racial equality

This just got sent to me, and it seems so fitting for Thanksgiving this year–a poem, by Langston Hughes:

I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed –
I, too, am America.

– Langston Hughes, 1925

See also Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again”.  And thank you, Jessie, for sending these! Here’s wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving, filled with stuffing and gratitude and love.  Me?  I’ll be stuffing myself with my Jewish family, on the holiday few in my family this year feel ambivalent about.  Well, I always feel ambivalent about the turkeys, but that’s just the guilty carnivore in me.  Today, my parents get to meet their grandkitten!  Off to bake the pies…

Yep, you got that right. Barack and 50 Cent in the same sentence. Or rather, post title.

Last night I went to KGB bar with Shira Tarrant to hear her read from Men Speak Out, along with one of her contributors, filmmaker Byron Hurt, and learned about Byron’s latest–a short doc examining the contrasting styles of manhood exhibited by Barack Obama and Rapper/Mogul Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent. It’s part of The Masculinity Project, a web-based endeavor launching in January 2009 devoted to redefining what it means to be a man. Here’s the 10-minute short, which has been released only at Byron’s website and is being spread virally:

Read more about it here. Word.

Courtesy of our gal Rebekah at WMC again:

Potential Treasury Secretary Sheila Bair Is A “Woman To Watch” 11/10/08
Jezebel.com: Despite being the lone government employee on the list, Bair tops it not just because of her work in finance as the chair of the FDIC but because, more importantly, her name is bandied about as a black horse candidate for Treasury Secretary in an Obama Administration.

Women Seek Voice In Cabinet As Obama Team Short On Female Faces 11/10/08
Globe and Mail (Canada): The dominance of men on Obama’s transition economic advisory board begs the question: are women being overlooked?

Latinos And The Obama Cabinet 11/12/08
Washington Post: Latino political advocates, citing the importance of Latino votes in President-elect Barack Obama’s victory, are pressing him to appoint at least two and as many as four Latinos to his administration’s 20 Cabinet-level positions.

There’s just so much post-election goodness out there in the analysis department, we’re posting links as we see them. (Thanks, Virginia, for that Katha link!) S’more:

Alice Walker’s letter to Brother Obama, at The Root

FlowTV’s Special Issue on Sarah Palin, which includes columns titled “In the Feminine Ideal, We Trust” by Janet McCabe / Manchester Metropolitan University; “Palin’s State,” by John Streamas / Washington State University; “Reading Sarah Palin,” by Bernadette Barker-Plummer / University of San Francisco; and “Sarah Palin: Castration as Plenitude,” by Nina Power / Roehampton University (Thanks to Mary Celeste Kearney for the heads up.)

Gloria Feldt at Heartfeldt Politics on Sarah Palin Clothinggate, and how the emperor has no towel (this one made my day)

And a great link round up, as always, from Ann over at feministing

I’ve found it fascinating to read here and there that some Civil Rights leaders are fearing a decrease rather than an increase in focus on civil rights and affirmative action issues should the first African American President assume office come January 2009.

Call it the Bill Cosby Effect?

The thinking goes like this: With a black man in office, Americans will be lulled into thinking that all our racial issues have now been solved.  With the election just days away and (dare I say it without jinxing?!) the possibility of a President Obama very real, just thought I’d share these two cheery tidbits about racial and other disparities, just in via the Council on Contemporary Families Briefing, cause I’m feeling all chipper like that today:

Income Gap Between Whites, Latinos Has Grown at Universities

Over the past three decades, the income disparity between Latino and non-Hispanic white students entering four-year colleges and universities has increased fourfold, with the difference in median household income growing from $7,986 in 1975 to $32,965 in 2006.

Declining Black Enrollments at Many of the Nation’s Highest Ranked Law Schools

Over the past eight years black enrollments have declined at a majority of the top-ranked law schools. At nine high-ranking law schools black enrollments are down by 19 percent or more. Three prestigious law schools in the nation show declines of more than 40 percent.

Hmm. Just sayin is all.

