The Pacific Standard website has posted a long article about how an airport fence has sparked a debate over honoring victims of the United States’ internment of citizens of Japanese descent during World World II. A small airport was built on the site of the former Tulelake, California internment camp, and now debate about replacing a dilapidated fence with an eight-feet tall, three-miles long, barbed wire-topped new fence has raised questions about preserving the historical significance of the land. It is a very interesting read.
race
“Community trauma remains a major issue in marginalized communities,” begins an article on the Pacific Standard website about research on connections between police violence and community trauma. “But there’s still little research to show how police cause mental-health issues—or what can be done to lessen the communal anguish.” I’ll have to speak with the director of the forthcoming SJSU Human Rights Institute about research the institute can conduct in this area.
Conservative college students sometimes report that their ideas are not welcome on campus. A Chronicle of Higher Education collaboration with This American Life explores a University of Nebraska skirmish involving conservative students that made national headlines.
The new movie Black Panther is breaking records at the box office, and generating lots of commentary online. The article that has most resonated with me is “Why ‘Black Panther’ is a Defining Moment for Black America.” Author Carvell Wallace begins with “the Grand Lake Theater — the kind of old-time movie house with cavernous ceilings and ornate crown moldings — is one place I take my kids to remind us that we belong to Oakland, Calif. Whenever there is a film or community event that has meaning for this town, the Grand Lake is where you go to see it.” My wife, mother-in-law, and I saw the movie at the Grand Lake Theater the day after it was released. The jam-packed multicultural crowd roared when the opening scene was identified as being set in Oakland, and many other scenes generated thunderous applause. I experienced the movie again the next day at a special screening for SJSU students. I’ll probably go view the movie a third time soon!
Carvell begins the analysis of the movie by contrasting it with earlier films with Black superheroes, which were either comedies or action films with the hero’s blackness being incidental.
Black Panther, by contrast, is steeped very specifically and purposefully in its blackness. “It’s the first time in a very long time that we’re seeing a film with centered black people, where we have a lot of agency,” says Jamie Broadnax, the founder of Black Girl Nerds, a pop-culture site focused on sci-fi and comic-book fandoms. These characters, she notes, “are rulers of a kingdom, inventors and creators of advanced technology. We’re not dealing with black pain, and black suffering, and black poverty” — the usual topics of acclaimed movies about the black experience.
“Black Panther is a Hollywood movie,” Carvell continues, “and Wakanda is a fictional nation. But coming when they do, from a director like Coogler, they must also function as a place for multiple generations of black Americans to store some of our most deeply held aspirations.” The movie sits squarely in the Afrofuturism artistic movement:
Afrofuturism, a decidedly black creation, is meant to go far beyond the limitations of the white imagination. It isn’t just the idea that black people will exist in the future, will use technology and science, will travel deep into space. It is the idea that we will have won the future. There exists, somewhere within us, an image in which we are whole, in which we are home. Afrofuturism is, if nothing else, an attempt to imagine what that home would be. Black Panther cannot help being part of this.
Carvell closes with “we hold one another as a family because we must be a family in order to survive. Our individual successes and failures belong, in a perfectly real sense, to all of us. That can be for good or ill. But when it is good, it is very good. It is sunlight and gold on vast African mountains, it is the shining splendor of the Wakandan warriors poised and ready to fight, it is a collective soul as timeless and indestructible as vibranium. And with this love we seek to make the future ours, by making the present ours. We seek to make a place where we belong.” Indeed!
The Pacific Standard website has published a fascinating story about using data to help migrants find work. In the article the authors of a Science magazine article are interviewed; they discuss their study of applying an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze historical data to predict where to best settle refugees upon their arrival in a new country. The authors note,
Refugee policies, like immigration policies generally, are dominated by ideology rather than sound evidence. We haven’t seen a lot of innovations in this space. Cash assistance, language instruction, training programs: These turn out to be very expensive and difficult to scale. The nice thing is, from a policy perspective, [using artificial intelligence algorithms] doesn’t really cost you anything more. It’s just a smarter way of doing the allocation. Rather than doing it in a haphazard, quasi-random fashion, as we’re doing it right now, we might as well do it in a more data-driven way, where we send people to the places they’re more likely to succeed.
Indeed!
An advertisement for Dove body wash was recently deemed racially insensitive for its portrayal of a Black woman who removes her brown shirt to reveal a White woman wearing a tan shirt. There is a long history of advertisers being insensitive to African American consumers…when they paid attention to that segment of the market at all. The Pacific Standard article “A Brief History of Companies Courting African-American Dollars” provides an analysis.
