-
"We learned the sign for Hindu (thumb making mark on head), Bangladeshi (opening fist like a flower), Sikh (two hands making a turban), Tamil (hand across forehead), Sri Lankan (circling pointer finger at open palm), Muslim (hand in front of face moving down) and FOB (hands in boat shape and finger jumping out). I was surprised at how many of the signs were so blatant. “That’s racist!” I mouthed to Shazia as she signed ‘Moroccan’ (two hands making a niqab) for me. She mouthed back, “Deaf people are blunt.” Touched upon in an earlier post by Amardeep on Russel Peters’ and his deaf stand up routine, I thought about how space to be politically correct in a deaf world was marginalized. Sure, it makes for faster conversations, but I also wondered how racism and South Asian identities developed. Does it make it less racist since these signs are inherently how this community communicates?"
-
"Fifth-graders who feel they've been mistreated because of their skin color are much more likely than classmates without such feelings to have symptoms of mental disorders, especially depression, a study suggests. There is evidence that racial discrimination increases the odds that adolescents and adults will develop mental health problems, but this is the first study to examine a possible link in children of varied races, says Tumaini Coker, the study co-author and a RAND Corp. researcher and UCLA pediatrician."
-
"Specifically, its Google Maps division has published an overlay of the historical locations of "burakumin," the Japanese underclass which was socially shunned because of its association with death, such as butchering animals and digging graves, the AP reports. The stigma also attaches itself to the historical villages, since razed and replaced by modern cities, where burakumin used to live. It's one of the Google-supplied maps, which uses the slur "eta" to describe one such village, that has publicized the locations of these largely-forgotten villages. Although the prejudice dates back to the Japanese feudal era, modern descendants of burakumin face active discrimination; the AP quotes a hiring manager at a top Japanese company as saying that her firm actually works to prevent burakumin from being hired."
-
"The reaction to Sonia Sotomayor makes the perfect case for why we still need affirmative action. She's been a federal judge since the early 1990s, she served as an ADA in Manhattan, she's worked in private practice. On paper, she's qualified, but yesterday Jeffrey Rosen, admittedly knowing next to nothing about her, wrote that the summa cum laude from Princeton might not be "that smart." [...] This is exactly what affirmative action is meant to correct: People coming to the arbitrary conclusion that someone is "an idiot" despite all evidence to the contrary, except if you consider not being a white man evidence. "
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist! wrote:
Hah. I’ve never found those signs racist. It’s just how we Deaf people are– blunt. We call it how we SEE it. I’m not offended by the signs for India, Islam, Muslim, or whatever.
Posted 06 May 2009 at 11:49 am ¶
atlasien wrote:
“Fifth-graders who feel they’ve been mistreated because of their skin color are much more likely than classmates without such feelings to have symptoms of mental disorders, especially depression, a study suggests.”
Wow… just… wow. I know research on racist abuse of children is still in its infancy, but it’s still amazing that a study has to be done just to prove such a basic starting point.
I’d also like to add that in the recent suicide of 11-year old Jaheem Herrera there’s a pretty clear racial factor. The main type of abuse he got was homophobic in delivery, but the fact that he was from the Virgin Islands and didn’t “fit in” racially marked him out for abuse as well.
Because of his case and the other suicide there’s a lot of national attention right now on abuse in schools. It’s a good start but there is still so much misinformation out there.
I actually think the “bullies” or the ones doing the abusing are the least important part of the equation. The kids who allow it to go on or casually join in (the enablers) and the kids who try to stop it (the protectors) are much, much more important. Saying “we have a zero-tolerance policy for bullying” (like Jaheem Herrera’s school did) is pretty much worthless.
As for the Japanese article, that’s also pretty depressing. I don’t think it’s racism, though; it’s casteism. Modern racism has some very specific geographic and historic demarcations (starting in Europe, circa 15-16th century) and I don’t like applying it wholesale.
Casteism is more of a cross-cultural phenomenon, and it often overlaps with racism. It’s just as horrible though.
On the whole, Japan has done an amazing job of getting rid of their feudalistic baggage. In that respect they’ve come farther and faster than many European countries, like the UK. But when it comes to the burakumin, that’s a huge weak spot.
Posted 06 May 2009 at 11:50 am ¶
Kendra wrote:
One of my sociology textbooks considered the Burakumin a separate “race.” I know that they are one of many minority groups in Japan, and they are indistinguishable from other Japanese in general, so that plus historical and contemporary factors has them treated as a separate race with less structural and institutional power. It look like a standard caste system but I’m assuming that within the Japanese context they are considered a separate race from the norm of Japan. Doesn’t matter what you call it they’re still historically disenfranchised.
Posted 06 May 2009 at 12:55 pm ¶
Joseph wrote:
re: Deaf Desis
@DIMA
This link and your response to it are really interesting to me for two reasons:
1) It goes to show how important it is to consider cultural contexts when we talk about racism. For example a swipe across the face to indicate darker skin is a traditionally racist gesture (cops in New York do this to indicate “black” to each other without words). But imposing the associations hearing people have on to Deaf culture in the name of anti-racism is just another example of a dominant culture using itself as a measuring stick for the rest of the world. Maybe instead of “that’s so racist!” Sepia Mutiny might have asked “Is that racist?”… because at least framing anti-racist concern as a question leaves some space for a cross-cultural conversation. But in my experience many anti-racists have the same lack of curiosity about other cultures that racists do. And they are just as self-righteous about their positions as racists are. It’s a problem.
