By Guest Contributor Blanca E. Vega, cross-posted from Race-Work Race-Love

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.” — Frederick Douglass

Writer’s block. This is how I woke up this morning. Confronted with the realities of beginning a dissertation and working full time as a college administrator, I came up with two words:

Writer’s Block.

I write about race and education. I research racial incidents on college campuses. Every day, in my inbox, I see some article about another racist incident, form of harassment, example of violence – I go to sleep with this, I wake up to this, I eat with this racial narrative.

I wonder about those folks who are color-blind. How do they wake up every morning?

So this morning I woke up with writer’s block. And I read on my twitter-feed that The Help received five Golden Globe nominations – a story about a young white woman who desires to become a writer and focuses her writing on her Black female housekeepers/maids.

Historians, sociologists, educators, and other writers have all critiqued the book that has turned into a movie. They have pointed out facts versus the fiction that one sees in the movie. Two very important critiques can be read here and here.

Essentially, The Help is a story about a color-blind, white woman who wants to be a writer. Someone who tells the story of Black women who are domestic workers. This is not the story of Black female domestic workers.

One need not look too far to see how the author’s standpoint affects her work. The movie’s title is a great example of the author’s perspective. An author who talks about Black women from a color-blind perspective wouldn’t be able to see her own white privilege in constructing the title. A color-blind author who writes about Black women won’t be able to see how she continues to reproduce a racist narrative.

She didn’t call it the ‘The Black Help”. She called it The Help. And I will add that when I caught a quick glimpse of a preview of the film and saw that the first person in the preview was a white woman, I thought “Wow. A movie about white female domestic workers. How interesting.”

Wrong. The Help implied The Black Help. Similar to using terms such as “disadvantaged”, “urban”, “Inner city” and “at-risk”, the title The Help is a manipulation of language to replace racial specifics. We use coded terms to mark bodies, construct race to make some bodies deficient (Black/Brown bodies) and others the norm (White).

This author, like many, is getting paid and rewarded to continue a cycle of racist reproduction. We are all involved in this kind of racist reproduction in one way or another. The Help is a great example of this: nominate Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer for their roles as maids in addition to having the author of the book get accolades, a movie deal, and a pat on the back for seemingly being racially conscious.

These kinds of stories reinforce the need to maintain a racial narrative that is pleasing for and thereby dumbs-down the audience. To see Black women, really wonderful actresses, reprise the role of Mammy from Gone with The Wind, and receive awards for it, is disturbing, but all too familiar. We are all in collusion with racist reproduction of who Whites are and who People of Color are. But some of us are more willing to fight this than others. These stories also lead some of us to think that racial progress is occurring, leading to a bifurcated understanding of racial progress. In fact, Richard P. Eibach and Joyce Ehrlinger (2006) found that there is a difference in perceptions of racial progress held by Whites and People of Color. They write:

\White Americans tend to spontaneously think about racial progress as movement away from racial injustices of the past instead of thinking of progress as movement toward a system of full racial equality. In contrast, ethnic minorities seem to spontaneously think about racial progress as movement toward fully realized racial equality, and their assessments of progress accordingly take into account the distance we have yet to traverse to reach that goal… our results reinforce the point that a balanced assessment of progress needs to consider both the distance we have come and the distance that remains as we travel along the path to a truly egalitarian community (Eibach & Ehrlinger, 2006, p.76).

And, I want to believe that maybe Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer have more choices than Hattie McDaniel did over 70 years ago, but nominations for this film tells us “not really”.

We have been fooled. They SEEM to have choices, but maybe they really don’t. The work that they have to choose from, work that reproduces racist perspectives is work that people will rely on for learning history. This kind of story is privileged. Why? Because it is easy.

And here I wonder why I have writer’s block.

Of course I have writer’s block! Writing against a racist system, such as the one that would dupe people into thinking The Help is great, accurate work means that I have to constantly fight what is normal.

It is easy for people to write books and produce movies like The Help. We all know the story like the back of our hands. Any of us could have written it! It is probably why some women love it so much. It is too damn familiar! We all know this racist narrative too well. It is in our novelas, it is in our history books, it has been made into law in Alabama – they have made concessions to allow for undocumented immigrant women to work as The Hispanic Help while making it illegal to go to school, drive, have utilities in their homes if there are no papers to prove US citizenship.

But undocumented women have permission to work as The Hispanic Help in Alabama. Walking around without papers is not legal. Being an undocumented immigrant domestic worker is legal.

As a race-worker, I have to constantly write against that kind of system that makes it legal to be racist. I have to reconstruct, re-write, and develop a new racial narrative. To be constantly conscious of this takes time and effort. Where the hell are the awards for that?

How do you interrupt the reproduction of racism? Luckily, we have our heroes. People who rarely get as much attention as do writers of racially-easy work. Critical race narratives like Professor Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well written precisely in the spirit of racial justice by interrupting our post racial notions of race relations in the US. Geneva Crenshaw, a prophetic lawyer, does the interrupting by questioning, guiding, and empowering a young lawyer into thinking outside of the subtle racism that has come into existence since the Civil Rights Era. Could she be made into a movie heroine? Could an actress like Viola Davis play that role and still get a Golden Globe or Oscar nod?

Or will people say “That’s not real enough.” Not real enough that some have described critical race narratives as “sci-fi”. The “other-world-liness” of powerfully analytical People of Color is fascinating but not as fascinating as the description of Black maids by a color-blind woman.

There are people who are writing against the “Nostalgia Movement (Code for When we were Openly Racist)”. While some are desiring for The “Good Ole Days” (as some of our presidential hopefuls have freely expressed) there are others who are reminding us that a racist narrative is powerful to and desired by a mass audience because it is racially easy and nice (for more racially-easy work, go watch The Help).

Race–workers, race researchers, race educators remind us that the first step is to be racially conscious and aware – but this is not enough

They remind us that we have to think, write, and share about a racial narrative that isn’t deficient, deleterious, and disappointing.

They use Critical Race Theory, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Testimonios, Street Lit, to construct a more robust racial narrative.

Work like The Help is racially-easy. And we all know the recipe: Develop code words and people may call you complex. Add “heroic” Black characters and you will be applauded for being well-intentioned. Add a couple of white characters that then find their souls and you just may get a movie out of it. Tell a sanitized Black story through the eyes of an innocent White woman — will get you an Oscar.

So is being a race-conscious writer/researcher really writer’s block? Or is it constructing courageously, constructing outside of the racist narrative that we inherited, that we continue to privilege, that we continue to reward? What some like to call “thinking outside the [racist] box?”

I think I prefer writer’s block now than to be racially-easy. Any day.

The challenge throughout has been to tell what I view as the truth about racism without causing disabling despair. ~ Derrick Bell

Thanks to Northwestern University’s Poetry and Poetics Colloquium for the heads-up regarding a new annual competition geared toward unpublished poets of color.

The PPC is teaming up with Northwestern University Press for the inaugural Drinking Gourd chapbook poetry prize. A panel of POC poets will select the winning entry, and the first prize chapbook will be introduced by poet

Northwestern University’s Poetry and Poetics Colloquium (PPC) proudly announces a partnership with Northwestern University Press for the inaugural Drinking Gourd chapbook poetry prize, a first-book award for poets of color. Poet Ed Roberson will introduce the winner, and will also publish an accompanying chapbook of new work to launch the series.

The submission deadline is January 15th, 2012, and the winner will be notified by March 15th. The two chapbooks will be published in Fall 2012 by Northwestern University Press. Submission guidelines are under the cut.

Award

• Winner receives $350 prize money, publication by Northwestern University Press in Fall 2012, 15 copies of the book, and a featured reading. Results announced in March 2012.

Judging

• Judging will be conducted by a panel of senior minority poets and scholars assembled by the Northwestern University Poetry and Poetics Colloquium.

Eligibility

• Poets of color who have not previously published a book-length volume of poetry. Simultaneous submissions to other contests should be noted. Immediate notification upon winning another award is required.

