In my last post, I mentioned the larger discussion about blame for racism that cases like Trayvon Martin produce.  One consistent meme that arises every time black people protest the killing of a black person by a white person is: Why don’t black people protest when blacks kill other blacks?  After all, statistically black homicide victims are more likely to be killed by blacks than any other race.  Black on black homicide certainly happens at a far greater rate than vigilante or even police killing of blacks.  So, why doesn’t the black community protest that?  Why is it only when the perpetrator is white?    The questions (rhetorical as they may be) need answers. (more…)

Photograph by: Red Huber , Orlando Sentinel/MCT

The Trayvon Martin case has become a national media event complete with competing individual evaluations, competing definitions of racism and competing blame narratives.  In these “racial events,” Americans propensity for individualistic analysis coalesces with America’s racialized culture in order to produce a mix of individual evaluations and sweeping claims about racial groups and the institutional privileges and disadvantages of different racial groups.  In my experience, this process reinforces many of the flawed ideas about race that sociologists regularly debunk and challenge. (more…)

Photo courtesy: Official Site of the City of Dayton, Ohio

Editor’s note: This post has been printed with permission of the author.

By Dr. Jamie Longazel

We should certainly applaud Dayton’s willingness to embrace immigrants and refugees, especially at a time when many cities and states are passing sweeping anti-immigrant legislation. Yet for this countertrend to generate meaningful social change, it must be more than a redevelopment ploy. What we need is the formation of class-based alliances that are unwilling to submit to anti-immigrant scare tactics and eager to challenge the economic processes that have distressed these communities in the first place.

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Lately there has been a lot of talk about class, and not just the vague election year pandering to the vague demographic of the “middle class.”  Instead, the very concept of class has become a subject of debate.  Last time, I focused on Mitt Romney’s comment’s about “people who have fallen out of the middle class.”  This time I focus on fellow candidate Rick Santorum’s criticism of Romney for using the word class.  Here’s what Santorum said:

“There are no classes in America. We’re a country that don’t allow for titles. We don’t put people in classes. Maybe middle income people.”

Once again, it’s tempting to dismiss these statements as bizarre gaffes perhaps brought on by a grueling campaign season.  However, I have convinced myself that there are no “bad” political soundbytes.  Partly because shouting “what are you insane?!?!?” at my computer is apparently frowned upon at my local Starbucks, but also because such comments often provide a useful starting point to discuss a complex phenomenon like class. (more…)

A recent article published in the Kansas City Star stimulated my interest for a discourse. I found the article especially relevant, as presently, a wide segment of the United States population vehemently opposes undocumented aliens in the country. The article’s author reported that an immigration bill proposal sponsored by State Senator Will Kraus, a Lee’s Summit Republican, would require public schools in Missouri to verify the immigration status of students. A provision of the proposed bill stipulates that all public schools document the immigration status of students in order to authenticate that they are lawful aliens. Another segment of the bill proposes that schools compile a report on students’ immigration status for classification purposes and to report the amount of students enrolled in English as a second language to the State Board of Education.

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“I don’t know if I should be saying this right now,” sophomore Allie stated, her eyes making a cautionary sweep of the room, even though except for us it was empty, and the door had long been shut. White and well-off, she held a prestigious academic scholarship and took many of her courses through a selective honors program. But not this course: “[The professor] was a nice lady, but she felt like she had to tie every single thing she said into like, diversity. And it felt extremely forced. And the class was largely, it was a diverse class, more so than any other class that I had taken … Don’t get me wrong I love the diversity at this school, but it just felt so forced…Like it wasn’t even related to our topic, and it just felt almost like someone was forcing it in there… [It] wasn’t in the course description at all. It didn’t count as a diversity requirement or anything.”

The course was an introduction to Public Health. Public Health is the work of protecting and improving the health of communities through education, research, and communication. Sociologists, demographers, and legal scholars, as well as public health scholars and clinical care providers, have documented myriad ways in which race and ethnicity shape communities and their health – influencing at the very least where people live and thus the schools and jobs they have access to, the distances they have to travel to get to their jobs and schools, and the means by which they travel there. Race and ethnicity are fundamental to the study of the health of communities. But somehow Allie didn’t see the connection.

Allie had the transcript of a superstar. She’d aced every course she’d taken in college and most every course prior to it. And many of those courses explicitly stated as a primary course objective that students would improve their critical thinking capacities. Allie’s grades would suggest that she’d unequivocally excelled at this; her comments indicate something more ambiguous about her success. They indicate to me that the “critical thinking” valued by the institutions in which a White, privileged student like Allie had excelled might be leaving students to flounder when it comes to thinking critically about race, ethnicity, and the ways in which privileges and oppressions have been – and continue to be – systematically linked to race and ethnicity. For Allie, this lack of support led to a vicious loop: she saw race and ethnicity as having nothing to do with her (Whiteness apparently did not count as race or ethnicity); as mattering only when fulfilling some institutional requirement; and as unworthy of her learning energies unless she was fulfilling such requirements, upon completion of which, she could return to not thinking of race and ethnicity at all.

