the victims of violence, they still rarely get their accomplishments named in the mainstream media.

In McKinney, Texas, white neighbors yelled racial slurs and physically assaulted a group of youth of color at a pool party – and things got even worse when a police officer called to the scene wrestled unarmed Black teenager Dejerria Becton to the ground, pulled a gun on her friends, and sat on her to restrain her.

So when Fox News’s Megyn Kelly talked about that horrible incident, she could’ve researched Dejerria Becton’s achievements. She could’ve focused on the fact that Dejerria was an innocent party who was invited to the honorable act of celebrating a friend’s graduation, AND who was following the officer’s instructions before he attacked her.

Instead, Kelly said that the girl was “no saint,” so rather than seeing her as an innocent victim of violence, viewers can believe that this young girl had it coming.

2. They Choose Charming Photos of White Victims – And ‘Incriminating’ Photos of Victims of Color

This makes the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown so powerful. It’s sad that some people have taken it to another level. pic.twitter.com/oZnLDRRDhN

— SUPERSAYIANGOAT (@SvmmieArnold) August 11, 2014

In addition to words, the media’s images have a huge influence on how we view people.

And once again, the media makes a choice – because we’ve all taken pictures that make us look impressive, and we’ve taken ones that people could use to make us look like we were up to no good.

When Twitter users started trending the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, they highlighted how much the media makes different choices depending on race.

When white victims lose their lives, the media shows graduation pictures, family photos, positive images of the life lost.

They even often use such images for white suspects and murderers, giving us a sense of who they were before things went terribly wrong. Theater shooter James Holmes was shown in a smiling senior photo wearing a suit and tie below a headline calling him “a brilliant science student.”

When mainstream media outlets broke the story of Michael Brown’s slaying at the hands of the police, they could have used photographs from his recent high school graduation. Instead, many of them chose an image that showed him towering over the camera, holding his hand in what some people on social media interpreted as a gang sign.

Clearly, this media representation sways the conversation about whether or not the police were justified in killing the unarmed teenager. A one-dimensional representation of a victim as a criminal makes us more likely to believe that the killers’ actions were necessary.

3. They Empathize With the ‘Motivation’ for a White Person’s Violence

This is the problem with the American media. Stay woke. pic.twitter.com/q1uWgcocLV — Rashad Alaiyan (@rashadalaiyan) June 21, 2015

Ever heard someone say “Wait until we get all the facts” before deciding how to judge a violence incident?

When we get these “facts” from the mainstream media, they encourage us to hold off judgment until we know what’s “really” going on.

And sometimes, even in cases of blatant racially biased violence, their narrative about what’s going on is based on empathy for the white perpetrator’s “motivations.”

For example, in the case of Dylann Roof, who killed those nine church-goers in Charleston for no reason other than that they are Black, some reporters said “we don’t know why he did it.” Others called it “an attack on religious freedom.”

Clearly, their hesitation to state the obvious influenced some people, who accused leaders speaking out about the racism – rather than the mass murderer who wanted to “start a race war” – of being the ones “making everything about race.”

If the media is so concerned about people’s motivations, you’d think they would’ve focused on what drove a Black man named Jim Jones to sacrifice his life by shielding his mother from bullets.

Instead, they called Jones a “son with a troubled past,” as Twitter user Rashad Alaiyan pointed out when he placed that headline side-by-side with one that described Dylann Roof as a “loner” who was “caught in ‘Internet evil.’”

This empathy for white attackers has the dangerous effect of encouraging us to look away from what’s really going on, and focus instead on the well-being of the person who committed a horrible act.

4. They Emphasize That a ‘Hateful’ White Person Acted Alone – While Casting People of Color as Stereotypes of Their Race

I’m not saying the media always shows empathy for white offenders.

In the US since 9/11, terrorist attacks by anti-government, racist, and other nonjihadist extremists have killed nearly twice as many people as those by jihadist extremists. Graphic: NY Times

There have been times when the mainstream media rightfully characterizes a white murderer as a person who did something terrible, showing empathy for the victims, regardless of their killer’s motivations.

But it’s also telling that in these cases, white offenders are often characterized as a “lone wolf,” someone who acted alone on their own hate.

Media outlets included descriptions of white supremacist Larry Steve McQuilliams, who thankfully killed no one in his Texas shooting rampage, as a lone wolf.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, 74% of domestic terrorist acts planned or carried out were the work of people working alone, with just one or two people behind 90% of them.

Violent racist extremists like McQuilliams fall into those categories, but the mainstream media rarely calls them “terrorists.” That word is usually reserved for mass murderers identified as Muslim extremists – especially those who are Arab.

This, in spite of the fact that people like white supremacists have killed almost twice as many people in the US as Muslim extremists who represent “terrorism” to so many Americans.

The media’s framing of terrorism often spreads Islamophobic ideas, perpetuating stereotypes that put the safety of Arab Americans – and anyone who’s seen to fit the erroneous stereotypes – at risk.

As we’ve seen since 9/11, when the media conflates Islam with terrorism, incidents of Islamophobic violence against innocent people rise.

Unlike with white suspects indoctrinated by violent white supremacist ideology, the mainstream media doesn’t mull over “why he did it” if a suspect is an Arab man. And they don’t even write him off as an evil lone wolf.

The media upholds the white privilege of not having the most violent people of your race appear as a stereotype of you.

And what a difference that makes – if white people who commit racist violence are just lone wolves, that means we don’t have to recognize the fact that they’re following a legacy embedded in our country’s violent history.

We don’t have to face the whole system of white supremacy, or be accountable for the fact that it’s not just the violent lone wolves who participate – it’s also everyday people with good intentions, like you and me.

5. They Humanize the ‘Troubled’ Lives of White Suspects

In addition to considering motivation, the media also humanizes white suspects by focusing on their struggles.

Caption: This headline from the LA Times was one of many humanizing Elliot Rodger by focusing on his mental health

Details mentioned far more often for white suspects than suspects of color include if they were “bullied,” or “kept to themselves,” or “had a hard home life.”

Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger is one of many mass murderers whose mental health was the also focus of a lot of media coverage. Rodger, who is half white and half Malaysian Chinese, benefits from white privilege and this is an example of how.

Calling white male suspects “mentally ill” instead of examining other factors is a pattern in the media, and it does twice the injustice: shifting the blame away from the person who chose to commit violent acts, and reinforcing stigma about people with mental illness.

Having a mental illness doesn’t mean someone’s predisposed to violence. So framing the story this way is a harmful distraction and a benefit given only to white suspects.

When the suspect is a person of color, the media often uncovers criminal records, not medical records.

And once again, even victims of color don’t get the humanizing efforts to detail the causes of the troubling aspects of their backgrounds.

With so many poor people of color losing their lives to police violence, for instance, then why doesn’t the mainstream media talk about their struggles that lead to fatal encounters with police?

For example, Freddie Gray, who died in Baltimore police custody, grew up as one of thousands of low-income African-Americans exposed to deadly chemicals in an inner city home.

His family won a settlement after arguing that the lead poisoning he and his sister got “played a significant part in their educational, behavioral, and medical problems.”

Add up the traumatic effect of poverty and mass incarceration in poor Black neighborhoods with the experience of growing up as a Black male targeted by police, and you can understand why we need to address the deadly risk of criminalizing poor people of color. But that’s not what the mainstream media talks about.

6. They Use Innocence and Youth to Humanize White Suspects – And Treat Young Victims of Color as Older and Guilty

When suspects are young, the difference in how the mainstream media treats them is clear.

A headline from the NY Daily News.

Studies show implicit biases lead many of us to see innocent Black children as guilty adults.

And it’s no wonder that our impression depends on the child’s race, when the source of much of our information – the mainstream media – reminds us that young white suspects are “kids.”

Even Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who killed children in Newton, Connecticut, was described in headlines as a “deeply disturbed kid.”

Tamir Rice, on the other hand, is a 12 year old Black boy who was playing with a toy gun when he was killed by police less than two seconds after their arrival.

Tamir was the victim in this case, the one who tragically lost his life. But when the media calls him a “young man” and reminds us that he was “big for his age,” they’re not just reporting information on the tragic death of a child.

They’re not talking about why police are twenty-one times more likely to kill young Black men than young white men.

In fact, they’re helping justify violence and mass incarceration against youth of color, by characterizing them as dangerous criminals, whether they’re victims or not.

7. They Discredit Justice Movements for People of Color – And Give Rioting White People a Pass

Your media guide to the differences between #Ferguson and #pumpkinfest pic.twitter.com/XfRjlhgei0

— Matt Weinecke (@MattTW) October 19, 2014

Not everyone’s buying the media’s biased stories.

Racial justice activists put blood, sweat, and tears into advocating for justice for victims of color, and their voices help bring attention to the truth about racism.

Unfortunately, many of us have to filter through bias to hear activist voices, too.

And there’s a huge difference between how the media portrays mass gatherings advocating for people of color and those with groups of white people.

Protests for Freddie Gray in Baltimore, for instance, were part of a national grassroots movement, Black Lives Matter. They included dynamic speakers, wise youth leaders, deep analyses of issues of inequality, and even a Michael Jackson impersonator dancing to “show positivity” and raise money for the Gray family.

Pretty impressive, right?

But that wasn’t the impression you would’ve gotten from watching or reading coverage of the protests in the mainstream media.

Their coverage was focused almost entirely on “riots,” “looting,” and “destruction.” After 10,000 marched peacefully one day, the next morning’s headlines included words like “chaos,” “destruction,” and “violence” to talk about the few agitators who strayed from the protest to vandalize.

The media blew the vandalism out of proportion, spread inaccurate information about how the chaotic moments began, and used one word over and over again to characterize the protesters, the vast majority of whom were advocating for peace.

That word was “thugs.”

Clearly, not just anyone who gathers in mass or causes destruction gets called a “thug” in the media. If that were the case, then white people who destroy things in the name of sports or who riot over pumpkins would get the same treatment, but the media doesn’t portray those people as dangerous criminals.

Even when mobs of white people are committing violent crimes, the media doesn’t treat them this way.

White biker gangs in Waco, Texas beat, stabbed, and shot each other, and fired at police, in a bloody brawl that resulted in nine deaths. The media called it a “rumble,” and a “meeting” to “settle their differences” – and the word “thug” was noticeably absent.

This double standard isn’t just unfair – it’s also holding back progress in the fight against racial injustice.