Deadline

• Reading period begins January 15, 2012. Manuscripts must be received by January 15, 2012. To be notified that your manuscript has been received, please enclose a self-addressed, stamped postcard. The winner will be announced on March 15, 2012.

Submission

•  Send two copies of a single manuscript. One manuscript per poet allowed.
• Enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope to receive notification of results.
• Author’s name should not appear on any pages within the manuscript. Copy One must include a title page with the author’s brief bio (200 words, maximum) and contact information: author’s name, postal address, e-mail address and telephone number. Copy Two must include a cover sheet with the title only.
• Manuscript must be typed single-sided with a minimum font size of 11, paginated and 25-35 pages in length.
• Manuscript must include a table of contents and list of acknowledgments of previously published poems.
• Manuscript must be unbound. Use a binder clip—do not staple or fold. Do not include illustrations or images of any kind.
• Manuscripts not adhering to submission guidelines will be discarded without notice to sender.
• Due to the volume of submissions, manuscripts will not be returned.
• Post-submission revisions or corrections are not permitted.

Reading Fee

• $10. Enclose check with submission, made payable to Northwestern University.

Direct packet to:
Northwestern University Poetry and Poetics Colloquium and Workshop
Drinking Gourd Prize Chapbook Series
University Hall, Room 215
1897 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208
Attn: Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb

[Last week,] UC Berkeley’s College Republicans Chapter decided to have an “Affirmative Action Bakesale” to protest a new bill that has been introduced into the CA legistlature that would reverse parts of Prop 209, which in 1996 banned the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions in the UC system.

The premise of the bake sale is not new, and has definitely been used on other college campuses. The basic idea is that there is different pricing for different racial groups, as follows:

White: $2.00
Asian: $1.50
Latino: $1.00
Black: $.75
Native American: $.25
$.25 discount for women

The pricing implies that standards are lower for non-whites and women, and that the (poor, innocent!) White males are just royally screwed by the whole system. But you know what I see from that pricing? I GET FREE SNACKS. (I joke, I joke)

I’ll let the illustrious Tim Wise breakdown why this is so stupid (as if you needed an explanation):

Tim Wise, author of the book “White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son,” calls the bake sale a “sarcastic and rather smarmy slap at people of color.”

“There are a lot of ways to make a point about your disagreement with affirmative action,”

“I get the joke,” he continued. “How very original. It’s been done for 15 years. The point that I think needs to be made … is that by the time anyone steps on a college campus … there has already been 12- to 13-years of institutionalized affirmative action for white folks, that is to say, racially embedded inequality, which has benefited those of us who are white. And it’s only at the point of college admissions that these folks seem to get concerned with color consciousness.”

So we’re clear why this was a silly publicity stunt. But what about those girls in the picture above wearing headdresses? They decided to be “cute” and pretend to be Native American women and get free cookies.

You can hear from them in their own words at this video here. But the gist of what they say is:

“This bake sale trivializes the issue of affirmative action, so we thought to show our opinion of the bake sale, we would trivialize their opinion.”

Um, that doesn’t even make sense. At all. In the words of my friend Kayla (a Native UC Berkeley student):

Even if anti-bake sale, [this] makes no sense to me, since the next logical step ought to have been “maybe we ought not to trivialize Native American (women) with stereotypical headdresses.”

Amen. Basically this whole thing was a big mess, and got far more attention than it deserved. There were several counter-protests, and even a table selling “Magical Costco Muffins” with different prices for Muggles and Wizards, but the bottom line is that, clearly, the College Republicans of UC Berkeley have no grasp of historical context, current systems of institutional racism and inequality, or their own blinding privilege.

(Thanks MK, Kayla, Caroline, and Olga!)

By Arturo R. García

No, seriously, does Salon have beef with Melissa Harris-Perry?

Twice this week, the online magazine – freshly rebranded as “aggressively populist” – has taken shots at the Tulane University professor, MSNBC contributor and columnist for The Nation in the midst of two positive columns regarding President Barack Obama.

(Full disclosure: Racialicious’ Editor, Latoya Peterson, has contributed articles to Salon in the past.)

Wednesday, Gene Lyons opened a piece praising an Obama appearance in Cincinnati by referring to her as “one Melissa Harris-Perry” and attacking her recent column in The Nation:

See, certain academics are prone to an odd fundamentalism of the subject of race. Because President Obama is black, under the stern gaze of professor Harris-Perry, nothing else about him matters. Not killing Osama bin Laden, not 9 percent unemployment, only blackness.

Furthermore, unless you’re black, you can’t possibly understand. Yada, yada, yada. This unfortunate obsession increasingly resembles a photo negative of KKK racial thought. It’s useful for intimidating tenure committees staffed by Ph.D.s trained to find racist symbols in the passing clouds. Otherwise, Harris-Perry’s becoming a left-wing Michele Bachmann, an attractive woman seeking fame and fortune by saying silly things on cable TV.

Lyons’ opening grafs read like Microaggression Madlibs: “Lonely battle”? “Yada, yada, yada”? “trained to find racist symbols in the passing clouds”? Likening a black columnist’s reasoning to the Ku Klux Klan? Methinks he doth protest too much, and he’s already getting some well-deserved blasts, like this response from Elon James White:

You can like Dr. Harris-Perry’s theory or not, but 1) its a theory not an etched in stone condemnation and 2) it’s based in reality. It’s based in feelings many in the Black community have wondered when hearing attacks from White liberals. It’s based in issues that have been previously pointed out within the progressive movement. You could make the argument that race has nothing to do with White liberals issues with Obama and I wouldn’t have an issue with that. But to dismiss one of the great Black public intellectuals of our time because it made you feel uncomfortable is completely ridiculous.

And that’s the problem. Dr. Harris-Perry made folks feel uncomfortable.

White liberals enjoy the concept that they are immune to accusations of racism. They’re LIBERALS. They obviously are totally and completely not racist so how could you ever dare even pose the possibility of such a thing? Matter of fact? Since White liberals are so “obvi” not racist they can dismiss this feeling amongst Black folks as silly and tell them to stop it. You can even get all Dave Sirota on us and say how this hurts the civil rights movement. Because questioning the possibility of racism obviously makes equality harder right? Thanks sir!

What got Lyons’ goat was Harris-Perry’s column comparing Obama’s presidency to Bill Clinton’s – and the decidedly different response each has gotten from white Democrats:

Today many progressives complain that Obama’s healthcare reform was inadequate because it did not include a public option; but Clinton failed to pass any kind of meaningful healthcare reform whatsoever. Others argue that Obama has been slow to push for equal rights for gay Americans; but it was Clinton who established the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy Obama helped repeal. Still others are angry about appalling unemployment rates for black Americans; but while overall unemployment was lower under Clinton, black unemployment was double that of whites during his term, as it is now. And, of course, Clinton supported and signed welfare “reform,” cutting off America’s neediest despite the nation’s economic growth.

Today, America’s continuing entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan provoke anger, but while Clinton reduced defense spending, covert military operations were standard practice during his administration. In terms of criminal justice, Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which decreased judicial disparities in punishment; by contrast, federal incarceration grew exponentially under Clinton. Many argue that Obama is an ineffective leader, but the legislative record for his first two years outpaces Clinton’s first two years. Both men came into power with a Democratically controlled Congress, but both saw a sharp decline in their ability to pass their own legislative agendas once GOP majorities took over one or both chambers.

Harris-Perry also writes that Obama’s bid for reelection “is a test of whether Obama will be held to standards never before imposed on an incumbent. If he is, it may be possible to read that result as the triumph of a more subtle form of racism.”

While Lyons suggests, correctly, that the White House will want to steer clear of defining the 2012 campaign along a racial paradigm, he refuses to do so without taking another dismissive swipe at Harris-Perry:

The sheer political stupidity of turning Obama’s reelection into a racial referendum cannot be overstated. It would be an open confession of weakness. Whatever its shortcomings, this White House is too smart to go there. Harris-Perry will have to fight this lonely battle on her own. Voters can’t be shamed or intimidated into supporting this president or any other. They can only be persuaded.

