links for 2011-05-24

"This past week, I watched a rerun of National Geographic's newest show, Navajo Cops. You can watch a clip here The premise of the show is similar to Cops, but filmed on the Navajo reservation. Obviously, the show will be littered with your average reprobates, thugs, trouble youths, etc. After watching the show, I couldn't help but cringe. The Navajo Nation, the largest American Indian tribe in the US, receives little if any national exposure. When we do, it's usually negative or stereotypical, for instance Oprah's visit to the Navajo Nation. So, to my dismay, Navajo Cops was just a reinforcement of negative stereotypes of American Indians."

"One interviewee said: 'Integration is highly important and vital for refugees, and we need to be encouraged to integrate by education or working or volunteering or social activities … Having said that, integration is also important to the British people because we all live together … ie Britons also need to be encouraged to integrate with us.'"

"But the Insight Foundation believes that a disproportionate number of the students committing suicides are Dalits, and its members allege that caste discrimination, a dirty secret, is ubiquitous at India's top universities — even as the government works to expand access to higher education with quotas, or reservations, for historically oppressed groups."

"One of Europe's most prominent right-wing populists, Wilders argues that his remarks comparing Islam to Nazism and calling for a ban on the Quran are part of legitimate public debate that is protected by freedom of speech. Muslim groups say Wilders is infringing their right to freedom of religion by increasing discrimination against them."

"The progressive Latino group Democracia USA took out ads against proposals in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Florida. President Jorge Mursuli said backers of some state bills couldn't answer basic questions about the legislation, such as whether families hiring nannies would have to use E-verify, or whether employers would be on the hook for unemployment insurance for new hires found ineligible to work."

"The trickiest thing about prejudice is that it is so malleable, so capable of reinvention. Susan Fiske, a professor of psychology at Princeton, has documented the varied and fluctuating presentations of social biases like race, class, disability, gender. She points out that there are nuanced differences in how prejudice is expressed against the disabled as opposed to Asian-Americans, or as against high-status blacks versus poor blacks, or the homeless or those with low-status accents. Elements like pity, resentment, competition, revulsion, paternalism, or fear play against one another in complicated ways."