The National Parks Service has issued a report about the Reconstruction Era that followed the U.S. Civil War. According to a Pacific Standard article about the report, “a new initiative by the National Parks Service seeks to designate sites for their historic significance in the Reconstruction era. It’s a bold and vital move for an agency that has only recently begun to seriously address the racial complexities of the Civil War.” Indeed!
Last week faculty and staff returned to SJSU for the fall semester. Classes started on Wednesday (August 23, 2017), and the next day the President gave her annual Fall Welcome Address. She started the address by discussing the August 11-12, 2017 violence at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville surrounding marches and rallies by White supremacists. I also discussed the protests and counter-protests at the conclusion of the College of Social Sciences welcome event, on Monday, August 21, 2017. See below for the transcript.
To close, let me read two brief items to you.
(1) The first is a note I sent to the college the day after the November 8, 2016 U.S. elections:
Dear Social Sciences Family-
Many of us are shocked and saddened by yesterday’s election and our nation’s deep divisions. It seems that across all aspects of the political spectrum many actions were driven by ignorance and fear instead of knowledge and hope. As we process these results two social media posts by colleagues may be good to keep in mind:
“Out of touch. Like me, you are out of touch with the majority of our country if you did not vote for Trump. (I am not a Hillary supporter either….so I am even more out of touch than most.) Whether or not you are right, does not change that we are out of touch. That said, the best route forward is not to vilify those who don’t think like us, nor condemn them as stupid or ignorant, but instead to understand how and why the majority came to be so different from us.”
“Being a teacher/writer/advocate has never been more important. Let’s fight for the next generation. I’m fired up and ready to go.”
In these challenging times let’s remind ourselves of our mission to help our students and the broader community create more complex and nuanced understandings of their social worlds. Our work matters more than ever now.
Warmest Regards, Walt
(2) The second was the start of an article from last week in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Teaching Newsletter, August 17, 2017”):
The violent demonstrations by white nationalists this past weekend at the University of Virginia have brought renewed attention to one of higher education’s biggest challenges: fostering civil dialogue in class.
There’s no shortage of guidance available. Groups like Project Pericles, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ American Democracy Project have been working to help students engage in constructive conversations, especially during fraught times.
When the students return on Wednesday many will be extremely anxious about the futures. From undocumented students worried about their ability to stay in school and study, to students of color wondering if they are safe when formerly closeted bigots are emboldened to openly express their hate, to the increased unease of all students about their economic futures in the midst of worldwide upheaval, the next few weeks will be difficult times.
I know that many of you are already making changes to engage the challenges we will face. For instance, at least two Assistant Professors rewrote their syllabi after the atrocities in Charlottesville. And the SJSU Fall 2017 Faculty Professional Development Series on Whiteness and Race is more timely than ever. I applaud and thank all who have already thought deeply about how we can move forward to build a better society.
I know that many more instructors will use tools such as those listed in the Chronicle article. Others will develop and powerfully implement new ideas over the semester. In the development I encourage you to draw on the collective experience and wisdom of your colleagues. Together we are stronger.
Earlier in this event we discussed new investments in our Ethnic Studies programs. There are also other social justice proposals in development that will help us create more democratic societies. Our work as social scientists is crucial in that endeavor.
So, on the one hand this concluding note could dampen a traditionally celebratory event, but on the other it is a testament to our vibrancy. When I started as CoSS dean two years ago one of the Chairs remarked, “Collaboration is in your DNA!” Well, I was drawn here because collaboration is an essential component of the college as a whole; collaboration is in our DNA. Tough times are ahead, but we will collectively generate ideas that will get us through the current mess as we build better places on the other side. I look forward to the journey with you all. Have a good semester!
Although not in the College of Social Sciences (CoSS), I’d like to highlight a project by Journalism and Mass Communication Associate Professor Michael Cheers: his recently completed Simple Gifts: A Portrait Series Celebrating SJSU’s Black Faculty. Professor Cheers notes, “The Black faculty at San José State University were given a homework assignment. They were asked to choose a personal keepsake, and pose with that item for a formal portrait. Then explain how that item influenced their teaching careers.” Several CoSS faculty are featured! I am too. My keepsake is Racial Formation in the United States, Second Edition, and here was my narrative: “I entered graduate school in the fall of 1993. I chose sociology as my field of study based on being drawn to books on the subject, even though I had never taken a sociology class. I was a bit unsure about my choice initially, as none of the books that semester really appealed to me as was the case in the past. That changed in the spring of 1994 when I read Racial Formation in the United States. Not only did it remind me of how much I loved sociology, it provided key ideas for my first publication, which was accepted in the fall of 1994. It was frequently cited in future publications for years to come. In 2008 I met one of the authors, and he signed my copy! I still occasionally thumb through it now, 22 years later.” I have not yet read the third edition from 2014. I’ll have to correct that soon….