Sociologists like Eduardo Bonilla Silva see students like Allie the norm among college students who are White and economically well-off: they’ve learned, even been encouraged, to minimize – and deny – the ways in which race shapes social relationships, and the ways in which the blatant racism of the past relates to deeply embedded and ongoing injustices in the present. Such dangerous misunderstandings are evident now in Tucson, Arizona, where the Tucson Unified School District has moved to eliminate its Mexican American studies curriculum and to ban books the discuss the history of the Americas from the perspective of the peoples who have lived on the land prior to European and European-American conquests. Arizona School Superintendent John Huppenthal argues that this ban was a necessary move because the program “promotes resentment.” But what about the resentment of White, privileged students like Allie – the resentment of having to think about, talk about, reflect on systemic inequities by which they have benefited? Allie’s “mainstream” course of study promoted her resentment of her public health course. So do we ban Allie’s honors program, then? Do we ban the high-level honors curricula she followed in high school?

Education scholar and educator Ernest Morrell has described critical thinking as thought and/or inquiry that fosters individual or social transformation (2009:29). A ban transforms nothing, relying instead on binary oppositional terms and explanations. Dangerous and unjust as a ban may be, however, it makes the binary oppositional logic on which it operates apparent. In Allie’s case, her mainstream curriculum allowed that thinking to operate silently. So if institutions like Allie’s really want to “honor” students, shouldn’t they support – actively and explicitly and thoroughly – the voices and perspectives that students need to engage them in the conversations that foster critical thinking?

AJ shrugged when I asked him why he didn’t even mention the panel. He had been working on it since last semester. Yet during the class period when the very theme of his panel was central to the topic at hand in his upper-level Gender and Families seminar, AJ said nothing of his own work.

He spoke, of course. And as usual, his teacher and his classmates seemed engaged in what he said. They nodded; they looked at him when he was speaking. Some responded to his comments directly. At least one made reference to “what AJ was saying” when making a contribution later in the discussion.

AJ’s panel centered on experiences shaping Black male identities and the development of supportive relationships around those identities. The class discussion that day and the assigned readings for it were billed under the heading of Men and Masculinities. The instructor was White and female. Over half the students in the class appeared to be White. As in many of his college classrooms, AJ was the only African American male. And now, here he was, leaving class with me, a White, female graduate student and researcher with whom he’d consented to spend an inconveniently large number of hours. Here he was shrugging his shoulders as he searched for a verbal answer that might skirt any sensitivities I might have and still answer my question about why he had not discussed his own work where it seemed so relevant and so important to furthering the discussion at hand. Softly he critiqued that powerful discussion I (and perhaps also his professor, the college deans, and the University Viewbook for prospective students) were imagining as he shrugged his shoulders and said: “It’s not going to go as far as you want it to.”

I thought about this experience with AJ when I was reading through The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color, a report released Monday (20 June 2011) by the College Board’s Advocacy and Policy Center. The College Board report makes “six clear recommendations” toward addressing some of the issues that young men of color face, including teacher education for culturally responsive pedagogy in the college classroom and the strengthening of campus multicultural centers. Sounds great to me, but what about AJ’s classroom and countless other classrooms quite like it? What about those class discussions that hold so much potential, but that “don’t go as far as you want [them] to” because one student feels looked to, again and again, to represent a  provide a neat and tidy synopsis of the myriad perspectives and experiences of  myriad others who share his race and gender? What about those deliberations and disagreements and questions and shared experiences that students like AJ want to participate in but have learned not to look for in the classroom? What about the cultural and disciplinary messages students receive day after day, semester after semester, to channel their classroom energies and efforts have to go into preparing for tests of discrete skills rather than into dialogue and collaborative knowledge construction?

The College Board study finds that campuses with strong multicultural centers that reach out to students and families tend to have higher retention rates. Indeed many of the students in my study have indicated that the campus multicultural center at our University has been a key resource for academic advising, extracurricular activities, peer mentoring programs, and summer opportunities. I can’t help but think, though, about a comment from Chloe, another student in my study, a rising senior, who transferred last year from an HBCU (Historically Black College/University):

There’s just a lack of diversity [on this campus]. This is a predominantly white university. I think you can call it a PWI. I looked that up. And I don’t care any type of way, but the fact that there’s even a multicultural center, this one separate place, that says a lot about the lack of diversity.

The College Board’s six recommendations are indeed clear and worthwhile. But recommendations that suggest changes that can be made around the margins without reconstructing the center are, like AJ’s class discussion, “not going to go as far as you want it to.”

found at http://www.seiu.org/2011/04/immigrant-history-immigrant-future.php

If you asked Americans to pick which political party they considered pro-immigration and which one they considered anti-immigration most would agree that the Republican Party is anti-immigration and the Democratic Party is pro-immigration.  Like abortion politics, this does not mean that every Democrat is pro-immigration and every Republican anti-immigration.  Still, the divide between the parties appears to be growing starker as voters either sort themselves into parties due to their stance on immigration or solidify their stances on immigration as a result of their party affiliation.  While many of us may take this alignment for granted, founders of the anti-immigration movement did not see this party alignment as inevitable and such an institutional arrangement was not deliberate.  Instead, the current situation, I believe, points to the outsized role racialized politics play in the American political system. (more…)