Yeah, because a woman who fills in for Rachel Maddow doesn’t have any fans, or people who share her observations. Not to mention the fact that Lyons should be more familiar with “one” Harris-Perry. After all, one of his colleagues had already written a column about her earlier this week.

Sunday, Joan Walsh – who you might recall likened herself to the President as being a victim of “identity politics” – also portrayed Harris-Perry as peddling some Strange Colored Thinking, albeit more politely:

I’m not sure how to argue with a perception, which is by definition subjective, but I’m going to try, because this is becoming a prevalent and divisive belief. When I say Melissa Harris-Perry is my friend, I don’t say that rhetorically, or ironically; we are professional friends, we have socialized together; she has included me on political round tables; I like and respect her enormously. That’s why I think it’s important to engage her argument, and I’ve invited her to reply.

Harris-Perry fired back with a blistering critique of liberal defensiveness, which included what’s usually referred to online as THIS:

I was taken aback that Walsh emphasized the extent of our friendship. Walsh and I have been professionally friendly. We’ve eaten a few meals. I invited her to speak at Princeton and I introduced her to my literary agent. We are not friends. Friendship is a deep and lasting relationship based on shared sacrifice and joys. We are not intimates in that way. Watching Walsh deploy our professional familiarity as a shield against claims of her own bias is very troubling. In fact, it is one of the very real barriers to true interracial friendship and intimacy.

(To her credit, Walsh reportedly apologized to Harris-Perry afterwards.)

In her column, Walsh noted that Salon “came to prominence” during Clinton’s presidency as a counter to right-wing smears on him, and perhaps that’s the most telling line in this whole debacle: we’re just over decade removed from the Clintonistas’ heyday, and the traditional progressive movement finds itself forced to try and rebuff voices from all sorts of different quarters: from Harris-Perry, Maddow, from the #OccupyWallStreet movement, leading to an unusual “show, don’t tell” moment: In trying to defend their bonafides against the professor, Walsh and Lyons are only illustrating her point.

For the maelstrom Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa caused by publishing on Psychology Today‘s blog a “study” he contended would “prove” that not only Black women are unattractive but we’re deluded for believing otherwise, his place of employment, the London School of Economics (LSE) placed him on publishing and teaching probation for a year.

From Times Higher Education:

The LSE has now published the findings of an internal investigation into the affair, ruling that Dr Kanazawa had “brought the school into disrepute” and barring him from publishing in non-peer-reviewed outlets for a year.

In addition to the 12-month ban, he will not teach any compulsory courses this academic year.

Kanazawa issued a very belated fauxpology for his “research.”

In a letter to Judith Rees, director of the LSE, Dr Kanazawa says he “deeply regrets” the “unintended consequences” of the blog and accepts it was an “error” to publish it.

“In retrospect, I should have been more careful in selecting the title and the language that I used to express my ideas,” he writes.

“In the aftermath of its publication, and from all the criticisms that I have received, I have learned that some of my arguments may have been flawed and not supported by the available evidence.”

He adds: “In my blog post, I did not give due consideration to my approach to the interpretation of the data and my use of language.”

Yes, Psychology Today fired Kanazawa after Color of Change and many other people online and offline pressured the company to do so. And students from LSE agitated for his firing. However, considering that he’s obfuscating–and failing to apologize for–the fact that he used his science skills on a piece that helps perpetuate engendered racism–and that he has pulled this fooliganery before–a year really isn’t enough.

Related posts:

Voices: The Satoshi Kanazawa Study

H/t to Taja for the update!

By Arturo R. García

Another week, another head-scratching study result. Or so you’d think, right?

The study, conducted by researchers at Tufts and Harvard Universities, concluded that white people think the prejudices blacks faced during the Civil Rights era are literally in the past. But it’s not all rosy, apparently, for the majority of the 209 white people (alongside 208 blacks) surveyed. From the abstract:

We show that this emerging belief reflects Whites’ view of racism as a zero-sum game, such that decreases in perceived bias against Blacks over the past six decades are associated with increases in perceived bias against Whites—a relationship not observed in Blacks’ perceptions. Moreover, these changes in Whites’ conceptions of racism are extreme enough that Whites have now come to view anti-White bias as a bigger societal problem than anti-Black bias.

But, setting aside questions regarding the size of the survey group and the focus on white/black relations in an increasingly diverse country, one has to wonder: is this really a surprise?

Researchers Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers say as much in a column for the New York Times:

One outcome of granting rights to traditionally marginalized groups has been to leave many whites feeling marginalized themselves. What are the consequences of this sense of marginalization? For one, the very same developments that some would point to as evidence of progress toward equality (an African-American president, a Latina Supreme Court justice) are seen by others as further evidence of the threats aligned against them.

Consider the rhetoric associated with some members of the Tea Party, whose emphasis on the perceived values of the founding fathers implicitly centers on the notion that the founders were white heterosexual Christians. Or the oft-voiced concern that political correctness has stifled traditional American values, as with the idea of a “war on Christmas.”

As a result, there’s a “jockeying for stigma” among groups in America today. This competition is surprising because being marginalized often equates to being powerless, yet many whites now use their sense of marginalization as a rallying cry toward action. Already, this sentiment is affecting political discourse, as shown by the rise of the Tea Party and the growing number of lawsuits alleging “reverse racism.”

Besides the larger political and historical examples, though, haven’t we seen some of these fears play out on a smaller scale? Consider:

• People who makes it a point to tell you they “like all types of music, except rap,” and radio stations who use that statement to advertise themselves.
• Privilege-Denying Dudes.
• Basketball fans who call, say, Jimmer Fredette “a gamer” while decrying Allen Iverson as “a ballhog” and “a thug,” or lament that the game is “all about who jumps highest.”

But potentially even more disturbing is a Cal-Berkeley study highlighted by Joan Walsh at Salon:

In an experiment known as “Me/Not Me,” respondents were asked to quickly rate whether a series of terms having to do with race, ethnicity and diversity had anything to do with them personally. It found that the white students related more favorably to the terms associated with “colorblindness” — equality, unity, sameness, similarity, color blind, and color blindness – than to words associated with “multiculturalism”: diversity, variety, culture, multicultural, multiracial, difference and multiculturalism.

What does this tell us? The study authors (as do I) take for granted that it matters — it would be a good thing — if whites embrace diversity and multicultural initiatives, whether in schools, workplaces and community groups, and they therefore suggest that people designing such programs consider that “whites’ reactions to multiculturalism … are rooted in the basic social psychological need for inclusion and belonging.” Stressing that multiculturalism encompasses the wide variety of white ethnic and class experiences might help. Emphasizing words with positive resonance like “equality” and “unity” might too.

But when does inclusiveness become self-erasure? Did the white people in these studies ever learn to accept that there’s some experiences they probably just won’t get to totally understand because of their privilege? And what happens – for everybody – if they don’t?

Satoshi Kanazawa’s Monday blog post about black women and beauty standards, since taken down, was only the latest in a string of questionable contributions to both Psychology Today and his field.

In 2006, Kanazawa was accused of reviving eugenics-era theories after publishing a paper in England blaming low IQ levels for low life expectancy and high infant mortality rates in the continent of Africa – seemingly ignoring decades worth of political and social unrest. This led to him being called “the great idiot of social science” by renowned biologist PZ Myers in an article last year on Alternet.

Daniela Perdomo’s piece for Alternet focused on another study by Kanazawa, this one alleging that atheists are “more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and atheism…) than less intelligent individuals.” Perdomo writes:

… Not only does Kanazawa wax over structural inequalities that may lead to varying IQ levels in American society, even the disparities he finds in this imperfect measure of intelligence are relatively miniscule. For the most part, he is not speaking of a difference of more than six IQ points between liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers — a negligible difference one would never notice in real person-to-person interactions.