Check out the latter bit in particular, where Colin Powell speaks out against Republicans’ insinuations that Obama is Muslim. It’s up there, in my book, with Obama’s race speech.

Sex and Sensibility: Quick Takes
by Kristen Loveland

Hi to all from your Sex and Sensibility lady here. Here are a few things that caught my eye this past week:

1. The Truth About Teen Girls: Belinda Luscombe has an awesome article in Time Magazine talking about how, despite the proliferation of sexual imagery in the teenage world, maybe we shouldn’t be twisting our knickers in such a knot over their alleged sexual promiscuity. To wit:

“With the pornucopia of media at teens’ disposal in the past decade and a half, on cell phones and computers as well as TVs, early-adolescent sex should be having a growth spurt. But the figures don’t necessarily support one. Despite a minor increase in 2006, the rate of pregnancies among teen girls has been on a downward trend since 1991. Another indicator, the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, is alarmingly high: nearly 1 in 4 girls ages 14 to 19 and nearly 1 in 2 African-American girls, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But this is the first year such a study has been completed, and the study doesn’t separate 14-to-16-year-olds from 17-to-19-year-olds, so it’s still unclear which way that trend is heading.”

Keep reading this fantastic article here and thanks to Deborah for sending this to me!

2. I Am Charlotte: The Series: While on the one hand it appears that there are finally a number of voices asking us to put on the breaks for a second and contemplate what the actual sexual experiences of teenage girls are, it looks like Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons is going to be made into an HBO series. Charlotte Simmons the book has often been noted as over-stated and over-bearing in its condemnation of college sexuality. As the New York Magazine Book Review put it at the time:

“Wolfe’s vision of eroticism is ultimately too dark. When, in Charlotte Simmons, an older man has sex with a younger woman, it is, of course, cynical. But when a younger man has sex with a younger woman, it is equally cynical. Indeed, all the sex in Wolfe’s imagined university is rotten. All intimacy is rotten. At the end of the novel, Charlotte falls in with a new man. He comes from a very different walk of life than Charlotte does, and to all appearances he adores her. One might reasonably see this turn of events as a triumph—love conquering differences, love opening doors. But Wolfe intends for us to see it as a defeat: The man is not suited for his clever country heroine; she has forgotten, he suggests, that “she is Charlotte Simmons”; she has lost her identity.”

To put it mildly, I’m not overly-optimistic about the way the series will portray yet another young woman who has lost her character to the hedonistic offerings of that Gomorrah now known as the American university.

3. The Old is New Again: And finally, on a slightly different note, Ann over at Feministing recently wrote about John LaBruzzo, a state legislator from Louisiana, who wants to pay low-income women to be sterilized. Something that is consistently overlooked in mainstream’s take on what it means to be Pro-Choice is that it is just that: the choice to have or not to have a child. As a political position, it is both concerned with those woman who, for x, y, and z reason, choose not to have a child, and with those from whom the right to have a child is coercively taken away. There have been a number of studies and histories done on sterilization abuse which, particularly in 1970s America, targeted poor and minority women, and included everything from outright nonconsensual sterilizations, to unclear statements signed on the hospital bed before an abortion, to, well, something like LaBruzzo’s brilliant idea. The government has no place in coercing a targeted group of women into permanent reproductive decisions.

So I’m finishing up a report this week on media coverage of race, gender, class, and age in the 2008 primaries. And I’m so jazzed by Gina McCauley’s Michelle Obama Watch and what I’ve learned about it so far that it merits another post. And another, and another to be sure.

I corresponded with Gina yesterday and learned that there have been over 90,000 page views in the 20 days since the site’s been up. A recent piece about MOW in The Baltimore Sun tentatively asks “Michele Obama Ties Black, White Women?” and notes, “Gina McCauley’s blog on African-American women in pop culture has never attracted this kind of attention. But she launched a new Michelle Obama Watch blog in June to monitor and critique media coverage of the potential first lady, and since then, feminists of all colors have been linking and commenting.”

