The Racialicious Links Roundup 3.14.13
- Dartmouth College Reports Third Racial Incident in Three Months (The Valley News)
Two Asian students reported that they were walking in the dining hall at the college’s ’53 Commons student union Wednesday when a white student “walked by them, made eye contact and verbally harassed them by speaking in gibberish seemingly meant to mock Chinese,” college spokesman Justin Anderson said in an email.
The incident is under investigation, Anderson said.
A forum for members of the Dartmouth community to discuss the incident is scheduled today from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. It is closed to the public.
The allegations come just days after racist graffiti was discovered in a campus dorm over the weekend; somebody had scrawled the “n word” on a student’s whiteboard, Dean Charlotte Johnson reported earlier this week. The college held a forum in response to the graffiti on Monday.
The Dartmouth reported that Safety and Security director Harry Kinne said during the forum part of the message “appeared to be directed towards that individual, and it was a racist statement.” (The Valley News was asked to leave that event because it was closed to college outsiders.)
- The View From Somewhere (Jacobin)
I’m only telling you this to make it clear that there’s no such thing as a “view from nowhere” — that weird mainstream media orthodoxy that holds that the perfect journalist, the ideal journalist, can only discover truth by adopting a posture of invisibility, that the perfect journalist should be little more than a human recorder himself — always himself, because this perfect reporter is invariably imagined as male, usually as a middle-class white dude from an English-speaking country. Those are the only people whose race and class and gender and nationality ever get to be “invisible,” whose views get to be from “nowhere,” because they are everywhere.
That’s just one of the reasons that in-the-field investigative journalism jobs are still given mostly to white men — even if they’ve never visited the country in question and don’t speak the language, editors still trust those people to tell the story over and above local reporters. The net result of all this is that anyone who isn’t a white, heteronormative Western man has to fight doubly hard not to get stuck in an office rewriting press releases — on this, trust me.
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