Kanazawa isn’t the first to study the intelligence-religiosity nexus. Other studies have also found a three- to six-point IQ difference between atheists and religious believers, in the atheists’ favor. But those studies didn’t claim that atheists were more evolved, as Kanazawa presumes, and merely conclude that they are more skeptical due to a certain kind of schooling and cultural exposure (which might also account for why some people perform well on IQ tests), leaving room to account for why so many people — say, like William F. Buckley, Jr., the late conservative public intellectual — can be so religious and conservative and yet quite intelligent.

In February 2008, Kanazawa defined his position as “extremely purist” in a post in Psychology Today, saying findings can only be either true or false:

No other criteria besides the truth should matter or be applied in evaluating scientific theories or conclusions. They cannot be “racist” or “sexist” or “reactionary” or “offensive” or any other adjective. Even if they are labeled as such, it doesn’t matter. Calling scientific theories “offensive” is like calling them “obese”; it just doesn’t make sense. Many of my own scientific theories and conclusions are deeply offensive to me, but I suspect they are at least partially true.

Once scientists begin to worry about anything other than the truth and ask themselves “Might this conclusion or finding be potentially offensive to someone?”, then self-censorship sets in, and they become tempted to shade the truth. What if a scientific conclusion is both offensive and true? What is a scientist to do then? I believe that many scientific truths are highly offensive to most of us, but I also believe that scientists must pursue them at any cost.

It is not my job as a scientist to “use” scientific knowledge in any way to improve the human condition; that’s the job of politicians, policy makers, physicians, and other social engineers. Their goal of helping people and improving their lives is a noble and important (albeit nonscientific) one. Any successful intervention, however, must be based on the true understanding of nature. If these social engineers don’t know the true causes of what they are trying to create or eliminate, how can they possibly hope to succeed? By opposing and entirely disregarding certain scientific theories and conclusions a priori on ideological and political grounds, because they believe they could not and should not be true, they risk the chance they might not achieve their goal of helping people.

Less than a month later, however, he engaged in a rather unscientific – and genocidal – bit of speculation as to how the United States could have ended the “war on terror” more quickly, emphasis his:

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.

That post is still active on PT’s website, while Monday’s has been pulled – justifiably, according to fellow PT blogger Mikhail Lyubansky. But it wasn’t because Kanazawa’s work arrived at an unpopular confusion, emphasis his:

The point is that there are also group differences, not in attractiveness (as Kanazawa claims), but in cultural messages about what is and is not attractive. Standards of beauty, like most other beliefs, are socialized and change not only from place to place but also over time. In both the United States and England, (where Kanazawa lives and works), standards of beauty are essentially “White” standards, because whites comprise the majority of the population and have disproportional control over both media and fashion. And while it is not just White respondents who are socialized this way (internalized racism has been well documented), it is certainly the case that White Americans and Europeans (who are less likely to have received more positive messages about Black beauty) would show the strongest anti-Black bias.

As long as this is understood and framed accordingly, there is no problem with the data Kanazawa reports. What they show is that because Black faces and bodies don’t fit mainstream White standards of physical attractiveness, both respondents and interviewers show an anti-Black bias. Unfortunately, Kanazawa fails to consider either sample bias or socializing effects. Even if he believes, as he apparently does, that human behavior is entirely “evolutionary”, good science requires a careful analysis of sample bias and an explicit discussion regarding the study’s generalizability. Without this kind of methodological analysis, Kanazawa’s entire premise — that there is such a thing as a single objective standard of attractiveness — is fatally (and tragically) flawed.

It is worth noting that Kanazawa repeats this same flaw of omission when he explains that the attractiveness results are not due to race group differences in intelligence, as though there are no scholarly critiques of IQ measures in general and their racial bias in particular.

These are not trivial omisisions. They are the necessary context that gives readers the information they need to draw their own conclusions.

Compiled By Arturo R. García

Since bar graphs make everything truer, we present a pictorial representation definitively showing that although Kanazawa was pretty much the worst before his post on black women, he is now even worster.*

*As measured by the Jezebel Worstness Index, developed by leading Worstologist Anna North of Jezebel University, Internet Campus. Margin of error = +/- a million.
- Anna North, Jezebel

Few articles in recent memory have stirred a response from our readers like this piece, originally posted at Psychology Today, in which “evolutionary psychologist” Satoshi Kanazawa states, “As the following graph shows, black women are statistically no different from the “average” Add Health respondent, and far less attractive than white, Asian, and Native American women.”

Kanazawa, a regular contributor to Psychology Today, says he arrived at this theory, based on data in which black women were constantly rated as “less attractive” compared to women from other races. However, he says, “even though black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women, black women (and men) subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others.”

After dismissing black women’s “much heavier body mass” or disparities in intelligence, he comes to one conclusion for his findings:

The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races, and testosterone, being an androgen (male hormone), affects the physical attractiveness of men and women differently. Men with higher levels of testosterone have more masculine features and are therefore more physically attractive. In contrast, women with higher levels of testosterone also have more masculine features and are therefore less physically attractive. The race differences in the level of testosterone can therefore potentially explain why black women are less physically attractive than women of other races, while (net of intelligence) black men are more physically attractive than men of other races.

The article was pulled from Psychology Today’s website without explanation Monday afternoon. Latoya is putting together a roundtable discussion on the article, which we’ll post here soon, but in the meantime, thanks to our readers who mailed us a tip on it. Here’s a collection of views from around the blogosphere:

“The only thing I can think of”? Really? The blog’s presentation of the allegedly scientific findings had a decidedly informal tone, especially given the highly contentious conclusions. It struck us as so outrageous that we almost thought it was a hoax of some sort, and we double-checked the URL to make sure it didn’t include “The Onion.”
- Jenée Desmond-Harris, The Root

As I hold back my temper thinking as a woman, I already have cultural pressures to be something other than what I am in terms of a beauty standard, but I cannot believe this complete failure of an attempt to scientfically prove I’m less attractive than a white woman (assuming the same general characteristics).

What is absurd about the premise is what is he basing it on? “Black” women run the gamut of able to pass for white, to dark-skinned afro-centric features. We have dead straight blonde hair to ultra-nappy fros. Who participated and what did they look like? Who knows, that information isn’t there.

Any “scientific analysis” is fool’s gold without any context to historical sociological or ethnographic impact on majority and minority populations in regards to notions of physical attractiveness. Yet Kanazawa is trying so hard to make it work that you get the feeling that he gave himself a migraine.
- Pam Spaulding, Pam’s House Blend

Shame on Psychology Today for being a willing instrument to perpetuate racism. But I can’t be surprised, can I? It seems like every other week we hear NFL players saying “they don’t like black girls,” (c)rap songs calling us hoes and b*tches, and news of how some regions of Africa rape 48 black women per hour. Per. Hour. And with no one coming to our defense, it’s just implied that we’re denfense-less. This kind of soul-killing propaganda has got to stop, but I have a feeling it’s going to have to be black women making a concerted effort to work together and say “Enough is enough.”
- Christelyn Kazarin, Madame Noire

Perhaps at another point in my life, I would laugh this off as the musings of someone too stupid to realize how racist he is. But we live in an environment where the President of the United States is repeatedly forced to produce his birth certificate to prove that he was born in this country and where one of the leading candidates on the Republican side repeatedly characterizes the President’s attitude as “Kenyan anti-colonialist” and produces dog whistles like “food stamp president looking to make the entire country like Detroit”. This is not an isolated event by an insulated individual. This is a nasty undercurrent that simmers below the surface all the time and that has been bubbling up more and more frequently. And after being tangentially part of some rather heated online discussions about race and privilege recently, I don’t know that we can ever truly work towards a more progressive future without acknowledging and dealing with this.
- Nicole Belle, Crooks And Liars

Idiot.