A recent study found that white Americans believe protesting improves the nation – unless Black folks are the ones protesting. That’s the dangerous impact of the media’s bias.

The more people believe the mainstream media’s idea that activists of color are “destroying their own neighborhoods” with unwarranted protests, the harder we have to fight to spread the word about the change we need.

8. They Put Victims of Color at Fault – And White Suspects in Self-Defense Mode

If it seems like white attackers had no choice but to defend themselves with violence, that also helps to justify violence against people of color in the public’s eyes.

The AP’s tweet just after the verdict of Renisha McBride’s killer

The media sets the stage for this narrative with biases that lead us to see people of color as guilty, and they can really drive it home with as little as a hint that a victim of color was at fault for their own attack.

For example, African-American teenager Renisha McBride was reportedly asking for help after a car accident in a mostly-white neighborhood, and Theodore Wafer had no reason to kill her. But he did, and the media focused on whether or not she was drunk at the time of her murder – in spite of the fact that she likely posed no threat to the shooter.

South Carolina Officer Michael Slager also had no reason to kill Walter Scott. And at first, the news reported his version of the events that led him to shoot Scott in “self-defense.”

It wasn’t until after a civilian’s video of the shooting was released that the media reported on the real story: Slager shot Walter Scott in the back as he ran away, posing absolutely no threat to the officer. He then put his taser beside Scott’s body to make it look like self-defense, and lied about it.

And the media ate it up and fed it to us.

What else are we missing when we believe the mainstream media’s stories without thinking critically about their biases?

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The bad news is that this all shows just how deeply white privilege and racism are ingrained in the everyday media we consume.

The good news is that many of these examples also show that we have the power to resist the media’s biased messages and get to the truth.

In this digital age, people are recording incidents of police brutality and harassment, forcing us to confront what’s really going on when an unarmed victim is no longer alive to tell their side of the story.

We’re participating on social media with hashtags like #AliveWhileBlack and #CrimingWhileWhite, to show how the mainstream media’s narrative doesn’t reflect what it means to be targeted because you’re Black, or granted the benefit of the doubt because you’re white.

We’re speaking up and spreading the word when the mainstream media demonizes people of color, and telling our own stories about who we are.

You can help, by amplifying the voices of people speaking out.

For the love of justice, turn off the mainstream news channels and support alternative media instead. Seek out the information that’s on the ground with grassroots organizations analyzing the root causes of violence without the lens of white supremacy.

Talk to your friends and community members about how the media can influence our perceptions, and about how you can change the conversation so this biased influence stops spreading.

The six Black women and three Black men who lost their lives in Charleston were all inspirational models of leadership in their communities.

We can never get them back, and we can’t erase the way the mainstream media failed them by misrepresenting the cause of their deaths.

But for them, for Sandra Bland, and for all of those who were killed or traumatized, only to be re-victimized by the media, we need to demand more respect for people of color.

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Orientalism

Edward Said – Orientalism and the Politics of Stereotypes in News

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Orientalism and power: When will we stop stereotyping people? | BBC Ideas

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Edward Said – An Introduction to Orientalism

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Further Readings

• Newsweek: Most Black People Aren’t Poor, But The U.S. Media Tells You Otherwise
• Yes!: What’s Stopping Media From Calling Las Vegas Killer a “Terrorist”? His Whiteness
• The Opportunity Agenda: Media Representations and Impact on the Lives of Black Men and Boys
• Color of Change: NOT TO BE TRUSTED, Dangerous Levels of Inaccuracy in TV Crime Reporting in NYC
• Prime Suspects: The Influence of Local Television News on the Viewing Public

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Understanding Your Own Bias

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Tools to Understand Your Own Bias

Project Implicit

A Harvard project to help assess a person’s implicit associations about race, gender, sexual orientation, and other topics.  Try it out for free.  According to this study of the 1000s who participated 70% showed racial bias.

implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

Look Different: What Can I do About Bias

Racism surrounds us every day, but our generation has a responsibility to confront it head on.  These tools and resources can help us all understand our biases and challenge racism in our daily lives.

www.lookdifferent.org/what-can-i-do

Look Different: See that, Say This

Ever see something that made you feel uncomfortable and didn’t know what to say about it?  Get tips on making that awkward conversation less awkward here.

www.lookdifferent.org/what-can-i-do/see-that-say-this

Look Different: Bias Cleanse

Seven-day bias cleanses on race, gender and anti-LGBTZ bias that will provide you with daily task that will help you begin to change your associations

www.lookdifferent.org/what-can-i-do/bias-cleanse

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Microaggressions

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• Microaggressions
  • The casual degradation of any marginalized group
  • Often person committing microaggression is unaware they are doing it
    • but not always
  • Can be used as a passive or aggressive degradation
  • Often constant, continuous, cumulative for their targets
    • Over time can have serious negative impacts
      • Anxiety, depression, crises of belonging, stereotype threat, alienation, feeling insecure, undeserving, or unaccomplished enough to be in a particular setting, etc.
• Examples:
  • Verbally – “You speak good English”
  • Nonverbally – clutching one’s purse more tightly
  • Environmentally – symbols like Confederate flag or Native Indian mascot

How is Works by Look Different

“Racial microaggressions may be sent verbally (“You speak good English.”), nonverbally (clutching one’s purse more tightly) or environmentally (symbols like the Confederate flag or using American Indian mascots). Such communications are usually outside the level of conscious awareness of perpetrators.”

Why it Matters by Look Different

“Racial microaggressions are often constant, continuous, and cumulative for their targets. Even if they’re statements that are intended as positive (e.g. “You speak such good English!”), they can have a negative impact when piled on top of other microaggressions. And studies reveal that racial microaggressions have powerful detrimental consequences to people of color. They have been found to affect the mental and physical health of recipients, create a hostile work or campus environment, lower work productivity and problem solving abilities, and be partially responsible for creating systemic inequities.”

Source: theconsciouskid

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#HatchKids Discuss Microaggressions

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The Atlantic: Microaggressions Matter

“microaggressions point out cultural difference in ways that put the recipient’s non-conformity into sharp relief, often causing anxiety and crises of belonging on the part of minorities. When your peers at a prestigious university express dismay at the ability of a person of color to master English, it calls your presence in that institution into question and magnifies your difference in ways that can be alienating. It can even induce imposter syndrome or stereotype threat, both of which I have felt while studying at Oberlin. The former is feeling insecure, undeserving, or unaccomplished enough to be in a particular setting while latter is the debilitation that can arise from the constant fear of validating a stereotype about people from your identity groupings.

The turn towards political correctness in academia, to which the concept of microaggressions belongs, is sometimes mischaracterized as an obsession with the creation of victims or shoehorning radically liberal ideas into college students. Others have argued that political correctness evangelizes a new kind of moral righteousness that over-privileges identity politics and silences conservative viewpoints.

What these critics miss is that the striving for “PC culture” on college campuses is actually rooted in empathy. The basic tenets of this culture are predicated on the powerful impulse to usher both justice and humanity into everyday social transactions. Given the visible (albeit slow) rise in diversity on campuses, the lexicon of social justice invites students to engage with difference in more intelligent and nuanced ways, and to train their minds to entertain more complex views of the world.

Take for instance, the prevalent use of non-traditional gender pronouns at Oberlin College, a practice becoming increasingly common elsewhere, as well. They acknowledge that people can identify with many genders, not just along the binary of male and female. Using a person’s preferred or desired gender pronouns (such as the gender neutral “they” instead of she or he) is not a meaningless exercise in identity politics—it is an acknowledgement of a person’s innermost identity, conferring both respect and dignity.”

SheKnows created KidsSpeak content for grown-ups to educate parents on the concept of “microaggressions,” and their impact on teens’ self-esteem.

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Buzzfeed: 21 Racial Microaggressions You Hear On A Daily Basis

“The term “microaggression” was used by Columbia professor Derald Sue to refer to “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.” Sue borrowed the term from psychiatrist Dr. Chester Pierce who coined the term in the ’70s.”

While the term “microaggressions” has been a part of academic discourse for some time (“micro-inequities” was coined by an MIT Ph.D. in 1973), it became better known through the popular Tumblr Microaggressions.

The Tumblr is a project that aims to highlight the daily microaggressions people encounter through user submitted stories.

“This blog seeks to provide a visual representation of the everyday of “microaggressions.” Each event, observation and experience posted is not necessarily particularly striking in and of themselves. Often, they are never meant to hurt – acts done with little conscious awareness of their meanings and effects. Instead, their slow accumulation during a childhood and over a lifetime is in part what defines a marginalized experience, making explanation and communication with someone who does not share this identity particularly difficult. Social others are microaggressed hourly, daily, weekly, monthly.

This project is NOT about showing how ignorant people can be in order to simply dismiss their ignorance. Instead, it is about showing how these comments create and enforce uncomfortable, violent and unsafe realities onto peoples’ workplace, home, school, childhood/adolescence/adulthood, and public transportation/space environments.”

