prejudice/discrimination

Cross-posted at Asian-Nation and Racialicious.

As an undergraduate majoring in linguistics, I was fascinated with the concept of endangered languages. Colonization, genocide, globalization, and nation-building projects have killed off untold numbers of languages. As linguist K. David Harrison (my undergrad advisor) tells NPR, speakers of stigmatized or otherwise less-favored languages are pressured to abandon their native tongue for the dominant language of the nation and the market (emphasis mine):

The decision to give up one language or to abandon a language is not usually a free decision. It’s often coerced by politics, by market forces, by the educational system in a country, by a larger, more dominant group telling them that their language is backwards and obsolete and worthless.

These same pressures are at work in immigrant-receiving countries like the United States, where young immigrants and children of immigrants are quickly abandoning their parents’ language in favor of English.

Immigrant languages in the United States generally do not survive beyond the second generation. In his study of European immigrants, Fishman (1965) found that the first generation uses the heritage language fluently and in all domains, while the second generation only speaks it with the first generation at home and in limited outside contexts. As English is now the language with which they are most comfortable, members of the second generation tend to speak English to their children, and their children have extremely limited abilities in their heritage language, if any. Later studies (López 1996 and Portes and Schauffler 1996 among them) have shown this three-generation trend in children of Latin American and Asian immigrants, as well.

The languages that most immigrants to the U.S. speak are hardly endangered. A second-generation Korean American might not speak Korean well, and will not be speaking that language to her children, but Korean is not going to disappear anytime soon — there are 66.3 million speakers (Ethnologue)! Compare that with the Chulym language of Siberia, which has less than 25.

Even if they’re not endangered per se, I would argue that they are in danger. While attitudes towards non-English languages in the U.S. seem to be improving, at least among wealthier and better educated people in some more diverse cities and suburbs, the stigma of speaking a non-English language still exists.

How many of you have:

• been embarrassed to speak your heritage language in front of English speakers?
• been reprimanded for speaking your heritage language in school?
• been told to “go back to [country X]” when someone overhears you speak your heritage language?

I’ve heard innumerable stories about parents refusing to speak their native language to their children. Usually, the purported rationale is that they do not want the child to have language or learning difficulties, a claim that has been debunked over and over again by psychologists, linguists, and education scholars.

I’m sure that these parents truly believe that speaking only English to their children will give them an edge, though the reverse is true. What I wonder is how much this decision had to do with an unfounded belief about cognition and child development, and how much it had to do with avoiding the stigma of speaking a language that marks you as foreign, and as “backwards and obsolete and worthless”?

Calvin N. Ho is a graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles studying immigration, race/ethnicity/nationalism, and Asian diasporas.  You can follow him at The Plaid Bag Connection and on Twitter.

A couple of weeks ago I had a fever and sore throat that left me with laryngitis.  I lost my voice completely for two days and spent three additional days making no sounds at all in order to get it back.  In the meantime, I learned just a tiny bit about how people respond to the deaf.

Disclaimer: I’m sure that deaf people handle these situations with much more grace than I.  And I’m not claiming in the slightest that I know what it’s like to be deaf.  But other people thought I was deaf, and that’s where things got interesting.  (If I make any insensitive steps, please let me know.)

When I would approach someone and either hand them a note or point to my throat and shake my head, I would get a range of responses.

• First, humorously, many people would go correspondingly mute.  I would write a note and their lips would squeeze tightly together, almost like they were trying to forcibly hold back sound.  They would assume that I couldn’t hear and I guess it didn’t occur to them that I could read lips. So I would write “Giant diet coke, please” and they would clam up and get me the soda, but then they wouldn’t say “Here you go” or “Have a nice day” or any of the other niceties that pepper daily life.

• Second, I was shocked to discover that people would, in no uncertain terms, express pity.  They would say “Oh I’m so sorry for you!” or “That’s so sad!”  Deaf people are not necessarily sad about not being able to hear and many are deeply proud of their unique culture.  But many hearing people pity the deaf and apparently they are not afraid to say so to your face!