This is a long-standing problem with evolutionary psychology proponents, despite the field’s potential use in principle: there’s a desire to reduce any and all perceptions and societal norms as being the result of evolutionary selective pressures. Why? Because if it’s the result of biology—not sociological trends—then we have an excuse to cling to ignorant perceptions, stereotypes, and norms. Kanazawa has a long track record of pushing studies and narratives such as this (this isn’t his first time on the issue of race) and he is unfortunately not unique. All of these studies have one thing in common: they have no methodological basis to link some aspect or behavior being measured with a history of evolutionary selective pressures.

Black women are beautiful.

Black. Women. Are. Beautiful.

F-ck this asshole. Contact Psychology Today to express your disapproval. I think this needs to go beyond taking his article down.
- The Erratic Synapse, The Daily Kos

By Arturo R. García

Professor Manning Marable lived long enough to finish his life’s work. Marable, a prolific author, activist and academic, died this past Friday of complications from pneumonia in New York City, just three days before the release of Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, a comprehensive revisiting of the life and times of the civil rights leaders he put together over the course of two decades.

As The New York Times reported, Reinvention provides a challenge to many existing stories about Malcolm, including his famous autobiography, written by Alex Haley:

Malcolm X himself contributed to many of the fictions, Mr. Marable argues, by exaggerating, glossing over or omitting important incidents in his life. These episodes include a criminal career far more modest than he claimed, an early homosexual relationship with a white businessman, his mother’s confinement in a mental hospital for nearly 25 years and secret meetings with leaders of groups as divergent as the Ku Klux Klan and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

“Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” shows, for instance, that at a time when Malcolm X claimed in the autobiography to have “devoted himself to increasingly violent crime” in New York, he was actually in Lansing, Mich., his hometown. Mr. Marable attributes the embroidery of “amateurish attempts at gangsterism” to Malcolm X’s wish to demonstrate that the Nation of Islam’s gospel of pride and self-respect had the power to redeem even the most depraved criminal.

“In many ways, the published book is more Haley’s than its author’s,” Mr. Marable writes, noting that Haley, who died in 1992, was a liberal Republican and staunch integrationist who held “racial separation and religious extremism in contempt” but was “fascinated by the tortured tale of Malcolm’s personal life.”

The book’s completion, it could be said, was an exclamation point on a journey that, for Marable, began linked to another civil rights trail-blazer, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, whose funeral Marable attended at the urging of his mother.

“With Martin’s death, my childhood abruptly ended,” Marable wrote. “My understanding of political change began a trajectory from reform to radicalism.”

In the academic arena, Marable’s trajectory led him to a Bachelor of Arts degree from Earlham College and a PhD from the University of Maryland. He would go on to be the founder of departments for African-American studies at both Colgate University and Columbia University, where, as Professor Melissa Harris-Perry – herself a noted commentator and activist – noted, he emerged as much more than a purely professional mentor:

“To be a student or a junior faculty member in Manning’s office was to wait for the smile,” she wrote in The Nation. “He would listen intently and seriously as you told him about the project you envisioned, the finding you made, or a conclusion you’d drawn. As you spoke, his face was a mask of stillness covering a never-resting intellect just below the surface. It was more than a little intimidating to present an idea to Manning. But if he liked what you were up to or thought you had uncovered a promising direction then his face would crack into a broad and compelling smile that made the whole nerve-wracking experience worth it. If you got the smile then you knew you could keep going.”

Marable is survived by three children, two stepchildren and his wife, Leith Mullings Marable who told The Root she thought he would want to be remembered for having contributed to what she called “the black freedom struggle.”

He would want to be remembered for being both a scholar and an activist and as someone who saw the two as not being separated,” she said. “He believed that both [callings] went together and enhanced each other.”

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is in stores as of today.

Our multi-talented homegirl Jessica Yee just edited and published her first anthology.  Called Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism, Yee and her contributors (including myself and Andrea Plaid) keep it raw by illuminating the some of the issues people of color (particularly Indigenous people) encounter when entering feminist spaces.  In honor of International Women’s Day, we are going to share short excerpts of some of the essays in the book.

Jessica Yee: “Introduction”

[W]e’re not really equal when we’re STILL supposed to uncritically and obediently cheer when white women are praised for winning “women’s rights,” and to painfully forget the Indigenous women and women of colour who were hurt in that same process.  We are not equal when in the name of “feminism” so-called “women’s only” spaces are created and get to police and regulate who is and isn’t a woman based on their interpretation of your body parts and gender presentation, and not your own. We are not equal when initatives to support gender equality have reverted yet again to “saving” people and making decisions for them, rather than supporting their right to self-determination, whether it’s engaging in sex work or wearing a niqab.  So when feminism itself has become it’s own form of oppression, what do we have to say about it? [...]

[I']ve lost count the amount of times I’ve been asked by others and asked the question myself, what is now the main title of this book, “But what is feminism, for real?”

The responses I received when putting this very question out there to create the book demonstrated resoundingly that people did want to talk about this notion of “the academic industrial complex of feminism” – the conflicts between what feminism means at school as opposed to at homer, the frustrations of trying to relate to definitions of feminism that will never fit no matter how much you try to change yourself to fit them, and the anger and frustration of changing a system while being in the system yourself.

Krysta Williams and Erin Konsmo: “Resistance to Indigenous Feminism”

E & K: What does it mean for an individual to be considered “liberated?”  What does it mean for indigenous communities to be “liberated?”  I think the pictures we think of as Native women are very different than the end goals expressed in a lot of feminist literature.  In other words, there needs to be more space given to community-based solutions and the hard work that everyone, especially women in our communities do every day.

In academia (and in general) there’s still the problem of tokenism.    Including one article or person of colour, or Indigenous person into feminist curriculum is not enough.  This needs to be fully integrated into all women’s studies curriculum (which is still inherently racist).

E: One crucial element that non-Indigenous academia needs to accept is that no matter how much you read the journals of Columbus, a Native Chief, or through interviews of Native people, you do not have the blood memory that we have within us.   Sorry, if this ruins your PhD on Native people but you don’t have the blood memory experiences that I do and so the internal “validity” of your research will never compare!

K: Internal validity has never been so literal…It also needs to be said that including folks after the fact just doesn’t cut it.  White supremacy exists within institutions and this can’t be changed  by just putting Indigenous bodies in chairs.  There are structural changes that we have been calling for since forever!

Shaunga Tagore: “A Slam on Feminism in Academia (poem)

your ideal graduate student is
someone who doesn’t have to experience community organizing
because you’ve already assigned them five chapters to read about it

your ideal graduate student is
someone who can’t talk about positionality or privilege
without referencing some article

your ideal graduate student is
rich enough
white enough
straight enough
able-bodied and -minded enough
to be given luxury of enjoying sitting in a corner reading 900 pages a week
(with their fair trade starbucks coffee in hand and their lulu lemon track pants on ass)

your ideal graduate student
IS NOT ME

so WHY did you let me through these doors in the first place
if you were just gonna turn around and shove me out?

to fill some quote for affirmative action?
to appear like a progressive program without putting in the effort of actually being one?

Latoya Peterson: The Feminist Existential Crisis (Dark Child Remix)

(If) I think (about gender, access, and equality), therefore I am (by definition, a feminist).

It should all be so simple, right? But in the immortal words of Lauryn Hill in “Ex-Factor:”

but you had to make it hard/loving you is like a battle/and we both end up with scars 

tell me who I have to be/to get some reciprocity

To accept an identity as a “professional” feminist is to accept the layers of baggage associated with the label feminist. Added to the class and race parcels I carry, I find myself changing into Erykah Badu’s metaphorical bag lady – even while I’m trying to let it go and let love heal some of these wounds. If I make my living unpacking racism and sexism, why willingly take on more?

But one thing is clear – the culture of professional feminism is crowding my space. [...]