2) Anti-racists by definition get preoccupied with visible markers of difference… like skin color. But there’s a whole dimension of less visible differences that have a huge impact on the way people relate with each other and the world. Gesture is one of these. Because gesture = language in Deaf culture this is an obvious example. But even among hearing people of different cultures the way people communicate without words is an important marker that signals belonging and/or difference.
Interesting (to me at least).
Posted 06 May 2009 at 1:25 pm ¶
Sobia wrote:
Re: The study on racism and depression.
I’m surprised why this is news now. There have been many studies done that show that prejudice and racism leads to poor mental health. This is definitely not the first. For those of us who study minority psychology its just understood and study after study finds this.
Posted 06 May 2009 at 3:23 pm ¶
spacedcowgirl wrote:
Sotomayor is also facing backlash because she is apparently not pleasing enough to the male gaze, though people are pretending it has something to do with her “health,” as they always do when called on fatphobic remarks.
Posted 06 May 2009 at 3:27 pm ¶
Titanis walleri wrote:
“I don’t think it’s racism, though; it’s casteism.”
Although depending on the ethnic makeup of the castes (which I don’t know in this case), there could be both…
Posted 06 May 2009 at 5:29 pm ¶
atlasien wrote:
@Titanis: Burakumin cannot be distinguished from “regular Japanese” by facial features. I don’t speak Japanese, but I’ve never heard that they even have any kind of particular accent of speech (that’s one reason I brought up the UK, where class is strongly linked to accent).
I agree that casteism is often strongly linked with racism… but in this case, it’s not. The rationale for discriminating against the burakumin is not at all based on the European pseudo-scientific theories that fuel racial divisions. Instead, it was religious in nature.
Pure religion-based casteism is just as bad as racism. But it should be distinguished because it takes different tactics to fight against it.
Posted 06 May 2009 at 6:30 pm ¶
jpl wrote:
While I am used to the “what do we call you, American Indian, Native American, Indian, or what” question, I had not thought about it in the context of ASL nor deaf culture until I did a workshop for teachers at a school for the deaf. ASL is not my language, so I turned it over the them and relied on my interpreters to keep up the best they could with what was a truly engaging discussion. I learned about three signs, one of which is two fingers behind the head, like feathers, they explained. Another is two fingers drawn across the cheek, like paint. The third was rubbing a small circle on the hand, between the thumb and forefinger, indicating, they explained, skin color.
Finally, someone asked me what I thought they should use. It’s not my language, I explained, so not my place to say what sign to use. I simply asked that, after a rich discussion about denotation, connotation, word origins, and all that, they they use whatever sign they believed best expressed the idea in a respectful way, and they do so with all those things we learned from the discussion in mind.
It was a cross-cultural moment like no other I have experienced.
Posted 06 May 2009 at 8:27 pm ¶
Nate wrote:
i think the point with sign-language here is not weather or not a user thinks a gesture/word/phrase is racist, its how its perceived by the the recipient, when a POC or othr non majority group.
We may be comfortable with a WOC using signing phrase that could be considered to be based on steorotypes, but what for a white male who may be hearing impaired?
Posted 07 May 2009 at 6:03 am ¶
Nate wrote:
Apologies. Poor typing. I meant whether.
Posted 07 May 2009 at 6:03 am ¶
Kavita wrote:
I think DIMA’s comment that “we call it like we see it” makes a lot of sense. My question though, is whose eyes are being privileged? It seems like the signs originate from a white/Western gaze. Why is a sign connoting a bindi (with all the accompanying dot/feather baggage) the sign for Hindus (and is that synomous for Indian)? Why not a sign indicating mendhi, or a sari, or anklets, or a long braid, or a spinning wheel, or a Nehru jacket? The sign associating Tamils with dark skin seems like it must come from a point of view where white skin is the norm. Just out of curiousity, does anyone know the sign for Gujuratis?
Posted 07 May 2009 at 11:32 am ¶
jpl wrote:
@ Nate
I agree that intersectionalities are complex and the question you raise is important.
In my situation, the discussion preceded a series of activities designed to problematize participants’ thinking about Native peoples and the sources of those ideas. Most of the participants were white, and my friend and I, as Native men, were the recipients of these signs. We did not view it as racist under these circumstances because we were brought into the discussion in a respectful way. Most importantly, deaf and hearing ASL users themselves problematized the language used. It also helped that we recognized that similar terms in English are equally problematic.
Posted 07 May 2009 at 11:43 am ¶
Daniel wrote:
This may sound weird or qutie wrong but being blunt “sounds” quite a reasonable explaination. However, I’ll just leave it at that, because I’m forming my opinions based on that short article description and my limited knowledge regarding that topic.
I stand by with all those sentiments saying that even though different prejudices overlap in their illogical beliefs and pain it caused, they do need to be distinguish, due to the different ways to approach it and change. I don’t know how old those attitudes are.
It might not matter but every time I read about these issues, I keep remembering what one of my professors and high school teachers said regarding that. A questionable belief that has been in a place for centuries can be seen as reason. Like the people do not have think about it and those attitudes will seem quite natural. Something that took generations to create and maintain will take generations to change.
One thing I hope doesn’t happen is if people simply switch one set of prejudices to another. Switching one group to hate to another. It seems to happen a lot, as if human communities need to create an enemy out of others.
Posted 07 May 2009 at 7:51 pm ¶