• Finally, I encountered the classic reaction where people would just say what they wanted to say to me, but louder and with extra enunciation.  As if that would work if I were deaf!  I think, too, that in some of these cases they assumed I was mentally challenged.

In all, I was surprised to discover just how uncomfortable people were with the supposedly deaf me.  They were truly unprepared for interacting with a person who they thought couldn’t hear.  In their lack of preparedness and experience, they made all kinds of mis-steps.

These experiences inspired me to look up some humor and I found a comic called That Deaf Guy, written by Matt and Kay Daigle.  Matt is deaf and Kay is a sign language interpreter who can hear.  They have a little boy. Matt and Kay’s comic is a nice window onto life as/with a deaf person and it was interesting for me to get a peek into what some deaf people might experience sometimes.

Hat tip to my friend Robb, whose therapeutic silence and similar observations preceded mine.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Yesterday two juvenile men were convicted of rape, one was convicted of distributing a nude photo of a minor (NPR). The response by a segment of society reflects rape culture: “an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture” (source).  Below are a series of concrete examples. Trigger warning for rape apologists and victim blaming.

CNN coverage of the verdict spends six minutes on how sad the conviction is for the rapists:

It was incredibly emotional… to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as, as they believed their life fell apart.

MsCongeniality:

A selection of tweets collected by Public Shaming:

A selection of tweets collected by Mommyish:

A selection of tweets collected by Persephone Magazine:

Tweets collected by The Inquisitr:

Ms. Foundation for Women:

Great coverage from around the web:

• Elizabeth Plank at PolicyMic: Why Does CNN Think Watching Rapists Get Convicted is “Difficult to Watch”
• Mia McKenzie at Black Girl Dangerous: On Rape, Cages, and the Steubenville Verdict
• Laurie Penny at the New Statesman: This is Rape Culture’s Abu Ghraib Moment
• Anisha Ahuja at Feminspire: Why Does America Pretend It Doesn’t Hate Women?
• Doug Barry at Jezebel: The Egregious, Awful and Downright Wrong Reactions to the Steubenville Rape Trial Verdict
• Ann Theriault at The Bell Jar: I Am Not Your Wife, Sister, or Daughter. I Am a Person.
• Alyx Andra at Radical Notions: “They didn’t get caught because when they raped her there was an audience; they raped her because there was an audience.”
• Amanda Marcotte at Slate: Why Did Two Girls Threaten the Steubenville Victim?
• Thomas Millar at YesMeansYes: Humiliation was the Point of the Exercise

Finally, a satire from The Onion, from two years ago: College Basketball Star Heroically Overcomes Tragic Rape He Committed

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Racialicious.The Harlem Shake is a syncopated dance form that first appeared on the New York hip-hop scene in the early 1980s. In 2012 music producer Baueer created an electronic dance tune, unfortunately calling it The Harlem Shake. Baueer’s song inspired an Internet meme in which people rhythmlessly shake their upper bodies and grind their hips in a tasteless perversion of the original dance.

This fake Harlem Shake meme has become so ubiquitous that it has been “performed” by the English National Ballet, and gone further globally with a video from the Norwegian army, and in Tunisia and Egypt, where the song and imitation dance has become a protest anthem.

The irony of an African-American cultural relic being white-washed to the point where other people of color perform its bastardized version is not lost, and this takes on a whole new level as teams with majority African-American members such as the Miami Heat and Denver Nuggets add to the fake Shake canon.

A major problematic of this meme is that it takes an already marginalized group in America, one whose history and culture has often been appropriated and co-opted in fetishistic ways by the white majority, and makes a mockery of not just them, but an entire dance tradition.  This is not lost on residents of Harlem, many of whom recognize cultural appropriation and malrepresentation when they see it:

In spite of a number of calls online from African-American writers, artists, scholars and supporters like myself to bring attention to the real Harlem Shake, every day there is instead a new group adding to the misappropriated dance. When you Google “The Harlem Shake” you must scroll through pages before you reach any posts about the actual hip-hop tradition.