Now, it’s always a different world than where you come from. But this was way different. It was wealthier, whiter, full of events and fetes and conferences. It was earnest. It was aware. But not too aware, since I always felt like I wore the cloak of the outsider. I’ve made a lot of wonderful friends through feminism, and got to meet so many more amazing women, and yet I always had this feeling that I still hadn’t quite landed where I was supposed to be. It was as if I was on this path, but it was leading away from where I was trying to go. Somehow, I always ended up feeling isolated.

Louis Esme Cruz: “Medicine Bundle of Contradictions: Female-man, Mi’kmaq/Acadian/Irish Diasporas, Invisible disAbilities, masculine-Feminist”

I write this to you, making something beautiful in this shared space between us, making it difficult for invasion to take root here. When we recognize each other, it is easier for both of us to relax.  We build what Lee Maracle, recognized Sto:lo author, describes as the golden rainbow between us.  Maracle says that when we build this arch, we are actively resisting invasion because no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time. [...]

Two-Spirit people are not allowed to participate in societies as our full selves and then we are shamed and blamed for the ways we are hurt by this.  When people say that a space is “women-only” they are assuming that women are always sensitive to each other’s needs, are always able to understand each other’s experiences, these experiences are always the same, and women are not violent.  Explicitly, this says all women are safe; all men are unsafe.  The inclusion of Two-Spirit people in women only space is arbitrary, shifting with who has the power to define the space.  This person in power is rarely Native.  From what I have seen, women who parade feminist ideals are the ones who decide who experiences gender-oppression.  Two-Spirit people can talk about our oppression only when it parallels women’s experiences.   When our lives get too complicated we are judged, ignored, punished, humiliated.  Whether it’s women-only or men-only space, the naming of a space as only one gender encourages invasion and conquest because they don’t allow people to be the complex creatures we are.  This pushes Two-Spirit people to the margins simply because we are not one thing or another.  We need liberation from the confines of gender baggage, too.  This parallels the larger call from Indigenous sovereignty movements asking for our Native Nations to be seen as distinct, sovereign entities.  We are necessarily unique and complex for a reason.

Ghadeer M. (of the AQSAzine Collective): “A Rant: Ya si sayed”

Insecure about your power, hungry for more, you throw a fit, feet in the air and scream out loud hoping to drown out the voices of objections, questions, and inquiries.

Listen to me – no longer will you allow yourself to tell me what to do.  What to cover or not cover, what messages my body will carry for you.

Things are going to change around here.

And I know that you are afraid, and that your violence only foster because of shame of your own mistakes.

But so you should be…

Tremble and quiver from the thought of your cold fate approaching you.

Then sit still and surrender as chaos from soles rubbing on pavements and streets turn into rubble and settle lightly on the shoulders of your pride.

Alone and desolate…like all captured kings.

Dethrones, de-powered. Ropes cut through your throat.

You’ve lost.

Because I’m woman – and I do what I want.

 

Shabiki Crane: “Pride from Behind”

[...] I was truly “done” with women’s studies after my professor announced to the class that when white women like Britney Spears presented themselves in a sexual manner it was because they were asserting their sexuality; however when black women, like Beyonce did, they were simply being puppets and degrading themselves.  I couldn’t understand the way that both images wouldn’t invoke the same reaction regardless of whether it was seen as empowerment or degradation, but why not the same? I saw two women singing, shaking, shimmying and to my horror, recognized it would never be the same.  It just reiterated the feelings of dis-empowerment I had harboured throughout the years of my life.

Feminism dictates that women deserve to be equal to men; but the truth is it’s telling us that some women are more deserving than others.

Megan Lee: “Maybe I’m Not Class-Mobile; Maybe I’m Class-Queer”

The current model of “class-mobility” reinforces separatism and a class-hierarchy because it posits that in order to escape oppression, one must become an oppressor – and universities do not merely mediate the boundary between professional and laborer, they teach the body of knowledge, the worldview, the values that mark a person as professional, as “belonging” to the middle- or upper-class.

Universities teach us to renounce our sense of identification with the poor; they teach us this by mainly ignoring the existence of poor people  and by treating us as “other” when we do become the subject of discussion.  Universities teach us not to care too much, because it will undermine our professional role.   Universities teach that we are separate from where we came from, that we are “qualified” (which suggests our families and peers are not), that we are justified in having power over people, in speaking for the subjects of our study.  Universities teach us that we are “too good” to wait tables and clean houses, with the implication that those who do those jobs are “not good enough” to deserve better.

Poor people tend to see university as a way out for their kids, but university is also a way in to the class of people whose success is premised on the oppression of the poor.  [...]For a kid to become educated meant that he or she would live an easier life that was premised on the oppression and invisibility of the very communities s/he came from.  This left a foul taste in many mouths.

I have had that foul taste in my mouth for years, and I have come to the conclusion that it is the taste of injustice – of being forced to choose between the indignity of remaining poor and the ethically repellent strategy of privilege seeking.  To a poor kid who has the chance to go to college or university, participating in an institution that she identifies as oppressive (either before attending or in the course of her education) might seem like the best choice with regards to her survival, but it is a conflicted survival.

Andrea Plaid: ” ‘No, I Would Follow the Porn Star’s Advice’: A Case Study in Educational Privilege and Kyriarchy”

I could have easily benefited from the feminist-academic complex.  I concentrated on women’s studies as part of my liberal-arts degree and my Independent Study project when I was getting my master’s degree in library science – since writing a master’s thesis was not an option at the time – was on founding and operating a sex-positive library, though I did not specifically study sex as an undergraduate or graduate student.  The fact that I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree allows me to be taken slightly more seriously because they signal that I know certain “privilege codes and signals” gotten from about seven years of beyond high school education, like knowing about or having “the right” books on my bookshelf or in my e-reader (Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, anything and just about everything by bell hooks, some Barbara Ehrenreich and Naomi Klein, etc.), having seen or heard about the “right” movies (anything Pedro Almodovar and Mira Nair, Outfoxed, Matrix, etc.) and the “right” music (usually some form of “alternative” hip-hop, rock, and country).  It also means I know the “right” places to meet other like-minded educated people offline (coffee shops, poetry readings, film screenings, panel discussions, galleries and museums, and so on.) In other words, my stating that I’m degreed lets others know that I’m the kind of “culturedness” that only a bachelor’s and master’s degree “can give” (translation: “can pay for” – which, really, is what educational privilege is welded with and signals)…and if I wasn’t exposed to these things, I can damn sure learn it quickly because I know the “right” places to go find such things, including the “right” Internet sources and from those adjunct and tenured types.

The linchpin in all of this and what I’m signaling to others by my degrees is that I’m capable of talking about complex ideas and issues, like the various schools of feminism, because I’m trained to do it, based on the “virtue” of the “right” knowledge and furthermore, take my complex notions to “the masses” who need to hear it and embrace it as part of their lives.  (This notion is one of the rawest forms of educational privilege.) Because that, from what we’re told in these social-class incubators called four-year colleges and advanced degrees, is the great responsibility that comes from the great advantage – and promise – of being an “educated person.”  The more subtle lesson passed to us in college is The Degreed are the only ones worth listening to – the more degreed, the more you’re worth listening to, because you’re an “expert” due to all those years of studying.

Robyn Maynard: Fuck the Glass Ceiling!

[L]et’s examine [the word] ‘marginalization.’ I’ve always felt wary about the community sector’s use of the word ‘marginalized populations’, but I didn’t always understand why I felt it was so dubious.  Now I do: ‘exploitation has always been a better term that ‘marginalization’, because where marginalization just means that people are pushed into, or exist already in, the margins of society, it doesn’t explain how or why.  The process of marginalization isn’t intrinsic to the meaning of the word, and ‘margins’ seem to pre-exist, as a natural location for people to inhabit in a society,  It seems like something that just accidentally happens, and needs to be fixed by pulling people into some kind of imaginary ‘centre,’ which I imagine is meant to be the middle class or something to that effect.  It is a watered down description of the extreme hardships and daily violence experienced by those living in extreme poverty and facing the harshest realities of racism in our society, and it also disguises the reasons for why it takes place. [...]