Fordham University’s Microaggression Photo Project

Tumblr with lots of real life examples: http://www.microaggressions.com

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Source: teachandtransform

If Microaggressions Happened to White People | Decoded | MTV News

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The Anti-PC Movement

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The Anti-PC Movement

Politically Correctness (PC)

“Avoiding words or behaviors that exclude or marginalize or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against. Basically treating people with respect…Its not just about hurt feelings. Its about calling out oppressive power structures. And thats where the misunderstanding comes in.” Franchesca Ramsey

• Early 90s, “political correctness” popularized by the Political Right
  • To exaggerate and demonize efforts to challenge systemic and implicit racism
  • Created false narratives around PC as propaganda tool to divide working class from Democrats/academia
• False Narratives:
  • “White victims”
    • Created victims out of white people who were perpetuating racism
      • Attack on their freedom of speech
    • Became a way to rebrand racism in ways that were politically acceptable in the post-civil-rights era
  • “Thought control”, “language police”, “Being silenced”
    • Made people challenging racism with PC became labeled as authoritarian
  • “Liberal Elite”
    • Label progressives fighting racism as liberal elites to divide them from working class
  • “Snowflake”
    • Anyone who was fighting racism or dealing with racism was just “overtly sensitive”, “weak”, “spoiled”
  • These narratives significantly help racist candidates win elections
    • Calling someone or something “PC” is a way to dismiss or derail a serious conservation about an injustice
    • Since 90s conservatives have push “anti-PC” propaganda to make whites think “PC” is serious problem

“political correctness is often used by those in a position of privilege to silence debates raised by marginalized people…dismiss ideas that make us uncomfortable ” Amanda Taub, Vox

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Anti-PC Becoming a GOP Weapon

• 1980-90s, Networks of conservative donors (Koch, Olin, Scaife families)
  • Financed think tanks, authors, networks to discredit academia and its new diversity
    • Authors like Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D’Souza, Richard Bernstein funded to bring “PC” on national stage as enemy of free speech & freedom
    • 1000s of national articles were created with titles like,
      • “The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct”, “THOUGHT POLICE”, “New Enlightenment – or the New McCarthyism?”, “The New Fascists”, “A New Intolerance”, etc.
      • Majority of articles recycled same stories of real and fake campus controversies from a few elite colleges
        • Often exaggerated or stripped of context to help portray PC as a type of fascism
      • Most Americans never heard about “PC” until this conservative campaign

“If you search ProQuest, a digital database of US magazines and newspapers, you find that the phrase “politically correct” rarely appeared before 1990. That year, it turned up more than 700 times. In 1991, there are more than 2,500 instances. In 1992, it appeared more than 2,800 times. Like Indiana Jones movies, these pieces called up enemies from a melange of old wars: they compared the “thought police” spreading terror on university campuses to fascists, Stalinists, McCarthyites, “Hitler Youth”, Christian fundamentalists, Maoists and Marxists.” Moira Weigel – Guardian

• 1991 – President Bush gave speech identifying “PC” as major danger to US
  • “Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States. The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land…In their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behavior crush diversity in the name of diversity.” Bush

“Nobody ever describes themselves as “politically correct”. The phrase is only ever an accusation…Political correctness” became a term used to drum into the public imagination the idea that there was a deep divide between the “ordinary people” and the “liberal elite”, who sought to control the speech and thoughts of regular folk. Opposition to political correctness also became a way to rebrand racism in ways that were politically acceptable in the post-civil-rights era.” Moira Weigel, The Guardian

• 1998, Political Correctness begins to be associated with Cultural Marxism
  • “Cultural Marxism…common snarl word used to paint anyone with progressive tendencies as a secret Communist. The term alludes to a conspiracy theory in which sinister left-wingers have infiltrated media, academia, and science and are engaged in a decades-long plot to undermine Western culture. Some variants of the conspiracy allege that basically all of modern social liberalism (rock’n’roll, Sixties counterculture, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, homosexuality, modern feminism, etc) is, in fact, a Communist front group…It’s also the work of the Jews.” Rational Wiki
  • “The phrase (Cultural Marxism) refers to a kind of “political correctness” on steroids…Right-wing ideologues, racists and other extremists have jazzed up political correctness and repackaged it — in its most virulent form, as an anti-Semitic theory that identifies Jews in general and several Jewish intellectuals in particular as nefarious, communistic destroyers. These supposed originators of “cultural Marxism” are seen as conspiratorial plotters intent on making Americans feel guilty and thus subverting their Christian culture.” SPLC
    • Conservative leaders such as Pat Buchannon, Paul Weyrich, Free Congress Foundation, Rightwing extremist groups start to spread the “Political Correctness/Cultural Marxism association
• After 9/11
  • Majority of Anti-PC debates went away till the Obama presidency
  • As Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, etc, grew, so did the attacks on the activists
    • Criticizing and trivializing them by using the same anti-PC narratives but with different buzzwords
    • Instead of “difference” and “multiculturalism”, new buzzwords became:
      • “Trigger warnings”, “microaggressions”, “privilege”, “cultural appropriation”, “Identity Politics”, “SJW”
    • New focus on labeling activist as spoiled, narcissists, millennials
• Trump
  • Successfully used “PC” as a way to avoid serious conservations or accusations
  • Claimed that his cruelty and malice was actually courage against PC
  • “The notion that Trump was both persecuted and heroic was crucial to his emotional appeal. It allowed people who were struggling economically or angry about the way society was changing to see themselves in him, battling against a rigged system that made them feel powerless and devalued. At the same time, Trump’s swagger promised that they were strong and entitled to glory. They were great and would be great again.” Moira Weigel, The Guardian

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Is PC Culture Anti-Free Speech? | Decoded | MTV News

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Moira Weigel: Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy

“If you search ProQuest, a digital database of US magazines and newspapers, you find that the phrase “politically correct” rarely appeared before 1990. That year, it turned up more than 700 times. In 1991, there are more than 2,500 instances. In 1992, it appeared more than 2,800 times. Like Indiana Jones movies, these pieces called up enemies from a melange of old wars: they compared the “thought police” spreading terror on university campuses to fascists, Stalinists, McCarthyites, “Hitler Youth”, Christian fundamentalists, Maoists and Marxists.

…PC was a useful invention for the Republican right because it helped the movement to drive a wedge between working-class people and the Democrats who claimed to speak for them. “Political correctness” became a term used to drum into the public imagination the idea that there was a deep divide between the “ordinary people” and the “liberal elite”, who sought to control the speech and thoughts of regular folk. Opposition to political correctness also became a way to rebrand racism in ways that were politically acceptable in the post-civil-rights era.

Soon, Republican politicians were echoing on the national stage the message that had been product-tested in the academy. In May 1991, President George HW Bush gave a commencement speech at the University of Michigan. In it, he identified political correctness as a major danger to America. “Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States,” Bush said. “The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land,” but, he warned, “In their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behaviour crush diversity in the name of diversity.

After 2001, debates about political correctness faded from public view, replaced by arguments about Islam and terrorism. But in the final years of the Obama presidency, political correctness made a comeback. Or rather, anti-political-correctness did.

As Black Lives Matter and movements against sexual violence gained strength, a spate of thinkpieces attacked the participants in these movements, criticising and trivialising them by saying that they were obsessed with policing speech. Once again, the conversation initially focused on universities, but the buzzwords were new. Rather than “difference” and “multiculturalism”, Americans in 2012 and 2013 started hearing about “trigger warnings”, “safe spaces”, “microaggressions”, “privilege” and “cultural appropriation”.

This time, students received more scorn than professors. If the first round of anti-political-correctness evoked the spectres of totalitarian regimes, the more recent revival has appealed to the commonplace that millennials are spoiled narcissists, who want to prevent anyone expressing opinions that they happen to find offensive…

…The climate of digital journalism and social media sharing enabled the anti-political-correctness (and anti-anti-political correctness) stories to spread even further and faster than they had in the 1990s. Anti-PC and anti-anti-PC stories come cheap: because they concern identity, they are something that any writer can have a take on, based on his or her experiences, whether or not he or she has the time or resources to report. They are also perfect clickbait. They inspire outrage, or outrage at the outrage of others…

…Trump did not simply criticise the idea of political correctness – he actually said and did the kind of outrageous things that PC culture supposedly prohibited. The first wave of conservative critics of political correctness claimed they were defending the status quo, but Trump’s mission was to destroy it. In 1991, when George HW Bush warned that political correctness was a threat to free speech, he did not choose to exercise his free speech rights by publicly mocking a man with a disability or characterising Mexican immigrants as rapists. Trump did. Having elevated the powers of PC to mythic status, the draft-dodging billionaire, son of a slumlord, taunted the parents of a fallen soldier and claimed that his cruelty and malice was, in fact, courage…

…The most alarming part of this approach is what it implies about Trump’s attitude to politics more broadly. His contempt for political correctness looks a lot like contempt for politics itself. He does not talk about diplomacy; he talks about “deals”. Debate and disagreement are central to politics, yet Trump has made clear that he has no time for these distractions. To play the anti-political-correctness card in response to a legitimate question about policy is to shut down discussion in much the same way that opponents of political correctness have long accused liberals and leftists of doing. It is a way of sidestepping debate by declaring that the topic is so trivial or so contrary to common sense that it is pointless to discuss it. The impulse is authoritarian. And by presenting himself as the champion of common sense, Trump gives himself permission to bypass politics altogether.”

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Vox: The truth about “political correctness” is that it doesn’t actually exist

Jonathan Chait has written an article for New York Magazine about his concerns that political correctness threatens free debate by trying to silence certain points of view.

Political correctness, in Chait’s view, is a “system of left-wing ideological repression” that threatens the “bedrock liberal ideal” of a “free political marketplace where we can reason together as individuals.” He writes, “While politically less threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life), the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed.”

But political correctness isn’t a “creed” at all. Rather it’s a sort of catch-all term we apply to people who ask for more sensitivity to a particular cause than we’re willing to give — a way to dismiss issues as frivolous in order to justify ignoring them. Worse, the charge of “political correctness” is often used by those in a position of privilege to silence debates raised by marginalized people — to say that their concerns don’t deserve to be voiced, much less addressed.

That’s a much bigger threat to the “free political marketplace” that Chait is so eager to protect.

“Politically correct” is a term we use to dismiss ideas that make us uncomfortable

First things first: there’s no such thing as “political correctness.” The term’s in wide use, certainly, but has no actual fixed or specific meaning. What defines it is not what it describes but how it’s used: as a way to dismiss a concern or demand as a frivolous grievance rather than a real issue.

Chait identifies a long list of disputes that he describes as examples of “p.c.” demands that are hurting mainstream liberalism. But calling these concerns “political correctness” is another way of saying that they aren’t important enough to be addressed on their merits. And all that really means is that they’re not important to Jonathan Chait.

An example from outside of Chait’s article makes it easy to see how that technique works in practice. I, personally, think that the name of the Washington Redskins is racist and hurtful to Native Americans, and should be changed. So if someone asks me what I think of the debate about the team, that’s what I say. By contrast, Virginia legislator Del Jackson Miller likes the name and wants the team to keep it. But rather than making an argument on the merits of the name, he referred to the entire debate as “political correctness on overdrive.” In other words, he’s saying, this is a false debate — just another example of “political correctness” — so I don’t have to even acknowledge concerns about racism. (Miller, in fact, claimed that it was literally fake, an issue trumped up by a “rich member of the Oneida tribe.”)

That’s a failure of communication and, arguably, of basic respect. Miller isn’t engaging with critics of the Redskins name by considering why they find it hurtful, and offering his basis for disagreement — he’s dismissing the whole conversation as unworthy of discussion.

