I often find it difficult to convey to my students why data matters. “They’re just numbers” is a common refrain. Racismreview has a good post on the elimination of racial data from reports on NYPD police shootings after 1997. Pre-1997 the NYPD did keep these records. The New York Times speculates that the move to stop collecting this data by race was done during the Amadou Diallo controversy. The key passage from the post:

if you bury knowledge about racism and racist practices (such as the NYPD’s abysmal record), then you effectively subvert efforts to combat racism.

I frankly have never understood arguments in support of colorblind policies. Societies can recognize race and racism as distinct realities of social life without descending into tribalism. There are times in my life where I want to be color blind and times when I want to be color (read – group) conscious. What would art or music or literature be without color consciousness. The Invisible Man would become the Just as Visible or Invisible as the Next Guy?

Ok, the first sharp, sustained attack against Obama by the McCain campaign is coming into focus and I’m starting to think that it might be effective. This latest ad mocks the “Obama as a the messiah” theme. I originally thought that this criticism had no legs. The public thinks all politicians are arrogant and that first ad with images of Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton was not effective. But if you see that ad as setting the table for what’s to come, it looks much more intriguing.

This “Obama as Messiah/celebrity” opens the door for a whole host of other criticisms. Take the shift in rhetoric towards calling Obama “fussy” as an example. This line of attack is deviously brilliant. It links him to a “culture of celebrity” that most voters find troubling and a preening petulance that celebrities on reality shows seem to exhibit. It is also a perfect word that can conjure up all sorts of homophobia without directly attacking him on those grounds. Now Obama is Oscar Wilde! This I find morally offensive, but of course I’m not the target market for this ad.

The Republicans are using the snarky tone of the Daily Show and Colbert Report against the Democrats. I find this fascinating. You can argue that satire and sarcasm have been instrumental in the re-emergence of the Democrats in the past few years. The ability to effectively poke fun at the president and the Right wing media apparatus through satire has provided the Democrats the window they now hope to pass through into the White House.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The stereotype is that “Red America” doesn’t do satire (just listen to when the audience applauds at the Daily Show). If I were Obama, I might try to respond by taking the McCain team to task for trivializing the serious issues facing the country and world. But the McCain people are setting up a framing where such chiding can be seen as “elitist” and of course “whiny” and any other terms you can use that reinforces the idea of Obama as an effete (read: possible gay), elitist with a “God” complex. At least they’re not calling him a “Muslim Manchurian Canddiate.”

Think it won’t work? McCain has closed a nine point gap to one point in the Gallup tracking poll and has taken the lead in the Rasmussen tracking poll. Some might think this is too early to be concerned, but campaigns are won and lost in the August framing wars. I’ll be curious to see how the Obama campaign hits back in the coming weeks.

Obama’s latest flap about McCain’s intention to remind voters that he does not look like all the other presidents on the dollar bill is something he’s repeated a few times to audiences. A few weeks back I posted about Obama having to worry about having a grievance frame attached to him. Apparently the “dollar bill” thing is being framed in terms of grievance. Rassmussen found that 53% of voters thought that Obama’s dollar bill comment was racist. Obama has done a heroic job traversing the racial minefield in the campaign thus far, but he has to be wary of the road ahead. Especially as quotes from his book begin to appear out of context in 527 ads or as Jeremiah Wright makes his re-emergence onto the public stage.

As an ardent Obama supporter, I find it depressing that he seems to be tying himself up in knots rhetorically over issues of race. Having just read Dreams From my Father, I marvel at the depth and sophistication with which he reflects on his own identity and race in America more generally. Of course I’m a latte liberal whose supposed to be gushing over the book. How predictable!!!

Fun filled day and night driving through Minnesota and Iowa and getting to explore Decorah, Iowa, and Luther College. I gave a presentation on “Diversity in the Cloud” and received some great feedback from a crowd of about 80 faculty and staff from the 28 colleges and universities affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Here are the slides that accompanied the talk for those interested.

I won’t go too much into the talk other than to say that it presented utopian and dystopian views of how the web changes inter-group relations. I was struck by how many faculty are grappling with the larger question of whether the web is friend of foe or both. One interesting assignment that came up during the Q and A was from a Religion professor at an ELCA college who requires his students to unplug from the web for 48 hours. He reports that students are frustrated by the assignment initially but are ultimately grateful for the chance to reconnect with their inner selves. It’s an interesting assignment worth doing myself, let alone assigning it to students.

Greetings from Denver International Airport. I’ve spent the last two hours reading the first 100 pages of Barack Obama’s Dreams From my Father. As a political scientist (and junkie), I was reading the book picturing the bio pic they will run during the Democratic Convention. I’m obviously not the first person this has occurred to, but this is one heck of a life story to have to contend with. The McCain people are going to have quite a time putting him in the traditional democratic boxes that worked so well against Al Gore and John Kerry. This current democratic candidate has spend a lifetime moving in and out of boxes. This is why he can speak to conservatives and progressives alike and seem so compelling. He’s had a lot of practice.