This literal erasure of black culture and its replacement with an absurdist movement and meme needs to be considered in light of African-American oppression and institutionalized racism in the United States. Supplanting the sinuous artistry of the Harlem Shake with frenetic styleless arm flailing and hip thrusting is yet another brick in a grand wall of symbolic and structural violence that further relegates an entire culture to the margins, both on and offline.

As the Harlem residents said in response to the meme: “Stop that shit.”

P.S. Here’s how to actually do the Harlem Shake. 

Sezin Koehler is a half-American half-Sri Lankan informal ethnographer and novelist living in Lighthouse Point, Florida.

In the two-minute animation below, sociologist Dalton Conley describes how inequality between families can create inequality within families. My favorite of his examples: if a family doesn’t have a lot of resources, it will often pour more of them into the most promising child instead of spreading the goods around equally to everyone.

For more, watch:

More at Norton Sociology’s YouTube page.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Tim Wise’s website.

It’s one of those stories that can leave even the most jaded and cynical critic of racist thinking scratching their head; the kind that manages to shock even those of us for whom acts of bigotry and intolerance seem all-too-typical, and who have, sadly, come to expect them in a culture such as this.

And so it was that in Flint, Michigan recently, a new father — and this is a term he has earned in only the most narrow, biological sense — demanded that when his recently arrived child was sent to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of the hospital where she had been born, no African American nurses were to attend to her needs, to care for her, to do what neonatal ICU nurses do, which is to say keep sick babies alive. White hands only for this white, fresh as snow child, whose father, sporting a shiny new swastika tattoo (a Christmas present no doubt from his pathetic skinhead bride) prioritized his own hatreds above and beyond the needs of his precious little girl.  That the future does not bode well for her seems hardly worth saying. To be delivered from an ICU into the arms of one as unhinged as this can only, by reasonable people, be seen as a turn for the worse. Incubators and breathing machines might be preferable to having parents such as she has, through no fault of her own, inherited.

But what is worse, perhaps, than the bigotry of this one neo-Nazi — which is at least to be expected and so, can, despite its irrationality in a case such as this, remain somewhat within the realm of the banal — is that the hospital in question, Hurley Medical Center, actually capitulated to his psychotically racist demands, posting a sign on the little girl’s chart instructing the unit to disallow any black nurses from as much as touching this baby.

Presumably, were Tonya Battle, a black Hurley neonatal nurse since 1988 the only nurse within arms reach of the girl as she entered cardiac arrest or as her kidneys began to shut down — both of which have been known to happen to those in a NIC-U — Battle was to scream loudly for a white nurse to come and save the child’s life. Because God forbid a black woman with 25 years experience do the job. And if she dies, well, at least her precious white skin wouldn’t have been sullied by black hands.

Hurley’s acquiescence to this insanity, in contravention of all ethical responsibility, not to mention legal obligations to treat their employees in a non-discriminatory fashion, is going to cost them no doubt, as they are apt to discover once the lawsuit currently brought against their witless administrators plays out. They are going to pay, and pay big, as they should, for their enabling of overt white supremacy. But that is hardly the most important part of this story. Just as it was not the most important part of the story back in 2000 when a heart specialist at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville did a similar thing, agreeing to the lunatic ravings of another racist white man, who demanded that his wife, who needed open heart surgery to save her life, not be attended to by any black doctor, because he didn’t want a black man to see his wife naked.

More interesting, I think, is what this story (and the earlier one from Nashville) says about racism in America, and not just of the sort evinced by one bottom-feeder, troglodytic fan of Adolf Hitler. For while we are too quick to presume racism to be merely an individual pathology manifested by individually bad people, much like the father in the story from Flint, the fact is, an incident like this illustrates as well as anything can, the way that racism continues to operate as a systemic force in the United States, civil rights laws and all our vaunted post-raciality notwithstanding.