Likewise, Chait clearly believes that “microaggressions” aren’t important enough to merit his concern, and that “trigger warnings” are a foolish request made by over-sensitive people. But he doesn’t spend much time considering why the people who demand them might think they do matter. The open communication offered by platforms like Twitter has brought Chait into contact with ideas that he clearly finds weird and silly. But rather than considering their merits, or why they matter to the people who put them forward, he dismisses them as political correctness, and concludes that their very existence constitutes “ideological repression.”

It’s tempting to dismiss uncomfortable criticism

It’s understandable that Chait, and the many others who agree with him, find it so upsetting to be on the receiving end of what he refers to as “P.C.” criticism. These critiques basically accuse their targets of being oppressors, or perpetuating injustice, and that’s a deeply hurtful accusation. Indeed, that kind of criticism hurts most if you are someone who cares about social justice, or do think that discrimination is harmful when it’s implicit as well as when it’s explicit.

But avoiding that discomfort by dismissing criticism as mere “political correctness” is no way to protect the marketplace of ideas whose fate so concerns Chait. At best, it replaces a relatively weak burden on free speech (Jonathan Chait has to listen to people scolding him on Twitter) with a similarly weak one (other people have to listen to Chait and his supporters scolding them for their “political correctness”).

But the reality is that the burdens are not equal, because the arguments that get dismissed as mere “p.c.” nonsense are overwhelmingly likely to be raised by people who are less privileged, and to concern issues that are outside the mainstream.

Look at Chait’s own examples. Trans women who protest definitions of “women” as “people with vaginas” aren’t merely bellyaching about terminology — they’re people on the margins of a group making legitimate demands for inclusion. Women of color who point out the many ways in which white feminists overlook issues that affect minority women aren’t engaging in race-based arguments just for the fun of it, they’re pointing out that the feminist movement had promised to protect their interests, but was in fact ignoring them.

And while I personally don’t think that trigger warnings are a workable solution to the problem of trauma, and have not used them in my own writing or teaching, I think that our society does generally struggle to take women’s safety into account, and I do not feel that shutting down that conversation is the appropriate solution to the problem of harassment of women.

Discrimination and safety are serious matters that actually do affect people’s ability to participate in public discussion — yes, even more so than the degree to which people in positions of privilege have to hear arguments they dislike. Writing them off as frivolous disputes over what is or isn’t “politically correct” makes those problems much harder to address.

There’s a difference between pointing out real problems and “tone policing”

Take, for instance, a phenomenon that actually and demonstrably restricts the free exchange of ideas: the harassment of women online. It is a depressing fact of life that women who discuss controversial subjects publicly are often targeted by harassers who want to silence them. (As are many other groups, of course.) And yet, bizarrely, women’s requests for safety online are often dismissed as “politically correct” threats to free speech, rather than as a way to promote it.

Last January, Amanda Hess wrote about the “trolls” who pursued her in response to her writing, including one account that had been set up for the express purpose of tweeting death threats at her. Anita Sarkeesian posted a list of the harassing tweets she received during an ordinary week last December, a never-ending mishmash of the words “kill,” “whore,” “bitch,” “fuck,” and “slut.” Megan McArdle has written about her experiences with this kind of vitriol. So has Lindy West. And Jill Filipovic. And me.

We’re all still writing; none of us have been silenced. But online harassment causes real fear and stress, and for others, that has been a form of ideological censorship. Programmer and game developer Kathy Sierra, who used to write a popular blog, stopped after she was targeted with a sustained campaign of violent threats. Sarkeesian had to cancel a public speaking engagement last year after threats of a mass shooting.

Conor Friedersdorf has written in the Atlantic that women often rejected his requests for articles on controversial topics, citing “an understandable reluctance to subject themselves to the vitriol that too often accompanies being a woman who writes publicly, especially on certain subjects.”

How dismissing problems as “political correctness” hinders efforts to solve them

But when women protest online harassment, their concerns are often dismissed as a politically-correct attempt to censor the views of people they disagree with. This dismissal is also often used to reject the premise that measures might be needed to make women safer.

During last year’s “Gamergate” campaign, which involved large-scale campaigns of online threats and harassment directed against women, harassers referred to their targets as “SJWs” — short for “social justice warriors.” Although Gamergate’s core dispute nominally concerned the way that video games are reviewed (hence the name), it quickly became clear that the online “movement” was more alarmed about women gaining power within the gaming community. Describing women’s goals as merely being about “social justice” was a way to dismiss their contributions, ideas, and even personal safety as superficial grievance politics.

Nor was that attitude limited to Gamergate. Blogger Andrew Sullivan wasn’t part of Gamergate, and says that he “actively support[s] suspending abusive, stalking tweeters or those threatening violence.” But when Twitter announced its decision to partner with the nonprofit WAM (Women, Action, & the Media) in order to combat harassment online, Sullivan denounced the move, referring to women as social justice warriors and warning that they were going to have a “censorship field day,” before dismissing WAM’s past work as crude “identity politics.”

The phrase “politically correct” is a way to say an issue has no value

Chait’s article does not mention Gamergate, and there’s no reason to believe that he’s anything other than appalled at online harassment. Likewise, Sullivan did not use the phrase “politically correct.”

But their arguments are fundamentally the same: that marginalized people’s demands for inclusion are just a bunch of annoying whining, and that efforts to address their concerns are unnecessary. They also betray the deeper concern: that listening to the demands of marginalized groups is dangerous, because doing so could potentially burden the lives, or at least change the speech, of more privileged people.

And you know what? They’re probably right. Chait proudly praises the “historical record of American liberalism” for extending rights to “blacks, Jews, gays, and women,” but Americans used to be able to refer to members of those groups as “coloreds,” “kikes,” and “fags,” without fearing the consequences. But doing so now would result in serious social censure — exactly the kind of “coercion” that Chait looks upon and despairs in his article.

Likewise, it is possible that efforts to address online harassment will put some sort of burden on the Andrew Sullivans of this world. (Although at this point those efforts are so feeble that it’s a little hard to imagine.) There is a legitimate argument to be had about how the “freedom” of social media platforms with few restrictions but lots of threats ought to be balanced against people’s “freedom” to participate in online debates without having to fear for their lives or safety. But the way to deal with that is to actually have that argument, not to suggest that the people asking for protection are just trying to censor free speech.

That kind of offhand dismissal is a problem for the ideals Chait seeks to protect. Just ask Jonathan Chait:

Of course liberals are correct not only to oppose racism and sexism but to grasp (in a way conservatives generally do not) that these biases cast a nefarious and continuing shadow over nearly every facet of American life. Since race and gender biases are embedded in our social and familial habits, our economic patterns, and even our subconscious minds, they need to be fought with some level of consciousness. The mere absence of overt discrimination will not do.

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Is ‘political correctness gone mad’ a lie? Nesrine Malik

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“Trans women who protest definitions of “women” as “people with vaginas” aren’t merely bellyaching about terminology — they’re people on the margins of a group making legitimate demands for inclusion. Women of color who point out the many ways in which white feminists overlook issues that affect minority women aren’t engaging in race-based arguments just for the fun of it, they’re pointing out that the feminist movement had promised to protect their interests, but was in fact ignoring them.” Amanda Taub, Vox

“They (anti-PC pundits) complained that other people were creating and enforcing speech codes, while at the same time attempting to enforce their own speech codes. Their writers designated themselves the arbiters of what conversations or political demands deserved to be taken seriously, and which did not. They contradicted themselves in the same way: their authors continually complained, in highly visible publications, that they were being silenced.” Moira Weigel, The Guardian

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Sarah Hagi: Cancel Culture Is Not Real—At Least Not in the Way People Think

“Has cancel culture gone too far?” The question felt impossible to ignore this year. Google it and you’ll see pages of op-eds, often concluding, yes, it has gone too far, and the Internet mob is out of control.

Cancel culture became so central to the discourse in 2019 that even President Obama weighed in. The idea is that if you do something that others deem problematic, you automatically lose all your currency. Your voice is silenced. You’re done. Those who condemn cancel culture usually imply that it’s unfair and indiscriminate.

The problem with this perspective is cancel culture isn’t real, at least not in the way people believe it is. Instead, it’s turned into a catch-all for when people in power face consequences for their actions or receive any type of criticism, something that they’re not used to.

I’m a black, Muslim woman, and because of social media, marginalized people like myself can express ourselves in a way that was not possible before. That means racist, sexist, and bigoted behavior or remarks don’t fly like they used to. This applies to not only wealthy people or industry leaders but anyone whose privilege has historically shielded them from public scrutiny. Because they can’t handle this cultural shift, they rely on phrases like “cancel culture” to delegitimize the criticism.

Since the #MeToo hashtag went viral in 2017, more women have spoken out about their experiences with sexual harassment and assault. While many people have applauded this movement, some men now say they fear even casual interactions with women will get them canceled.

Only that’s not what’s happening. While some powerful men may not have the status they once did, they have hardly been canceled. Louis CK admitted to masturbating in front of female comedians. He was dropped by his agency, and HBO and Netflix cut ties with him, but he recently sold out five shows in my home city of Toronto. Harvey Weinstein—who has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 80 women (he has denied the allegations) and charged with predatory sexual assault, a criminal sexual act and rape (he has pleaded not guilty)—lost his job, but when he showed up at a young artists’ event in October, a comedian who called him out in her set was booed and two women who confronted him were asked to leave. When political journalist Mark Halperin, who denied allegations of unwanted sexual contact but acknowledged that his “behavior was inappropriate and caused others pain,” faced pushback over a new book, his publisher spoke to the New York Post decrying “this guilty-until-proven-innocent cancel culture where everyone is condemned to death or to a lifetime of unemployment based on an accusation that’s 12 years old.” That criticism is being compared to death tells you a lot about some of the people arguing that cancel culture has run amok.

In September, comedian Shane Gillis was fired from Saturday Night Live after videos of him making racist jokes surfaced. Comedian Bill Burr condemned the firing saying, “You f-cking millennials, you’re a bunch of rats, all of you,” and “None of them care, all they want to do is get people in trouble.” But having a job at SNL isn’t a human right. And although Gillis’ defenders have fretted about the sanctity of free speech in comedy, the audience of a comedic TV show should get to speak out about whether they want to watch someone who has espoused this type of humor. That’s actually the marketplace at work. Why should Gillis be able to utter racist things but those affected by hate speech shut their mouths? Gillis is still a touring comedian. He will be fine.