The solidarity is key, and Gina knows it’s about something more. As she wrote to me in an email:

“[T]his ultimately isn’t about Michelle Obama, it is an exercise in how the nation, the news media and entertainment industry in particular, an deal or not deal with an African American women who defies the dominant stereotypes perpetuated about us. If we let them get away with their chicanery with a Harvard-educated attorney, then the next Black woman to walk in her footsteps would have to to trod a more difficult path.”

Hells yes.

The site currently has 13 volunteer contributors who have contributed 88 posts. Got a news tip for the site? Direct your concerns, complaints, or praise about the media’s treatment of Michele Obama to michelleobamawatch@gmail.com. And watch for more from Gina over at What about Our Daughters, which has received credentials to cover the 2008 Democratic National Convention in August.

My dear fellow WGL (short for WomenGirlsLadies) Kristal Brent Zook wrote a great piece yesterday over at the Women’s Media Center, Blogging While Brown (and Female). In case you missed it, here’s the summary:

In a preview of the “Blogging While Brown” conference (Atlanta, July 25-27), WMC author Kristal Brent Zook spoke with Gina McCauley, founder of www.whataboutourdaughters.blogspot.com and one of the organizers of the upcoming conference. McCauley’s foray into blogging began one year ago, when the Texas-based personal injury attorney was compelled to respond to the demeaning characterizations of black women that she saw making headlines. McCauley’s blog demonstrated the power of individuals to speak out and demand change, when she took on offensive programming from BET. McCauley’s righteous indignation helped to generate a wave of protest, leading BET to reposition, and then cancel, the show.

Then, in the midst of their success, everything changed for supporters of What About Our Daughters as its readers and writers were blindsided by a tragedy that would dramatically alter the tone and content of the site. As Zook reports, a tragedy at Dunbar Village, a West Palm Beach, Florida, public housing complex, helped bloggers at What About Our Daughters and other sites to find their voices on issues of misogyny and violence.

Read the article here.

And by the way, the WGLs (aka, our traveling panel “WomenGirlsLadies: A Fresh Conversation across Generations”) appear next in Washington DC, at the Association of Women in Communications Conference and at Georgetown on September 26. Details coming soon!

On the heels of the news about a significant rise in the number of black women entrepreneurs here in the US, I learned about a forthcoming book called Race and Entrepreneurial Success: Black-, Asian-, and White-Owned Businesses in the United States. One of the authors happens to be married to my best gal (formerly known as maid or matron or whatever of honor), Rebecca, who herself researches youth and poverty at Stanford. (Congrats, Rob!) Here’s from the book’s description:

Thirteen million people in the United States–roughly one in ten workers–own a business. And yet rates of business ownership among African Americans are much lower and have been so during the last 100 years. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, businesses owned by African Americans tend to have lower sales, fewer employees and smaller payrolls, lower profits, and higher closure rates. In contrast, Asian American-owned businesses tend to be more successful. In Race and Entrepreneurial Success, minority entrepreneurship authorities Robert Fairlie and Alicia Robb examine racial disparities in business performance. Drawing on the rarely used, restricted-access Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO) data set compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, Fairlie and Robb examine in particular why Asian-owned firms perform well in comparison to white-owned businesses and black-owned firms typically do not. They also explore the broader question of why some entrepreneurs are successful and others are not.

After providing new comprehensive estimates of recent trends in minority business ownership and performance, the authors examine the importance of human capital, financial capital, and family business background in successful business ownership. They find that a high level of startup capital is the most important factor contributing to the success of Asian-owned businesses, and that the lack of startup money for black businesses (attributable to the fact that nearly half of all black families have less than $6,000 in total wealth) contributes to their relative lack of success. In addition, higher education levels among Asian business owners explain much of their success relative to both white- and black-owned businesses. Finally, Fairlie and Robb find that black entrepreneurs have fewer opportunities than white entrepreneurs to acquire valuable prebusiness work experience through working in family businesses.

Look for the book on shelves in September 2008.