To understand what I mean by this, consider something I am often asked as I travel the country, speaking about racism, or in reply to one or another column or book that I’ve written: namely, it is queried, why don’t I ever talk about black racism, or, just generally, racism against white people? Why, it is wondered, do I focus on racism only when it’s deployed by whites?

There are many things I could say, and do, when asked something like this. But for now, let it suffice to say that this story, from Michigan, involving a white institution as respected as a hospital bending to the whims of a fucking Nazi, is more than enough of a reason for my selective attention. And this is true for multiple reasons.

First, what the story demonstrates is how much more potent white racism is than any potentially parallel version practiced by peoples of color. Simply put, there is no way that any bigoted black person, or Latino, or Asian American, or indigenous person, could possibly have made a similar demand in the reverse direction — that no white nurses attend to their newborn — and expect to have that insistence met with approval and acquiescence. Anyone who thinks a hospital would have agreed to such a thing — to actually deny opportunity to white nurses or doctors, and to limit the care of such a child to same-race caregivers because of the expressed bigotry of a patient — is either so overly medicated or mentally damaged as to make further discussion impossible. In other words, even when a white racist who is likely not of substantial economic means makes a racist demand, his desires can get ratified, and in ways that not even the wealthiest person of color could expect to have happen.*

And this is because — and this is what is especially pertinent to the matter of institutional racism — even if a hospital was willing to go along with the ridiculous and bigoted demands of a hateful person of color, that no whites be allowed to touch their black or brown baby, it would be virtually impossible to fulfill such a request. And why? Simple. Because given the history of unequal opportunity in medical professions, from doctoring to nursing — and also just given the demographic and power dynamics within pretty much any institution you can name — to work around white professionals, even if one wanted to, is almost impossible.

Bottom line: the hospital in this case went along with the demand to exclude blacks from attending to this child because they could. Given the history of discrimination in access to the medical profession, including nursing, and the barriers to professional practice faced by too many people of color, there exists today a more limited number of such professionals from which to draw. As such, excluding them from a particular hospital unit or assignment is hardly a huge burden for the institution in question.

But imagine what would happen if the situation were reversed, and a racist black man had demanded the exclusion of whites from caring for his child. Even if there were a doctor willing to agree to such conditions, it would be virtually impossible for him or her to follow through, because whites — having received the opportunities needed to enter the nursing profession in larger numbers — are hard to work around. “No whites” policies would result in a lot of empty NIC-Us, whereas “No blacks” policies require only a small administrative headache at best, so fewer are such professionals in the first place. And so, given the history of racial inequity, the consequences of which we still experience, white bigotry of the individual type is operationalized and activated if you will, by the institutional injustices that have resulted in the over-represantaion of whites and under-representation of black and brown folks in certain jobs to begin with.

In other words, institutional racism is akin to the gasoline, allowing the otherwise stationary combustion engine of individual racism to function: the former gives the latter life, and the ability to impact others in a meaningful and detrimental way. Without the power to enforce one’s racism, or expect it to be enforced or enforceable by others, that racism is largely sterile. Which is why white racism is simply more worthy of our attention and concern than any other form.

Much the same would be true in other realms of life, beyond medical and hospital settings. Blacks who wish to avoid whites in their neighborhoods will typically find themselves limited to the poorest, most crowded areas of town — places whites long ago abandoned — since finding Caucasian-free zones in more prosperous suburbs can be a tough task. Whites can more or less live wherever we wish. If we are not to be found in a particular census tract you can bet it’s because we’ve chosen to be absent. Such cannot be said for why blacks are often absent from more affluent areas, however. Money or no money, good credit or bad, millions face discriminatory barriers in residential opportunity every year.