Although use of the term spiked this year, the idea of cancel culture has been bubbling for a while. In 2016, Kim Kardashian shared clips revealing that despite Taylor Swift’s claim that Kanye West didn’t warn her about a provocative lyric, he actually did give her a heads-up and she thanked him. Swift said she was “falsely painted as a liar.” But soon #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled- was trending.

“When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being,” Swift told Vogue this summer. “You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, kill yourself.” There aren’t many people who can understand what Swift went through. To have so many people turn on you is surely upsetting. But how exactly was she canceled? Though many people believed that this white woman had disingenuously portrayed herself as a victim of a black bully and made clear that they didn’t find that acceptable, Swift has remained one of the highest-paid celebrities in the world.

The conversation reached a new level in October when Obama expressed concern about the way people are called out on social media. “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly,” he said at a summit. He didn’t use the term, but the assumption was he was condemning cancel culture.

Now I am certain Obama wasn’t talking about Louis CK in his call for us to be less judgmental. He was pointing out that people are complicated and make mistakes, though I’m not convinced they are being written off in the way he thinks. It should also go without saying that Swift’s perceived offense should not be lumped in with Weinstein’s alleged crimes. But that’s another problem with the conversation about cancel culture. It oversimplifies. The term is used in so many contexts that it’s rendered meaningless and precludes a nuanced discussion of the specific harm done and how those who did it should be held accountable.

Rather than panicking that someone might be asked to take a seat, we would all do well to consider the people who are actually sidelined: those who lose professional opportunities because of toxic workplaces, who spend years dealing with trauma caused by others’ actions, who are made to feel unsafe.

I write frequently about racism and Islamophobia and have received more death threats, calls for my firing and racist insults than I can keep track of. But when people who believe cancel culture is a problem speak out about its supposed silencing effect, I know they’re not talking about those attacks. When they throw around terms like “cancel culture” to silence me instead of reckoning with the reasons I might find certain actions or jokes dehumanizing, I’m led to one conclusion: they’d prefer I was powerless against my own oppression.

 

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Newsome: ‘Cancel Culture’ Is A Myth To Silence Marginalized Voices

Cancelling celebrities never actually results in anything beyond simple career inconveniences.

The phrase “cancel culture” has been one of the most popular new things for people to say without really having any clue what it actually means. The prevailing definition of cancel culture is the idea that saying the wrong thing, having old inflammatory tweets or sound bytes resurface or having unpopular political reviews will ultimately result in social media users “canceling” the offending party. To “cancel,” then, is to sic the wrath of social media upon someone with the end result being some sort of catastrophic blow to said person’s career. The prevalence of these “cancel” moments has caused people to characterize the leaders of so-called cancel culture – namely young, marginalized communities – as too sensitive; as always needing to find something to criticize or find fault in. Leading to an idea that free speech is dying at the hands of those pesky millennials. But here’s the problem: cancel culture isn’t an actual thing because nobody really, truly gets canceled. And the continued use of the phrase like it’s some boogeyman is only a thinly-veiled method of marginalizing the people around us who want to vocalize when they and their respective communities are wronged.

Let’s look at an abridged list of people who have gotten “canceled” on social media. When it was announced that Kevin Hart would host this year’s Oscars, his old homophobic tweets resurfaced, causing the Academy to demand an apology from him. He refused and was booted from the show. When Louis CK and Aziz Ansari were accused of sexual assault, they responded by taking social media hiatuses. When Kanye West said slavery was a choice and started donning MAGA hats while being chummy with Donald Trump, he was summarily slandered across social media. In most people’s eyes, these men got canceled. But in actuality, nothing really happened to them beyond career inconveniences.

Louis CK and Aziz Ansari are both back on the comedy circuit, touring and making money. Kevin Hart dropped a new (awful) Netflix comedy special and Kanye West’s Yeezy sneakers are still selling out every time they’re released. We could go on: R. Kelly was touring pretty much up until the day he was actually arrested; Roseanne – whose show was literally canceled last year due to her rampant racism – returned to standup in March; and so on. The fact is, people just don’t actually get canceled. Their shows might get canceled. Their movies might get shelved. Their albums might get panned but in the grand scheme of things, their lives go on relatively unscathed – especially compared to the marginalized folks they continue to insult.

If Kanye’s album had been any good or Kevin Hart’s standup been bearable or R. Kelly had a fire new project, these men would have just as many fans quoting gobbling up their works as before. That’s because, for as many voices that are genuinely outraged by what these people do and say, there are just as many fans who don’t care enough about the LGBT community, black folks, women or anyone else to stop supporting their trash faves.

Even though nobody is actually ever canceled, the importance of people who call out the homophobic, racist, ableist, misogynist, etc. etc. among us can’t be understated. The pressure applied to celebrities and those in the public eye from hordes of regular folks and activists is vastly important in articulating what actions will and won’t be accepted by society anymore. Every time someone becomes a trending topic for hate speech and intolerance, it’s a reminder that there will always be people among us who will hold your feet to the fire if you say something that could threaten our lives.

At the same time, however, the persistence in people in the public eye to scream “cancel culture” and call marginalized folks too sensitive or themselves intolerant is simply a means to control narratives and live with the freedom of a misogynist, racist or homophobe without consequences. No, society isn’t getting more sensitive, we’re just getting more vocal and using social media as a means to articulate the need for everyone to simply do better. Yelling “cancel culture” when a member of the LGBT community won’t let Kevin Hart off the hook for his homophobia gaslights that person and suggests that demanding the comedian answer for his words is somehow unreasonable. Crying “cancel culture” is simply begging to be as loud and hateful as possible with little recourse.

Cancel culture is a myth. The reality is there are more people with amplified voices who are refusing to sit silently while their communities come under attack by those with the social capital to cause harm. When that happens, awareness is raised, people are uncomfortable and hopefully, some are deterred from being trash. But in reality, for the overwhelming majority of instances, nobody actually gets fully canceled or faces life-changing consequences or silencing. They’ll still earn their money, maintain their notoriety and go about their careers relatively unscathed. They’ll just know that there will be folks ready to call them out at every step of the way if they show they haven’t bothered to learn from their transgressions.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Cancellation of Colin Kaepernick

“Cancel culture” has always existed — for the powerful, at least. Now, social media has democratized it.

We are being told of the evils of “cancel culture,” a new scourge that enforces purity, banishes dissent and squelches sober and reasoned debate. But cancel culture is not new. A brief accounting of the illustrious and venerable ranks of blocked and dragged Americans encompasses Sarah Good, Elijah Lovejoy, Ida B. Wells, Dalton Trumbo, Paul Robeson and the Dixie Chicks. What was the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction, but the cancellation of the black South? What were the detention camps during World War II but the racist muting of Japanese-Americans and their basic rights?

Thus any sober assessment of this history must conclude that the present objections to cancel culture are not so much concerned with the weapon, as the kind of people who now seek to wield it.

Until recently, cancellation flowed exclusively downward, from the powerful to the powerless. But now, in this era of fallen gatekeepers, where anyone with a Twitter handle or Facebook account can be a publisher, banishment has been ostensibly democratized. This development has occasioned much consternation. Scarcely a day goes by without America’s college students being reproached for rejecting poorly rendered sushi or spurning the defenders of statutory rape.

Speaking as one who has felt the hot wrath of Twitter, I am not without sympathy for the morally panicked who fear that the kids are not all right. But it is good to remember that while every generation believes that it invented sex, every preceding generation forgets that it once believed the same thing.

Besides, all cancellations are not created equal. Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Brett Kavanaugh at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings of sexual assault, was inundated with death threats, forced from her home and driven into hiding. Dave Chappelle, accused of transphobia, collected millions from Netflix for a series of stand-up specials and got his feelings hurt.

It would be nice to live in a more forgiving world, one where dissenting from groupthink does not invite exile and people’s occasional lapses are not held up as evidence of who they are. But if we are to construct such a world, we would do well to leave the slight acts of cancellation effected in the quad and cafe, and proceed to more illustrious offices.

The N.F.L. is revered in this country as a paragon of patriotism and chivalry, a sacred trust controlled by some of the wealthiest men and women in America. For the past three years, this sacred trust has executed, with brutal efficiency, the cancellation of Colin Kaepernick. This is curious given the N.F.L.’s moral libertinism; the league has, at various points, been a home for domestic abusers, child abusers and open racists.

And yet it seems Mr. Kaepernick’s sin — refusing to stand for the national anthem — offends the N.F.L.’s suddenly delicate sensibilities. And while the influence of hashtags should not be underestimated, the N.F.L. has a different power at its fingertips: the power of monopoly. Effectively, Mr. Kaepernick’s cancellation bars him from making a living at a skill he has been honing since childhood.

It is true that he has found gainful employment with Nike. But only so much solace can be taken in this given that Mr. Kaepernick’s opponents occupy not just board rooms and owner’s boxes, but the White House. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these N.F.L. owners, when somebody disrespects our flag to, to say, ‘Get that son of a [expletive] off the field right now,’” President Trump said in 2017. The N.F.L. has since dutifully obeyed.

Perhaps it is shocking for some to see the president of the United States endorse the cancellation of a pro football player, like he endorsed the cancellation of Hillary Clinton (“Lock her up”), and of Ilhan Omar (“Send her back”). But it is precisely this kind of capricious and biased use of institutional power that has birthed the cancel culture practiced by campus protesters and online. But whereas the wrongdoing of elite institutions was once hidden from public view, in the era of Donald Trump it is all there to be seen.

A sobering process that began with the broadcast beatings of civil rights marchers at Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965, then accelerated with the recorded police brutality against Rodney King, has achieved its zenith with the social media sharing of the executions of Walter Scott, Laquan McDonald and Daniel Shaver.

Mr. Trump’s boasting of sexual assault proved no barrier to the White House. Roger Ailes’s career as a media exec was but a cover for his true calling, sexual coercion. Bill Cosby, once exalted as America’s dad, was unmasked as a mass rapist.

The new cancel culture is the product of a generation born into a world without obscuring myth, where the great abuses, once only hinted at, suspected or uttered on street corners, are now tweeted out in full color. Nothing is sacred anymore, and, more important, nothing is legitimate — least of all those institutions charged with dispensing justice. And so, justice is seized by the crowd.

This is suboptimal. The choice now would seem to be between building egalitarian institutions capable of withstanding public scrutiny, or further retreat into a dissembling fog. The N.F.L. has chosen the latter option. First there was the notion that Mr. Kaepernick was not good enough to play in the league. When this fiction collapsed under the weight of injury and journeymen pulled off the streets, the N.F.L. conjured up a distraction. Whatever one thinks of Jay-Z’s partnership with the league, what it achieved was the replacement of the name of the N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Goodell, by Jay-Z’s headlines.