This is also why the attacks heretofore have been so muddled and strange. The “Obama is a celebrity theme” is not only a strange attack, but one that I think the Republicans might look back on in regret. It reinforces the idea of Obama as extraordinary, almost mythic. The arc of his story is going to make for an interesting convention Thursday (The grasping Kansas grandfather, boxing with his Indonesian stepfather, a Christmas rebuke from his absent Kenyan grandfater, etc.). Why the Republicans want to reinforce this is beyond me.

Update: I’m starting to think the mocking celebrity approach might be having an effect. Perhaps it is a riff on the Daily Show style of skewering politicians that has become normalized. The gap is closing in the campaign, so maybe these attacks aren’t so muddled after all.

Black Political Analysis links to an Ebony article that asks whether there are still “Two Americas?” It looks like the article is only in the print edition, but this isn’t the first “Two America’s discussion we’ve had in this country. Thanks to the 1968 Kerner Commission report that popularized this concept.

While the idea of “two Americas” was salient in 1968, I wonder of what use it has today. While it does reinforce the still significant “barriers to entry” for African-Americans when compared to other ethnic groups in American society, it has the distinct disadvantage of further “othering” Black America. While this “othering” makes sense of some cultural and political levels, it reinforces the idea of a “black culture” that downplays the cultural diversity within the black experience. Black Political Analysis makes the valid point that racial and ethnic groups choose to lead separate lives:

I’m talking about are the number of blacks and whites who prefer racial/ethnic homogeneity. Think about the school lunch cafeteria, the bus, parks, movie theater, etc….blacks with blacks, whites with whites, Asians with Asians. As long as Americans choose this, there will always be separate Americas.

This is undeniable, but I am inclined to believe that group affinity is not the same as group exclusiveness. The end of “separate Americas” will come when individuals from different racial and ethnic groups become more adept at cultural switching, or the ability to engage with a wide range of people in their own contextual contexts. What props up this “two Americas” idea is the distinct lack of empathy people have for those who are not like them. It’s particularly startling to see the number of Whites who think that racism is a thing of the past. The recent Gallup poll is startling in this regard. To me, that’s not an issue of Whites wanting to be with other Whites, it’s an issue of an unwillingness to want to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. You don’t have to give up the feelings of closeness and affinity one has to their own reference group to understand that others are of worth.

Mayjel Verkuyten has an interesting review of the social psychology literature on multicutluralism in the Oct 2007 edition of Social and Personality Psychology Compass. Exposure to multicultural framings increases the majority group’s opinion of minority groups but also downplays intergroup differences and provides challenges for people who are low identifiers with their ethnic groups. Here’s the key quote in his piece:

a focus on groups and group differences is understandable and, to a certain extent, useful, for example, for improving intergroup relations. It can, however, also lead to a situation in which these identities become overwhelming or unidimensional and society, out-groups and in-groups oblige people to place this particular identity in the forefront of their minds and make it central in their behaviour.

Personally mose of my students, being good neo-liberals, love the idea of an “identity free for all” and have little tolerance for the idea of focusing on group identity. This isn’t surprising since majority students have little to worry about in terms of the loss of cultural identity. A pedagogical challenge is to get them to focus on group difference to begin with.

I’m giving a talk this Friday to the annual Vocation of a Lutheran conference in Decorah, Iowa. The title of the talk is Diversity 2.0. The talk will explore the changing nature of diversity in an increasingly “wired” society. I’ll post the presentation slides in the next day or two.

The talk will look at diversity and how it relates to Aristotle’s three forms of knowledge. The crux of the talk is that we’re moving from a primary rationale for diversity based on episteme (epistemological knowledge) or techne (technical knowledge) to one based on prhonesis or wisdom, for lack of a better term. This is so because as the network society evolves, access to epistemological and technical knowledge can be acquired on-line but wisdom still requires the face-to-face interactions with diverse others. More soon 🙂

According to this Los Angeles Times article, hate crimes are up in the city of Los Angeles for nearly all identity groups. The Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission found that hate crimes in the city rose 28% over the past year to 763 incidents. The majority of these crimes is minority-to-minority (Latino on Black or Black on Latino) rather than majority on minority:

What we’re seeing is the democratization of hate crimes,” said Brian Levin, who directs the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. “We’re not only seeing a diversification of victims but also increased diversification of offenders.

On its face, this is more evidence for people with nationalist impulses to advocate for reducing immigration. Los Angeles is perhaps the world’s most global city. this vast melding of culture and peoples is destined to create tensions. But the bulk of these incidents appear to be gang related. It seems that many of the Latino on Black hate crimes reported are associated with an increased collaboration with White Supremacist gangs in prisons. How much of this is related to class issues and battles over turf and how much is really driven by racial animus?

Howard Rheingold points to an blog post on Google’s Knol , an ad-driven Wikipedia where posters get a cut of the advertising revenue on the site. Google touts the knol as an “authoritative article about a specific topic” but where is the authority going to come from? If it’s from the number of hits acquired, then isn’t that popularity rather than authority? Their site allows you to “provide credentials” but its legitimacy seems to depend on an honor system. It’s an interesting idea, but the charm of Wikipedia is is non-hierarchical framework. What happens to the wisdom of the crowds when there’s a profit motive involved? And how can I get paid for writing about the median voter theorem?