The ever-decreasing ability for the poor, racialized, and Indigenous to access the basic food and shelter needs that ‘marginalize’ people is not addressed and ‘marginalization’ seems to be a phenomenon that just is. The word ‘exploitation’ is clearer. The process of exploitation is inside of this word, it contains, in its definition, the fact that somebody is being exploited for the benefit of somebody else; it is describing a relationship.  And this makes it easier to understand what is meant in stating that the status of racialized, Indigenous, and immigrant women today is ‘structural.’

 

Interested in reading the rest of the book? You can order Feminism for Real here.

By Guest Contributor Aymar Jean Christian, cross-posted from Televisual

I recently had a conversation with a black director who fretted not putting any men of color in his film project. As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t find anyone to play the role. In the end he told me: “I can’t carry the whole black community on my own!”

It’s a strange thing to be a writer, creator, producer, artist and belong to some kind of “other” group. Every one of us — I think — struggles with how responsible we are to our communities. It’s something I find myself having to deal with more and more. And I’m starting to develop opinions about it.

Writing about one’s identity group is not always a “burden.” Soon I’ll be writing a column for AfterElton about gay men of color in the media, and I couldn’t be happier! I hesitated a bit when I was asked. The old questions emerged: would I pigeonholed? Would I be “that black gay guy”? But ultimately I saw more opportunity than limitations. I care about that stuff, and it’s so often not talked about. Why not?

Still, for anyone who creates media, the burden can be tiresome. The truth is there are typically few people who are X identity in a given field — film, the academy, television, web production — that the few who exist are often asked to correct structural imbalances, even if they have other interests. It’s unfair, but it is the world in which we live. These burdens aren’t limited to the traditional groups of minorities, though they have to deal with it most; it spans genre identities (sci-fi, western, horror), ideologies (nihilist, modernist), styles (independent, art-house, fringe), basically anything with a dedicated core of minority adherents and members.

When I was younger and immature I used to wonder: “why does so-and-so only write/talk/think about X identity? They’re so unimaginative!” You know who I’m talking about: the showrunner who only pitches shows about women, the journalist who only writes about sexuality, etc.

As I grew older and started to participate in these various worlds, I realized it was often the other way around. The people who are “pigeonholed” are, more often than not, forced to or called upon to hold those positions. Since there aren’t a lot of academics in, say, economics, who write about race, those scholars are asked to write the “race essay” for the edited collection, or edit an issue in a journal. If they aren’t asked by the “powers that be,” they’re urged to by friends or colleagues.

Because, like myself, they want and are happy to oblige because so few people write about their communities. As they start to, they realize how many stories go untold and theories unexplored; it starts to get interesting. I blog and write a lot about black identity, gay identity and women. (See the tag cloud to the right). Some might say I’m falling prey to stereotype. But the truth is I find there’s a lot to say about these topics that isn’t being said by the mainstream media, or even prominent blogs.

When I first started researching web series over a year ago, virtually no one was writing about black web series and gay/lesbian web series, despite dozens being released each year. That’s why I started making the lists linked to above (though I can never keep up! I try to update about once a month). I felt compelled to and was happy to do it, to give producers/directors what little exposure I could provide (it’s not much!).

I always feel for those directors, producers, writers, etc. who “stray” from their communities and do other things. Occasionally they’re branded “post-racial,” “post-gender,” “post-gay,” post-whatever. Will Smith is a classic example — he’s planning yet another project in China. Some have avoided it: Spike Lee and Gus Van Sant do a lot of non-black, non-gay films, but make sure to come back home every once in awhile. A lucky few can be both responsible to their communities and do other projects while not being branded either way. But society demands shortcuts, and in the end, most of us have to take our label and wear it with pride.

The best do both. Some of the greatest artists and thinkers of the 20th century took their less-than-popular identities and used them to create bold works about the broader culture, about society and civilization, from Toni Morrison and James Baldwin to David Wojnarowicz and Judith Butler.

We should embrace the challenge. I used to think “label” was a dirty word. Even today, read an interview with any artist or writer, no matter their race or religion, no matter how singular their interest in a particular identity, and, without fail, they will inevitably say they don’t want to be labeled. Nobody wants to! But labels are a way of communicating to the world, a way of signaling something important. Any creative or intellectual person should relish the opportunity to take something presumed to be “marginal” and make it central and important to a conversation.

Should we accept our burdens? I think maybe we should. Carrying a burden only makes you stronger.

Compiled by Arturo R. García

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
- Mark Twain, author, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Seems to me I’m doing something constructive by simply eliminating a word that’s a clear barrier for many people.
- Dr. Alan Gribben, Twain scholar, Auburn University.

We’ve got our first official race flap of 2011—and it involves something published in 1884.
- Kai Wright, editorial director, Colorlines

All it does is feed the American aversion to history and reflection. Which is a shame. If there’s anything great about this country, it’s in our ability to account for and overcome our mistakes. Peddling whitewashed ignorance diminishes America as much as it does our intellect.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor, The Atlantic.

At NewSouth, we saw the value in an edition that would help the works find new readers. If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain’s works will be more emphatically fulfilled.
- Suzanne LaRosa, publisher, NewSouth Books.

Yeah, it’s a tough book. Which is an excellent reason for teaching it.
- Millie Davis, Anti-Censorship Representative, National Council of Teachers of English

If some teachers have the audacity to believe that Mark Twain’s work is still meaningful, even absent the words “nigger” and “injun,” more power to them. If other teachers think keeping those epitaphs in is worth the pain they will cause students of color, I understand that too. This isn’t about censorship, it’s about choice. Either choice will have unfortunate consequences.
- Professor Paul Butler, associate dean and Carville Dickinson Benson Research Professor of Law, George Washington University.

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Ranking on 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000, American Library Association.

If a teacher is not prepared to have a social and historical conversation, and place this masterpiece in context, is she prepared to teach that text? Should it be to those students? So, when we get into changing words, unwriting history, rearranging art, we start to put our democracy in danger.
- Michaela Angela Davis, former fashion editor, Essence magazine.

We recognized that some people would say that this was censorship of a kind, but our feeling is that there are plenty of other books out there—all of them, in fact — that faithfully replicate the text, and that this was simply an option for those who were increasingly uncomfortable, as he put it, insisting students read a text which was so incredibly hurtful.
- Suzanne LaRosa.

The idea that we can somehow make any of these cultural products clean and nice is foolish. The whole point of culture and of literature is to challenge us.
- Professor Melissa Harris-Perry, associate professor of Politics and African-American Studies, Princeton University.

For a single word to form a barrier, it seems such an unnecessary state of affairs.
– Alan Gribben.

From the “some good news for once” files, here’s a piece from the Washington Post on how Towson University is one of eleven schools nationwide where graduation rates for minority students “meet or exceed those of whites.”

In 10 years, according to school data, Towson has raised black graduation rates by 30 points and closed a 14-point gap between blacks and whites. University leaders credit a few simple strategies: admitting students with good grades from strong public high schools, then tracking each student’s progress with a network of mentors, counselors and welcome-to-college classes.

“Regardless of your background, there’s people here for you who understand what you’re going through,” said Kenan Herbert, 23, an African American Towson senior from Brooklyn, N.Y.

The data used by The Washington Post was provided by The Education Trust, an educational think tank and watch dog group that is taking an honest look at how our institutions of higher learning measure up.

The Education Trust published a brief on this subject, and has some strong words for educational professionals who seem far too willing to just accept gaps between black and white students:

[W]hen we see data suggesting that the average graduation rate for black students in four-year colleges and universities is about 20 points below that of their white peers, we are hardly surprised. The average black student, we know, leaves high school with a weaker academic record than the average white graduate, so where’s the mystery? Until somebody fixes the
high school problem, there’s not much colleges and universities can do.

Or is there?