And then last week there was the rushed “tryout,” the details of which are still murky. But what followed was a debate over Mr. Kaepernick’s comportment, attire and what he had to say. The debate helped obscure this central fact — a multibillion-dollar monopoly is, at this very hour, denying a worker the right to ply his trade and lying about doing so.

It has been said that Colin Kaepernick missed an opportunity, that no matter how crooked the bargain, if he were truly serious about getting a job, he would have acceded to the N.F.L.’s demands. But Mr. Kaepernick is not fighting for a job. He is fighting against cancellation. And his struggle is not merely his own — it is the struggle of Major Taylor, Jack Johnson, Craig Hodges and Muhammad Ali.

This isn’t a fight for employment at any cost. It is a fight for a world where we are not shot, or shunned, because the masters of capital, or their agents, do not like our comportment, our attire or what we have to say.

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VOX: You’re watching Fox News. You just don’t know it.

Video talk about the “Hack Gap” and how Fox News is able to manipulate the agenda, such as anti-PC, to mainstream media

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The N-Word

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Ta-Nehisi Coates: The N-Word

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Everyday Feminism: 4 Reasons White People Can’t Use the N-Word

New debates are springing up in a long-contentious dialogue about reclamation of oppressive language.

During the recent ESPN “Outside the Lines” special discussion of a proposed NFL rule to penalize the n-word, Twitter erupted in critique, criticism, and debate.

In the midst of this debate, though, there is generally one rule when it comes to the n-word on which there is almost total consensus among Black people:

Yet White people don’t seem to get it.

I’d likely be a wealthy man if I had a dime for every time I’ve heard a White person ask “If Black people can just throw the n-word around all the time, why is it not okay for White people to use that word?”

I can only imagine the number of dimes Black people would have. Innumerable.

And despite how important listening to the voices of marginalized and oppressed people is to social justice work on the part of those with privilege, White people on the whole really seem to have hard time with this one.

Perhaps this is because we don’t like being told that anything is off limits to us.

Or perhaps we just have trouble hearing the voices of those we consider, at some basic level, to be lesser, not fully human.

Regardless of the reason, maybe it’s time for a different tact.

Perhaps you can hear it better or differently if a White person explains why exactly we don’t get to use the n-word, regardless of what Black folks are doing.

So here is my message to you.

Dear White Folks,

We have to stop using the n-word.

Like really, really.

And I know what you’re thinking, “But—But—‘They’ get to say it all the time!”

Well, tough cookies.

Here’s why it’s not okay for us to say it, no matter what Black folks are doing:

1. We Lost the Privilege

You know that whole 600 year time period when White Europeans were buying and selling Black Africans as chattel?

And remember how that whole system was enforced by a violent system of repression whereby Black slaves who did not act the way the White folks wanted them to were beaten and murdered?

Oh, and remember that time after slavery when Black people were locked in a system called Jim Crow that used a similar fear of violence and repression to keep Black people in “their place?”

Well, in the midst of all that shit, there was a word invented by White people as a pejorative for Black folks. And it was used just about every time a Black person was whipped, chained, beaten, insulted, spat upon, raped, lynched, or otherwise humiliated and mistreated by White folks.

Thus, I really don’t care how much White folks want to use that word.

I don’t care how unfair you think it is that someone else gets to use it when we don’t.

Our people gave up the privilege to use that word the moment we invented it as a tool of oppression.

2. Why Should We Get a Say in the Conversation about That Word?  

There is a lively debate in African American communities between those who think it’s time to “Bury the N-Word” and those who think it can be reclaimed as a word of camaraderie and brotherhood/sisterhood.

In his brilliant piece entitled “Exporting the N-word,” Coleman Collins explains,

There are generally four schools of thought on the word “nigga.” There’s the first and largest group — black working-class (but not exclusively so) people who say it casually because it’s what they’ve always done, or simply because they don’t like being told what to do.

There’s the small but vocal group of middle-class black intellectuals who claim to have “reclaimed” the word, to have turned it into a term of endearment instead of a tool of oppression. It’s a neat solution to a messy problem. It ends in “A,” after all!

The third group is comprised of the “respectable Negroes,” the bootstrap types, the “don’t you embarrass me in front of these White folks” crowd. Also largely middle- and upper-middle class, the worst of these would have us believe that if black men only pulled their pants up, stopped littering, and stopped calling each other that word, racism and poverty would come to an end. 

Last but certainly not least, you have the extremely sympathetic older generation that worked to have the word eradicated from White people’s vocabularies only to find it shouted from street corners and blasted from car windows in the future they worked so hard for.

If White folks are interested in this debate, we should listen, but we should not assume that there is consensus within Black communities on the issue.

That is a healthy conversation, and it’s a part of a long history of marginalized communities attempting to “reclaim” words that were once oppressive.

No matter how long that conversation goes on in Black communities, though, White people do not get to take part.

I’m sorry.

As the ones from whom the word of violence and oppression must be reclaimed, we do not get to have a word in that conversation. Plain and simple.

3. Not Everything Should Be in Bounds to Us as White People

The question of why White people can’t use the n-word is, in essence, the epitome of White privilege.

As White folks, we tend to think that every door should be open to us, every conversation should be ours, and every space should welcome us. We think this way because, when it comes to racialized spaces, that tends to be the case.

We have the privilege of having our voices heard and our presence recognized in just about every space there is.

Thus, we hate it when we are told that we are not actually welcome in a conversation.

But here’s what we need to understand: We’re the only people that get the privilege of access to whatever racialized space we want.

There is hardly a single context in the United States in which a White person (but particularly White, cisgender men) cannot assert themselves into a space and have their voice heard.

White women can hopefully begin to (though never fully) understand this when you think about the ways in which you are denied voice and space by dominant men.

Though these oppressions cannot be compared, hopefully this comparison can help generate a little empathy into why it simply is not okay for us as White people to expect our voices to be heard in every conversation.

Just because we are not welcome to use one word in the English language does not mean that we are being discriminated against.

No, it’s not “racist against White people” to assert that certain things are off limits to us, as people of privilege.

4. It Is Not, in Fact, a Double Standard – It’s a Standard

There’s literally nothing more on this one I could say than what Jay Smooth of Ill Doctrine lays down here:

That’s it!  That’s all you need to know! Which means that we can put this whole thing to rest, right? Yeah? No? Alright…

Well, if you’re still not convinced, then take 5 minutes and 15 seconds and listen to Chesca Leigh drop all the knowledge (plus, her lipstick is too fierce):

***

That’s it!  That’s all you need to know!

Which means that we can put this whole thing to rest, right?

Yeah? No?

Alright…

Well, if you’re still not convinced, then take 5 minutes and 15 seconds and listen to Chesca Leigh drop all the knowledge (plus, her lipstick is too fierce):

And when you’re done, say it with me: “As a White person, I won’t use the n-word any more.”

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Dehumanization

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Dehumanization

• Dehumanization
  • Psychological process of making someone seem less than human
    • not worthy of humane treatment or moral consideration
  • Can lead to committing and justifying, violence and oppression, towards marginalized populations
• US, long history of dehumanization of people of color
  • Dehumanization of people of color began during colonization to justified horrible realities such as the
    • Ethnic cleansing of Native Americans
    • Enslavement of Africans
    • Keeping poor white people from uniting with poor people of color
• Dehumanization still effects how white people view POC

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Moral Exclusion

• Dominant group view themselves and norms as superior to other groups
  • While marginalizing and excluding targeted groups
    • Those excluded are viewed as inferior, evil, or criminal
  • Often occurs during prolong violent conflicts
• Excluded individuals viewed as outside of morality:
  • Are excluded from deserving basic needs and fair treatment
    • Any harm individuals received is deserved and morally justified
      • Even treatment not acceptable for dominant group
    • Common criteria for exclusion include
      • Ideology, skin color, geography, ethnicity, religion, etc.

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“Dehumanization” by Michelle Maiese

“Dehumanization is the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment. This can lead to increased violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide.

Dehumanization is a psychological process whereby opponents view each other as less than human and thus not deserving of moral consideration. Jews in the eyes of Nazis and Tutsis in the eyes of Hutus (in the Rwandan genocide) are but two examples. Protracted conflict strains relationships and makes it difficult for parties to recognize that they are part of a shared human community. Such conditions often lead to feelings of intense hatred and alienation among conflicting parties. The more severe the conflict, the more the psychological distance between groups will widen. Eventually, this can result in moral exclusion. Those excluded are typically viewed as inferior, evil, or criminal.

(Moral exclusion is a psychological process where members of a dominant group view their own group and its norms as superior to others, belittling, marginalizing, excluding, even dehumanizing targeted groups.)

However, for individuals viewed as outside the scope of morality and justice, “the concepts of deserving basic needs and fair treatment do not apply and can seem irrelevant.”[2] Any harm that befalls such individuals seems warranted, and perhaps even morally justified. Those excluded from the scope of morality are typically perceived as psychologically distant, expendable, and deserving of treatment that would not be acceptable for those included in one’s moral community. Common criteria for exclusion include ideology, skin color, and cognitive capacity.”

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Ascent of Man 2015 Dehumanization Study

• 2000 white people were surveyed on how “evolved” different races are
  • Over 1/3 whites surveyed rated black people as “less evolved” than whites
  • Many white used these terms to describe black people
    • “savage,” “barbaric,” and “lacking self-restraint, like animals”
• White people who dehumanizing blacks were more likely support Trump
  • But dehumanization is pervasive across all white social groups
  • Stats on how different types of white people rated black people as less evolved
    • 33% of white Democrats
    • 34% of high-income whites
    • 39% of white Republicans
    • 41% of low-income whites

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Dehumanization Increases with Increased “Threat Perception”

• NWU study examined how dehumanization changes over time
  • Compared survey data before/after 2013 Boston Marathon bombings
  • Arab dehumanization spiked in immediate aftermath of terrorist attack
    • Then started subsiding in a couple of months.