The Atlantic‘s CityLab website has a fascinating story about multiracial defenders of confederate memorials in New Orleans. One would initially think that all of the defenders are White, but, as usual, race in America is more complex and nuanced than meets the eye….
“Community trauma remains a major issue in marginalized communities,” begins an article on the Pacific Standard website about research on connections between police violence and community trauma. “But there’s still little research to show how police cause mental-health issues—or what can be done to lessen the communal anguish.” I’ll have to speak with the director of the forthcoming SJSU Human Rights Institute about research the institute can conduct in this area.
Conservative college students sometimes report that their ideas are not welcome on campus. A Chronicle of Higher Education collaboration with This American Life explores a University of Nebraska skirmish involving conservative students that made national headlines.
The new movie Black Panther is breaking records at the box office, and generating lots of commentary online. The article that has most resonated with me is “Why ‘Black Panther’ is a Defining Moment for Black America.” Author Carvell Wallace begins with “the Grand Lake Theater — the kind of old-time movie house with cavernous ceilings and ornate crown moldings — is one place I take my kids to remind us that we belong to Oakland, Calif. Whenever there is a film or community event that has meaning for this town, the Grand Lake is where you go to see it.” My wife, mother-in-law, and I saw the movie at the Grand Lake Theater the day after it was released. The jam-packed multicultural crowd roared when the opening scene was identified as being set in Oakland, and many other scenes generated thunderous applause. I experienced the movie again the next day at a special screening for SJSU students. I’ll probably go view the movie a third time soon!
Carvell begins the analysis of the movie by contrasting it with earlier films with Black superheroes, which were either comedies or action films with the hero’s blackness being incidental.
Black Panther, by contrast, is steeped very specifically and purposefully in its blackness. “It’s the first time in a very long time that we’re seeing a film with centered black people, where we have a lot of agency,” says Jamie Broadnax, the founder of Black Girl Nerds, a pop-culture site focused on sci-fi and comic-book fandoms. These characters, she notes, “are rulers of a kingdom, inventors and creators of advanced technology. We’re not dealing with black pain, and black suffering, and black poverty” — the usual topics of acclaimed movies about the black experience.
“Black Panther is a Hollywood movie,” Carvell continues, “and Wakanda is a fictional nation. But coming when they do, from a director like Coogler, they must also function as a place for multiple generations of black Americans to store some of our most deeply held aspirations.” The movie sits squarely in the Afrofuturism artistic movement:
Afrofuturism, a decidedly black creation, is meant to go far beyond the limitations of the white imagination. It isn’t just the idea that black people will exist in the future, will use technology and science, will travel deep into space. It is the idea that we will have won the future. There exists, somewhere within us, an image in which we are whole, in which we are home. Afrofuturism is, if nothing else, an attempt to imagine what that home would be. Black Panther cannot help being part of this.
Carvell closes with “we hold one another as a family because we must be a family in order to survive. Our individual successes and failures belong, in a perfectly real sense, to all of us. That can be for good or ill. But when it is good, it is very good. It is sunlight and gold on vast African mountains, it is the shining splendor of the Wakandan warriors poised and ready to fight, it is a collective soul as timeless and indestructible as vibranium. And with this love we seek to make the future ours, by making the present ours. We seek to make a place where we belong.” Indeed!
The Pacific Standard website has published a fascinating story about using data to help migrants find work. In the article the authors of a Science magazine article are interviewed; they discuss their study of applying an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze historical data to predict where to best settle refugees upon their arrival in a new country. The authors note,
Refugee policies, like immigration policies generally, are dominated by ideology rather than sound evidence. We haven’t seen a lot of innovations in this space. Cash assistance, language instruction, training programs: These turn out to be very expensive and difficult to scale. The nice thing is, from a policy perspective, [using artificial intelligence algorithms] doesn’t really cost you anything more. It’s just a smarter way of doing the allocation. Rather than doing it in a haphazard, quasi-random fashion, as we’re doing it right now, we might as well do it in a more data-driven way, where we send people to the places they’re more likely to succeed.
Indeed!
An advertisement for Dove body wash was recently deemed racially insensitive for its portrayal of a Black woman who removes her brown shirt to reveal a White woman wearing a tan shirt. There is a long history of advertisers being insensitive to African American consumers…when they paid attention to that segment of the market at all. The Pacific Standard article “A Brief History of Companies Courting African-American Dollars” provides an analysis.
The National Parks Service has issued a report about the Reconstruction Era that followed the U.S. Civil War. According to a Pacific Standard article about the report, “a new initiative by the National Parks Service seeks to designate sites for their historic significance in the Reconstruction era. It’s a bold and vital move for an agency that has only recently begun to seriously address the racial complexities of the Civil War.” Indeed!