Once again, even if people of color despise whites and seek to avoid us, their ability to do so will be directly constrained by the larger opportunity structure that has skewed power and resources in our direction. Whites seeking to avoid blacks and Latinos on the other hand, can do so readily, with the help of mortgage discrimination, redlining, zoning laws and so-called “market forces” pricing many blacks out of the better housing markets (even though we only got into those markets because of government subsidies and preferences, both private and public).

So for those seeking to understand what racism is — and the difference between the merely individual as opposed to institutional forms of it — and why white racism is more potent and problematic than any other potential form, you need look no further than the recent headlines. When institutions can and will collaborate with and directly empower the racism of even the most deranged of bigots, you know that we have yet to arrive at that place of racial ecumenism claimed for us by those who would rather gloss over the ongoing injustices we face, and pretend to have attained, as a people, a perch to which we have no ethical right to lay claim.

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*Please note, I wish to differentiate here between those patients whose desire for same-race/ethnic nurses or doctors is motivated by apparent bigotry, on the one hand, and those whose desire for such a thing might be motivated by such things as linguistic familiarity, on the other. So, for instance, a Spanish-speaking, or for that matter, German or Russian-speaking mother-to-be might request a nurse, or anesthesiologist who speaks their language, for reasons of comfort and communication. Additionally, it is possible that given the history of difficulties in cross-cultural communication between authority figures who are white and patients/clients who are persons of color (which has been studied and documented for years), a black patient might prefer, if possible, to have a black nurse or anesthesiologist to wait on them. Although even these cases are likely rare, they would not be remotely comparable to a blatant bigot demanding same-race care for reasons comparable to the facts in this story, or the 2000 story from Nashville.

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Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and educators in the United States.  The author of six books on race in America, he has spoken on over 800 college and high school campuses and to community groups across the nation.  His new book, The Culture of Cruelty, will be released in the Fall of 2013.

On previous Valentine’s Days, we’ve featured vintage holiday cards caricaturing African Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians.  This year I stumbled upon a card that draws upon stereotypes of the Scottish.

Though it has largely disappeared as a well-known stereotype, at one time in American/British history, the Scottish were stereotyped as cheap.  Accordingly, this 1932 Scotch-themed valentine boasts that it’s box of dates (a type of dried fruit) can last all year if “ye use them sparingly.” A great example of a bygone stereotype (I think):

Valentine found at Kitsch Slapped.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Over at Feministing, Maya Dusenbery made a great observation about the conservative response to Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime show.  Conservatives widely criticized her for sexually objectifying herself.  She made her “sex appeal the main attraction,” said one commentator, who said that Beyoncé “humping the stage and flashing her lady bits to the camera” made her “sad.” Another said that her performance was “tasteless and unedifying.”

Dusenbery notes that the definition of sexual objectification is the reduction of a person to their sex appeal only.  And, ironically, this is what the conservative commentators did to Beyoncé, not something she did to herself.  Sexual objectification is not found in a person’s clothing choices or dance moves; instead:

[Objectification is] watching Beyoncé’s show — where she demonstrated enormous professional skill by singing live, with an awesome all-women band I might add, while dancing her ass off in front of millions of people — and not being able to see anything besides her sexy outfit.

Indeed, these conservative commentators are arguing that Beyoncé’s talent can only be fully be appreciated in the absence of sex appeal (whatever that might look like).  And that is the problem. Dusenbery continues:

These commentators reflect a “culture in which too many people seem to find it difficult to understand that it is possible to simultaneously find a woman sexually attractive and treat her like a full human being deserving of basic respect.”

Right on.  To me, Beyoncé’s performance — along with those of her band mates and fellow dancers and singers — embodied strength and confidence; the pleasure of being comfortable in one’s own skin and the ability to use your body to tell a story; and the power that comes from being admired for the talents you’ve worked so hard to cultivate.  I don’t see how you could watch this and only see a sexual object:

Via Racialicious.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.