“When people feel like their group is coming under attack from another group … it may increase the blatant levels of dehumanization” Nour Sami Kteily NWU

• Fears and perceptions of threat can be manipulated to justify ill-treatment and violence against certain people
  • Nearly 14 years after 9/11, anti-Muslim violence is still common
    • Recent dehumanizing rhetoric against immigrants increased violence against immigrants
    • Hate crimes against Muslims in the US are at their highest levels since 2001

“[Politicians] are playing to an audience… They recognize that the perception, or this type of rhetoric, has supporters.” Nour Sami Kteily – NWU

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City Lab: We’re Still Dehumanizing Others

“The concept of dehumanization—considering another person less human than you, and therefore, less deserving of humane treatment—is an ancient one. It’s been used to explain and justify aggressive actions of one group towards another throughout history. In Nazi Germany, propaganda posters and movies represented Jews as rats. Many who opposed abolition of slavery compared African Americans to apes…

…In one study, the researchers surveyed a mostly white, liberal-leaning sample of Americans to find out which groups of respondents (if any) blatantly dehumanized other U.S. racial groups. The questions were designed in a way that the respondents were likely to be conscious that they were attributing less humanity to certain groups. The respondents were shown the “ascent of man” silhouettes and asked to point to where they saw various ethnic groups on that scale from lower animals to highly evolved humans

The respondents rated European groups and Japanese as “similarly evolved” as themselves. But Chinese, South Koreans, and Mexican immigrants were rated as being at a lower rung of humanity. Arabs and Muslims were perceived as being the least evolved compared with Americans. (The researchers didn’t measure dehumanization against African Americans in this part of the study series, but other parts confirmed that they were one of the dehumanized groups.)…

…In successive studies, researchers found that dehumanization was strongly associated with social dominance orientation—the belief that that some groups should maintain superiority over others. They also found that dehumanization was a strong predictor of certain behavioral outcomes.

Dehumanization of Arabs, for example, was linked to more tolerance for military violence in Arab nations. For African Americans, dehumanization predicted that respondents would have less sympathy when encountered with incidents of injustice and wrongful incarceration. For Hispanic Americans, it meant less support for immigration.

Dehumanization increases with increased threat perception

In another study, the researchers examined how dehumanization changes over time. They compared survey data before and after the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013. Dehumanization of Arabs spiked in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack, and then started subsiding in a couple of months.

“When people feel like their group is coming under attack from another group … it may increase the blatant levels of dehumanization,” Kteily says.

It’s frightening to think about how fears and perceptions of threat can be manipulated to justify ill-treatment and violence against certain people. Nearly 14 years after 9/11, anti-Muslim violence is still common. And the recent stream of dehumanizing rhetoric against immigrants has already also had violent ramifications.

“[Politicians] are playing to an audience,” Kteily says. “They recognize that the perception, or this type of rhetoric, has supporters.””

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Vox: The dark psychology of dehumanization, explained

“Dehumanization doesn’t only occur in wartime,” says Nick Haslam, a psychologist who is the world’s current leading expert on the topic. “It’s happening right here, right now. And every day, good people who don’t see themselves as being prejudiced bigots are nevertheless falling prey to it.”…

…Fiske at Princeton has studied how immigrants and refugees are uniformly discriminated against the world over. She’s conducted neuroscience research that shows when we dehumanize others, the regions of our brain associated with disgust turn on and the regions associated with empathy turn off. What’s shocking about Kteily’s results from the “Ascent of Man” experiment, she says, is that “people are willing to admit that they have relative scales of humanity in their heads.”…

…With the “Ascent of Man” tool, Kteily and collaborators Emile Bruneau, Adam Waytz, and Sarah Cotterill found that on average, Americans rate other Americans as being highly evolved, with an average score in the 90s. But disturbingly, many also rated Muslims, Mexican immigrants, and Arabs as less evolved.

“We typically see scores that average 75, 76,” for Muslims, Kteily says. “Which I think is a lot on a scale that’s so extreme.” And about a quarter of study participants will rate Muslims on a score of 60 or below.

In the months since Donald Trump was elected president, it’s become shockingly commonplace for Americans to blatantly dehumanize Muslims and Mexican immigrants — and then use violence against them. Hate crimes against Muslims in the US are at their highest levels since 2001. In the 1970s, Bandura predicted that dehumanization leads to increased aggression. Today, Kteily and colleagues find something similar: Willingness to dehumanize on the “Ascent of Man” scale predicts aggressive attitudes toward the Muslim world.

People who dehumanize are more likely to blame Muslims as a whole for the actions of a few perpetrators. They are more likely to support policies restricting the immigration of Arabs to the United States. People who dehumanize low-status or marginalized groups score higher on a measure called “social dominance orientation,” meaning that they favor inequality among groups in society, with some groups dominating others…

…And , in a study, blatant dehumanization of Muslims and Mexican immigrants was strongly correlated with Trump support — even when compared with support for other Republican candidates. The data is “consistent with the idea that support for some of the Republican candidates (and Trump in particular) comes not despite their dehumanizing rhetoric but in part because of it,” Kteily and Bruneau conclude in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.”

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Dehumanizing by Relating to Animals

• History of dehumanizing people by relating them to animals
  • Jew related to vermin during Holocaust
  • US Latinos referred to with insect-related language such as:
    • “hordes of immigrants” that “scurry over the border,” “infecting” U.S. culture
  • People of African descent related to apes
• Research supports the link between dehumanization and sanctioned violence
  • In a 2008 UC study
    • White participants were subliminally exposed to images of apes before watching a video of police beating a black man were more likely to endorse that beating
    • Participants did not endorse same beating when suspect was white or no ape image primer
• 2008 Stanford/Penn State study
  • Compared 183 criminal death penalty cases to language used in Philadelphia Enquirer articles about cases
  • Among black defendants, more ape-related images/phrases used in the press coverage
    • The more likely the defendant was to be put to death
• Trump Rhetoric
  • About the Las Vegas shooter (white man), Trump said this:
    • “wires were crossed pretty badly in his brain. Extremely badly in his brain. And it’s a very sad event.”
  • Muslim immigrant from Uzbekistan in 2017 terrorist attack in NYC
    • “This animal who did the attacking.”

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 APA: “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children”

 A History of Dehumanization

Historians of genocide often argue that dehumanization is a necessary precondition for culturally and/or state-sanctioned violence (Frederickson, 2002; Jahoda, 1999; Santa Ana, 2002)—a view echoed by some social psychological theorists (Opotow, 1990; Staub, 1989). The logic of this assertion is that dehumanizing groups morally excludes them (Opotow, 1990), making it permissible to treat people in a way that would be morally objectionable if they were fully human. U.S. history is replete with examples of this kind of moral exclusion of Black children. For instance, the policies of chattel slavery (mostly pertaining to peoples of African descent) permitted children to be separated from their parents and forced into labor at any age (Guttman, 1976). In 1944, a Black 14-year-old, George Junius Stinney Jr., became the youngest person on record in the United States to be legally executed by the state (electrocuted without the benefit of a lawyer, witnesses, or a record of confession; Jones, 2007). And, notoriously, in 1955, a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till was dragged from his bed, disfigured, and lynched for allegedly whistling at a White woman (Crowe, 2003). What psychological context could explain this treatment of children? Again, there is reason to believe it may be contexts that provoke dehumanization.

A growing literature demonstrates that individuals tend to associate out-groups and out-group members with nonhuman animals more than they do members of their in-group (Boccato, Capozza,Falvo, & Durante, 2008; Capozza, Boccato, Andrighetto, & Falvo, 2009; Haslam, 2006; Loughnan & Haslam, 2007; Saminaden, Loughnan, & Haslam, 2010). More to the point, research by Goff and colleagues supports the hypothesized link between dehumanization and sanctioned violence (Goff et al., 2008). In this research, White participants who were subliminally exposed to images of apes before watching a video of police beating a Black man were more likely to endorse that beating, despite the extremity of the violence. Participants did not, however, endorse the same beating when the suspect was White or when they had not been primed with the ape image. In a follow-up study, Goff et al. coded newspaper articles about death-eligible criminal cases in Philadelphia for ape-related metaphors. They found that the frequency of ape-related imagery predicted whether or not criminals were executed by the state. Of importance, in neither study was racial prejudice (explicit or implicit) a significant predictor. That is, dehumanization uniquely predicted violence and its endorsement.

The Specific Historical Connection Between Blacks and Apes

Although a general association between a group and “animals” is one form of dehumanization, there are reasons to believe that some animals are more strongly associated with some groups than others. For instance, Jews were frequently represented as vermin (particularly rodents) during the Holocaust of World War II (Jahoda, 1999). Similarly, in the context of United States immigration, Latinos are frequently referred to with insect-related language, such as “hordes of immigrants” that “scurry over the border,” “infecting” U.S. culture (Santa Ana, 2002). Likewise, there is a long tradition of peoples of African descent being likened to nonhuman primates—what the philosopher Lott (1999) referred to as the “Negro/Ape metaphor.”

This dehumanizing representation can still be found in depictions of soccer players of African descent, especially in Europe (Jones, 2002; Thompson, 2013), and of the first Black president of the United States (Apel, 2009). Consequently, the research conducted by Goff, Eberhardt, et al. (2008) tested the strength of an association between Blacks and great apes (e.g., gorillas, chimpanzees) in contrast to that between Blacks and big cats (e.g., lions, tigers, cheetahs). This research found that, though big cats were seen as more violent, more negative, and more strongly associated with Africa than were great apes, the Black/ape association predicted violence. This finding suggests that the strong historical association between Blacks and apes specifically—and not Blacks with simply any animal—may still influence the unique ways in which individuals dehumanize Blacks. Consequently, the present research uses the same methods as this previous work (Goff, Eberhardt, et al., 2008) to investigate the reduction in protections afforded to Black children when they are dehumanized.”

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Political meme to dehumanize President Obama to make him appear inferior

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Undefeated: Ibram Kendi, one of the nation’s leading scholars of racism, says education and love are not the answer

Just so you know, black people are not inherently better athletes than white people, Kendi says. We only think so because “black people have not only been rendered inferior to white people, they’ve been rendered like animals,” and thus physically superior creatures. It’s an old racist idea that helped justify African-Americans’ suitability for backbreaking labor and medical experiments and the theft of their children.

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The Root: Comparing Black People to Apes: It’s Worse Than You Thought

“This whole “simian” thing has roots as old as the creation of race itself. The notion of blacks as apelike “began with the first European contact with Africans,” Phillip Atiba Goff, a UCLA psychologist who has studied the topic, says. You have to look no further than news about taunts (and tossed bananas) from the stands of soccer matches and hateful photos of Barack and Michelle Obama to realize how stubborn this association has been.