For the past several months, we’ve been digging beneath the averages and looking at data from individual institutions in our College Results Online database. We’ve found that some institutions have horrendous graduation-rate gaps between white and black students—well above the national average. And it turns out that other institutions have no gaps at all. Indeed, in dozens of colleges, black students graduate at rates equal to or higher than their white counterparts.

In other words, it’s not entirely about preparation, and wide gaps in the graduation rates of white and black students are not inevitable. Our analysis strongly suggests that what colleges do with and for the students they admit matters a great deal.

The data set in the report explains the horrifying statistics:

The graduation rate for African-American students in the private colleges and universities in our analysis is 54.7 percent, compared with 73.4 percent for whites—an 18.7 percentage-point gap.

Similarly, at public institutions, only 43.3 percent of African American students graduate within six years, compared with 59.5 percent of whites—a 16.2 percentage-point gap.

However the researchers over at Education Trust point out that some of the data patterns reveal disturbing trends:

[I]nstitutions on our “big gap” lists—the 25 public and 25 private
colleges and universities with the largest white-black gaps(see Tables 5 and 6). These institutions all have gaps larger than average, and some have gaps upwards of 30 percentage points.

Some institutions—such as the University of Akron in Ohio and Wayne State University in Michigan— are not serving white students particularly well, but black students fare even worse.Only about four in ten white students at these universities graduate within six years, and only about one in ten black students do.

Other institutions—Michigan State University and
Indiana University-Bloomington, to name two—graduate
white students at high rates but have large gaps for African-
American students. At Indiana University, 73 percent
of white students graduate within six years—well above
the national average—yet only half of its black students
do.

The full brief is well worth the read. The Trust takes pains to note that the most successful colleges on the list acknowledged there was an issue and took responsibility to close that gap.

By Arturo R. García

A report re-published this week in The Quarterly Journal of Economics suggests a racial bias among NBA referees. But the bigger story might be watching the league get forced out of its’ defensive stance on the issue.

According to the study by Joe Price and Justin Wolfers, based on analyzing 13 years’ worth of data on referee calls, the refs are 4 percent less likely to call fouls on players of their own race. (No wonder Kobe looks so surprised there.) Also, players score 2.5 percent more points during games involving ref crews of their own race. But don’t tell that to NBA Commissioner David Stern.

As Price told ESPN’s Henry Abbott, the idea for the study stems from his reading of Blink, Malcolm Gladwell’s book about what goes into split-second decisions in a variety of situations. As Abbott explains it:

Sports presented a special opportunity to learn a lot more, because referees make quick decisions — the kinds that reveal implicit bias — every night.

“If I had as good a set of data on judicial sentencing, or hiring decisions, I would have gone and looked at those,” says Price, who was then getting his Ph.D. at Cornell, and is now an assistant professor at Brigham Young. “In my mind, I don’t have any issues with the NBA. I actually think they’ve achieved racial equality in so many dimensions. They just happen to be a lab setting in which I get quasi-random assignment, I get lots of interactions between a small number of actors. I get a perfect setting to look at racial bias. And in some ways, if it’s happening on a court in front of thousands of people, then it’s probably happening when you go to make purchasing decisions, or hiring decisions, or whatever decisions we can think of as more important.”

But ever since the New York Times reported on Price and Wolfers’ findings three years ago, the NBA and Stern have gone out of their way to knock it, going so far as to say racism “doesn’t exist” in the league:

“This is a bum rap, that’s all,” Stern said after the study’s initial release. “This is a bum rap, and if it is going to be laid on us it should be laid on us by basis of some people who are purported to be scholars in a publication that purports to hold us up to a higher standard — a little bit more should have been done.”

Stern has also said the league conducted its’ own study into referee bias, and crowed about it to Time Magazine:

By Guest Contributor Renina Jarmon, originally published at New Model Minority

In March, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a blog post titled, “The Debatable Legacy of For Colored Girls.” He writes,

“I haven’t read it in years, but even as a younger person I remember thinking it was somewhat over the top and heavy-handed. Hence when I heard that Perry was involved my thoughts were more along the lines of “Of course” or “Perfect.” I could be off on this and I’d like to hear some discussion around this.”

Nearly four years ago, I shouted out Ta-Nehisi Coates after reading an article of his in O magazine on his process of being a Black dad. I stated explicitly that publishers needed to give him a book deal. He responded to me a year later, and arranged to send me a galley of Beautiful Struggle, which I then reviewed on this blog. So i say this knowing that we have some limited history and I want to acknowledge that.

I have found Ta-Nehisi’s Black gender politics to be lacking on his blog and in some ways the questioning of whether or not For Colored Girls is classic symbolizes some of what troubles me about his Black gender politics.

When reading this post Moya asked me two questions. The first was, “Why does it matter to Ta-Nehisi Coates whether For Colored Girls is a classic?” The second is “Is he saying that because it is not a classic that it doesn’t matter if Tyler Perry butchers it?

This is not to say that For Colored Girls should not be questioned. Work around Black gender relations should be given a critical eye.

The issue for me is his reliance on his memory as a basis for questioning whether or not it is a classic.

What does it mean that a Black man, at a popular White publication openly questions whether or not a work by Black feminist artist is a classic, having not read the work since his was younger?

Ta-Nehisi is a reader. Last summer he read and blogged so much about the civil war that he had me revisiting the founding fathers narratives on slavery and democracy. Blog post here, “The Coming Coming Jobless Society.”

In fact, he is currently re-reading Malcolm’s autobiography. Why not re-read For Colored Girls, then ask whether or not it’s a classic?

To read something is to deem it important, significant and worthy of your time.

In the book Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton, Duchess Harris explains the significance of For Colored Girls. I picked up this book on Tuesday because I suspected that Dr. Harris would analyze the cultural moment out of which For Colored Girls emerged. I include three of her quotes below. She writes,

The work of Michelle Wallace and Ntozake Shange shook Black academe and the predominantly male establishment, creating necessary controversy that advanced the Black feminist movement. Without the debates the works engendered, Black feminist writings would not be as developed as they are today. Wallace and Shanges works were also necessary since they were articulations not only about Black women, but by Black women, offering a narrative that diverged considerably from the limiting sterotypes of the Monyihan report, as well as those books such as Soul on Ice by former Black power leader Eldridge Cleaver.

She also says,

Yet, the fact that Shange asserted women’s rights to have their own narratives and, moreover, the right to tell those narratives, opened the door to a new type of creative cultural production that expanded opportunities for Black women to explore, discuss, and understand the issues that affected their lives, as well as present these issues before a broader more diverse audience.

She goes on to say,

Shange also resisted the notion that she glamorized Black women at the expense of Black men, and insisted that her treatment of Black women was neither glamorizing or uplifting but rather a reflection of how she viewed reality. Black men and some Black women were not accustomed to seeing Black women stand up for a Black autonomous feminism that questioned racism within White feminist movements but also went against sexism within Black society. Such a stance is central to Wallace’s and Shange’s writing, since they did not attack all Black men- only the ones who abuse and oppress women and those who let other men so without educating them to act otherwise.

In the essay, “Neither Fish Nor Fowl: The Crisis of African American Gender Relations” Michelle Wallace said that a significant aspect of the Black feminist work is to,

“get black scholars and intellectuals of Orlando Patterson’s superb caliber to think seriously and write publicly about Black gender relations.”

In many ways Wallace’s sentiments towards Patterson captures my sentiment’s toward Ta-Nehisi.

Given Ta-Nehisi’s ability to dig in deep on a topic, AND the audience and platform that he has, he could conceivably impact the tone and content of Black gender discourse in profound ways.

Some great books on Black gender politics (relationships between Black men and women) are When and Where I Enter by Paula Giddings, Black Macho and the Myth of the Super Woman by Michelle Wallace and Black Feminist Theory from Margin to Center by bell hooks.

• Do you think that For Colored Girls is a classic? Why or Why not?
• Would you need to learn more in order to say so?
• What is politically at stake when we discuss text we haven’t recently read?