Last week faculty and staff returned to SJSU for the fall semester. Classes started on Wednesday (August 23, 2017), and the next day the President gave her annual Fall Welcome Address. She started the address by discussing the August 11-12, 2017 violence at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville surrounding marches and rallies by White supremacists. I also discussed the protests and counter-protests at the conclusion of the College of Social Sciences welcome event, on Monday, August 21, 2017. See below for the transcript.
To close, let me read two brief items to you.
(1) The first is a note I sent to the college the day after the November 8, 2016 U.S. elections:
Dear Social Sciences Family-
Many of us are shocked and saddened by yesterday’s election and our nation’s deep divisions. It seems that across all aspects of the political spectrum many actions were driven by ignorance and fear instead of knowledge and hope. As we process these results two social media posts by colleagues may be good to keep in mind:
“Out of touch. Like me, you are out of touch with the majority of our country if you did not vote for Trump. (I am not a Hillary supporter either….so I am even more out of touch than most.) Whether or not you are right, does not change that we are out of touch. That said, the best route forward is not to vilify those who don’t think like us, nor condemn them as stupid or ignorant, but instead to understand how and why the majority came to be so different from us.”
“Being a teacher/writer/advocate has never been more important. Let’s fight for the next generation. I’m fired up and ready to go.”
In these challenging times let’s remind ourselves of our mission to help our students and the broader community create more complex and nuanced understandings of their social worlds. Our work matters more than ever now.
Warmest Regards, Walt
(2) The second was the start of an article from last week in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Teaching Newsletter, August 17, 2017”):
The violent demonstrations by white nationalists this past weekend at the University of Virginia have brought renewed attention to one of higher education’s biggest challenges: fostering civil dialogue in class.
There’s no shortage of guidance available. Groups like Project Pericles, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ American Democracy Project have been working to help students engage in constructive conversations, especially during fraught times.
When the students return on Wednesday many will be extremely anxious about the futures. From undocumented students worried about their ability to stay in school and study, to students of color wondering if they are safe when formerly closeted bigots are emboldened to openly express their hate, to the increased unease of all students about their economic futures in the midst of worldwide upheaval, the next few weeks will be difficult times.
I know that many of you are already making changes to engage the challenges we will face. For instance, at least two Assistant Professors rewrote their syllabi after the atrocities in Charlottesville. And the SJSU Fall 2017 Faculty Professional Development Series on Whiteness and Race is more timely than ever. I applaud and thank all who have already thought deeply about how we can move forward to build a better society.
I know that many more instructors will use tools such as those listed in the Chronicle article. Others will develop and powerfully implement new ideas over the semester. In the development I encourage you to draw on the collective experience and wisdom of your colleagues. Together we are stronger.
Earlier in this event we discussed new investments in our Ethnic Studies programs. There are also other social justice proposals in development that will help us create more democratic societies. Our work as social scientists is crucial in that endeavor.
So, on the one hand this concluding note could dampen a traditionally celebratory event, but on the other it is a testament to our vibrancy. When I started as CoSS dean two years ago one of the Chairs remarked, “Collaboration is in your DNA!” Well, I was drawn here because collaboration is an essential component of the college as a whole; collaboration is in our DNA. Tough times are ahead, but we will collectively generate ideas that will get us through the current mess as we build better places on the other side. I look forward to the journey with you all. Have a good semester!
Although not in the College of Social Sciences (CoSS), I’d like to highlight a project by Journalism and Mass Communication Associate Professor Michael Cheers: his recently completed Simple Gifts: A Portrait Series Celebrating SJSU’s Black Faculty. Professor Cheers notes, “The Black faculty at San José State University were given a homework assignment. They were asked to choose a personal keepsake, and pose with that item for a formal portrait. Then explain how that item influenced their teaching careers.” Several CoSS faculty are featured! I am too. My keepsake is Racial Formation in the United States, Second Edition, and here was my narrative: “I entered graduate school in the fall of 1993. I chose sociology as my field of study based on being drawn to books on the subject, even though I had never taken a sociology class. I was a bit unsure about my choice initially, as none of the books that semester really appealed to me as was the case in the past. That changed in the spring of 1994 when I read Racial Formation in the United States. Not only did it remind me of how much I loved sociology, it provided key ideas for my first publication, which was accepted in the fall of 1994. It was frequently cited in future publications for years to come. In 2008 I met one of the authors, and he signed my copy! I still occasionally thumb through it now, 22 years later.” I have not yet read the third edition from 2014. I’ll have to correct that soon….
The Atlantic‘s CityLab website has a fascinating story about multiracial defenders of confederate memorials in New Orleans. One would initially think that all of the defenders are White, but, as usual, race in America is more complex and nuanced than meets the eye….