The worst part is, it’s not just old, inspired by racism or embraced by racists. It’s also potentially harmful in real life.

(Earlier in 2014, the Belgian newspaper De Morgen ran an image depicting President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as apes.)

Take two studies that Goff worked on: In one, students who were primed with words associated with cats before seeing a video of police officers beating a man considered the beating unjustified. So did those who were primed with words associated with apes but were told the victim was white. But those who were primed with the ape words and told the victim was black weren’t as sure.

“The association between ‘black’ and ‘ape’ left our white respondents more open to the possibility that police violence might, in fact, be justified,” Goff said.

In another study—examining 183 criminal cases in which a defendant was eligible for the death penalty, as well as the language used in Philadelphia Enquirer articles about those cases—“it turned out African Americans had significantly more ape-related images ascribed to them than did whites,” said Goff. Worse: “Among African Americans, the more ape-related images you had in your press coverage, the more likely you were to be put to death.”

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Further Reading

Slate: How Do Trump Supporters See Black People?

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Cultural Appropriation

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Cultural Appropriation vs Cultural Exchange

• Cultural appropriation
  • Dominate group uses marginalized groups’ cultural symbols to:
    • Self-expression
    • A costume
    • A mascot
  • An exercise in privilege and is “not honoring a culture”

“Cultural appropriation is itself a real issue because it demonstrates the imbalance of power that still remains between cultures that have been colonized and the ex-colonizers.” Jarune Uwujaren – Everyday Feminist

• Cultural Exchange
  • Engaging with a culture as a respectful and humble guest
    • Must have some element of mutual understanding, equality, respect
      • Usually white people need to be invited

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7 Myths about Cultural Appropriation DEBUNKED! | Decoded | MTV News

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Every Day Feminism”The Difference Between Cultural Exchange and Cultural Appropriation“

What Cultural Exchange Is Not

“One of the reasons that cultural appropriation is a hard concept to grasp for so many is that Westerners are used to pressing their own culture onto others and taking what they want in return. We tend to think of this as cultural exchange when really, it’s no more an exchange than pressuring your neighbors to adopt your ideals while stealing their family heirlooms.

True cultural exchange is not the process of “Here’s my culture, I’ll have some of yours” that we sometimes think it is. It’s something that should be mutual. Just because Indian Americans wear business suits doesn’t mean all Americans own bindis and saris. Just because some black Americans straighten their hair doesn’t mean all Americans own dreadlocks.

The fact is, Western culture invites and, at times, demands assimilation. Not every culture has chosen to open itself up to being adopted by outsiders in the same way. And there’s good reason for that. “Ethnic” clothes and hairstyles are still stigmatized as unprofessional, “cultural” foods are treated as exotic past times, and the vernacular of people of color is ridiculed and demeaned.

So there is an unequal exchange between Western culture – an all-consuming mishmash of over-simplified and sellable foreign influences with a dash each of Coke and Pepsi – and marginalized cultures. People of all cultures wear business suits and collared shirts to survive. But when one is of the dominant culture, adopting the clothing, food, or slang of other cultures has nothing to do with survival.

So as free as people should be to wear whatever hair and clothing they enjoy, using someone else’s cultural symbols to satisfy a personal need for self-expression is an exercise in privilege.

Because for those of us who have felt forced and pressured to change the way we look, behave, and speak just to earn enough respect to stay employed and safe, our modes of self-expression are still limited. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is consistently treated as lesser than Standard English, but people whitewash black slang and use expressions they barely understand as punch lines, or to make themselves seem cool. People shirk “ethnic” clothes in corporate culture, but wear bastardized versions of them on Halloween.

There is no exchange, understanding, or respect in such cases – only taking.

What Cultural Exchange Can Look Like

That doesn’t mean that cultural exchange never happens, or that we can never partake in one another’s cultures. But there needs to be some element of mutual understanding, equality, and respect for it to be a true exchange.

I remember that at my sister’s wedding, the groom – who happened to be white – changed midway through the ceremony along with my sister into modern, but fairly traditional, Nigerian clothes.  Even though some family members found it amusing, there was never any undertone of the clothes being treated as a costume or “experience” for a white person to enjoy for a little bit and discard later. He was invited – both as a new family member and a guest – to engage our culture in this way.

If he had been obnoxious about it – treated it as exotic or weird or pretended he now understood what it means to be Nigerian and refused to wear Western clothes ever again – the experience would have been more appropriative. But instead, he wore them from a place of respect.

That’s what cultural exchange can look like – engaging with a culture as a respectful and humble guest, invitation only.

Don’t overstay your welcome. Don’t pretend to be a part of the household. Don’t make yourself out to be an honored guest whom the householders should be grateful to entertain and educate for hours on end. Don’t ask a bunch of personal questions or make light of something that’s clearly a sore spot. Just act like any polite house guest would by being attentive and knowing your boundaries.

If, instead, you try to approach another culture as a mooch, busybody, or interloper, you will be shown the door. It’s that simple.

Well, maybe not as simple when you move beyond the metaphor and into the real world. If you’re from a so-called melting pot nation, you know what’s it’s like to be a perpetual couch surfer moving through the domains of many cultures.

Where Defining Cultural Appropriation Gets Messy

Is the Asian fusion takeout I order every week culturally appropriative? Even though I’m Black, is wearing dreadlocks appropriating forms of religious expression that really don’t belong to me? Is meditating cultural appropriation? Is Western yoga appropriation? Is eating a burrito, cosplaying, being truly fascinated by another culture, decorating with Shoji screens, or wearing a headscarf cultural appropriation?

There are so many things that have been chopped up, recolored, and tossed together to make up Western culture that even when we know things are appropriative in some way, we find them hard to let go of.

And then there are the things that have been freely shared by other cultures – Buddhism for example – that have been both respected and bastardized at different turns in the process of exchange. At times, well-meaning people who struggle with their own appropriative behavior turn to textbooks, online comment boards, Google, and Tumblr ask boxes in search of a clear cut answer to the question, “Is this [insert pop culture thing, hairstyle, tattoo, or personal behavior here] cultural appropriation?” That’s a question we have to educate ourselves enough to, if not answer, think critically about.

We have a responsibility to listen to people of marginalized cultures, understand as much as possible the blatant and subtle ways in which their cultures have been appropriated and exploited, and educate ourselves enough to make informed choices when it comes to engaging with people of other cultures.

So if you’re reading this and you’re tired of people giving white women wearing bindis crap for appropriating because “freedom of speech,” recognize that pointing out cultural appropriation is not personal. This isn’t a matter of telling people what to wear. It’s a matter of telling people that they don’t wear things in a vacuum and there are many social and historical implications to treating marginalized cultures like costumes.

It’s also not a matter of ignoring “real” issues in favor of criticizing the missteps of a few hipsters, fashion magazines, or baseball teams.

Cultural appropriation is itself a real issue because it demonstrates the imbalance of power that still remains between cultures that have been colonized and the ex-colonizers.

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Regardless, this is not an article asking you to over-analyze everything you do and wrack yourself with guilt. Because honestly, no one cares about your guilt, no one cares about your hurt feelings, and no one cares about your clothes or hair when they’re pointing out cultural appropriation.

When someone’s behavior is labeled culturally appropriative, it’s usually not about that specific person being horrible and evil. It’s about a centuries’ old pattern of taking, stealing, exploiting, and misunderstanding the history and symbols that are meaningful to people of marginalized cultures.””

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How to Not be a Jerk on Halloween

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Cultural Appropriation vs Cultural Appreciation

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NPR: Cultural Appropriation Is, In Fact, Indefensible

“But the truth is that cultural appropriation is indefensible. Those who defend it either don’t understand what it is, misrepresent it to muddy the conversation, or ignore its complexity — discarding any nuances and making it easy to dismiss both appropriation and those who object to it…

…Cultural appropriation can feel hard to get a handle on, because boiling it down to a two-sentence dictionary definition does no one any favors. Writer Maisha Z. Johnson offers an excellent starting point by describing it not only as the act of an individual, but an individual working within a “power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.

That’s why appropriation and exchange are two different things, Johnson says — there’s no power imbalance involved in an exchange. And when artists appropriate, they can profit from what they take, while the oppressed group gets nothing…

…Complicating things even further, those who tend to see appropriation as exchange are often the ones who profit from it.  Even Malik’s example involving rock and roll isn’t as simple as Elvis “stealing” from black artists. Before he even came along, systematic oppression and segregation in America meant black musicians didn’t have access to the same opportunities for mainstream exposure, income, or success as white ones. Elvis and other rock and roll musicians were undoubtedly influenced by black innovators, but over time the genre came to be regarded as a cultural product created, perfected by, and only accessible to whites.

This is the “messy interaction” Malik breezes over in dismissing the idea of appropriation as theft: A repeating pattern that’s recognizable across many different cultural spheres, from fashion and the arts to literature and food. And this pattern is why cultures and people who’ve suffered the most from appropriation sometimes insist on their traditions being treated like intellectual property — it can seem like the only way to protect themselves and to force members of dominant or oppressive cultures to consider the impact of their actions.

This has lead to accusations of gatekeeping by Malik and others: Who has the right to decide what is appropriation and what isn’t? What does true cultural exchange look like? There’s no one easy answer to either question.

But there are some helpful guidelines: The Australian Council for the Arts developed a set of protocols for working with Indigenous artists that lays out how to approach Aboriginal culture as a respectful guest, who to contact for guidance and permission, and how to proceed with your art if that permission is not granted. Some of these protocols are specific to Australia, but the key to all of them is finding ways for creativity to flourish while also reducing harm.

All of this lies at the root of why cultural appropriation is indefensible. It is, without question, harmful. It is not inherent to writing representational and inclusive fiction, it is not a process of equal and mutually beneficial exchange, and it is not a way for one culture to honor another. Cultural appropriation does damage, and it should be something writers and other artists work hard to avoid, not compete with each other to achieve.”

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New York Fashion Week, Where Cultural Appropriation Never Goes Out of Style: The Daily Show

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Co-opting Experiences

• People of privilege using experiences of marginalized people, especially their suffering:
  • To push an agenda that is unrelated
  • As “clickbait”
  • To make these experiences about themselves
• For example
  • White people posting “out of context” images and videos of people of color suffering
    • To garner support for their unrelated projects

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