All Posts Tagged With: "race"

The following is my final product from Prof. Leon Dash’s Immersion Journalism class. Prof. Dash is a two time Pulitzer Prize winner, author of Rosa Lee and a great professor. Immersion Journalism allows journalists to conduct extensive, personal, in-depth interviews with a single person over multiple weeks, months, or years. Read more…

Today, August 14, 2008, marks the one-hundredth anniversary of a race riot in Springfield, Illinois. One of the results of such riots in cities across the Midwest was the creation of “sunset laws” as we called them–regulations that forbade people of color from remaining in a community after dark. These laws resulted in cities and towns in the North becoming much more segregated than those in the South. Black people were not merely forced to drink from different water fountains or use designated bathrooms; they were instead excluded from being any part of the communities, whatsoever.

The assortment of ethnic groups that surrounded me when I was a boy was limited to the long-term residents of America on my mother’s side and the universally Catholic collection of immigrants on my father’s. To the best of my knowledge, there was no overt racism or hatred within that mixture of folks simply because there was no one around to hate–no one bothered to tell me, as a child, that there were people with skin even darker than Skinny Bernardoni and the other Italians. We knew from the July 4th celebrations every year, when Wilson Warrner read the Gettysburg Address, that soldiers from Tonica had fought to free slaves from their masters, but that was a long time ago–it may as well have been on another planet. There was nothing on television in the mid-1950s to show us anything different. The United States was a land of white people, as far as anyone could tell.

Read more…

Editors note: This is a guest post by a friend of mine who will be commenting here and occasionally writing a guest post under the name “Satya.” She was introduced to me by one of my smartest, most talented colleagues as “my smarter, more talented sister.” Unlike most of us who pontificate about Obama while remained firmly planted on our asses, Satya has actually spent the last year working for the Obama campaign.

~by Satya

Barack Obama’s landmark speech on race was not the best he has given thus far. His speech at the JJ dinner in Iowa, despite reaching most people via YouTube, surpassed this week’s speech, and many still continue to hail his 2004 DNC keynote address as his finest.

What was remarkable about Barack’s speech this week was the content. His critics accuse him of sounding great, but being light on content. This speech was all content. He apprised white people of things they either don’t know, aren’t cognizant of, or combination of the two because of white privilege.

His interview after with ABC News really drove this point home when he explained to Terry Moran about how differently white and black people react to the news of major crime. He explained it to him, as I [as a person of color] have many times in a nonthreatening way, how one’s initial reaction to news of the major crime is to worry that the perpetrator might be of your subculture. Barack then clearly illustrated to him the privileges of being white in America by asking him if he would ever be worried about resembling someone who had done something bad.

Jon Stewart, as always, nicely summed up Barack’s big gamble now. He has treated us like adults, put forth subtleties and difficult questions for us to digest. He got his message across, despite being asked idiotic question like, “Are you a black man or an American first?”

(Funny how being black is like being Muslim…you’re still not allowed to have multiple identities if you’re American.)

Buck already covered Obama’s speech and voiced a pretty much identical opinion to my own. But I just wanted to note this: at this point, we have seen Obama give probably the best speech on the confluence of race and politics, as well as the best speech on the confluence of religion and politics, that we have seen in at least a generation, not to mention one of the greatest speeches at a party convention, which itself might be described as one of the best speeches on the confluence of partisanship and politics. He’s also written one of the few political books by politicians that people seem to actually like.

Yes, those are all just words. But they’re also ideas – ideas of great substance that possess a power and a depth and a level of nuance that most politicians dare not express. Obama’s presidency would make history in a number of obvious ways, but I’m beginning to suspect that its greatest contribution might just be that it creates a successful model for other politicians to treat Americans as though they are actually intelligent human beings. Or maybe this will just be unique to him. Either way, this is a moment to savor.

There are moments when it becomes acutely irritating that Urbanagora is populated almost entirely by white men, even while acknowledging that certain members of this particular group of white men still constitute “the other” in certain areas (religion, sexual orientation, marital status). I had such a moment after watching this diavlog between Ezra Klein of the American Prospect and Christopher Hayes of the Nation, which covers a wide range of topics but tends to focus on identity politics and the Democratic primary.

The whole thing is a pretty illuminating discussion, but here’s a snippet I found particularly interesting. It’s about 8 minutes long, but for those who don’t have that much time to spare, it basically begins with Chris Hayes talking about this editorial by Gloria Steinem that ran just before the New Hampshire primary, which basically weighed how hard women in our society have had it vs. African Americans and coming down on the side of women having it worse.

Hayes responds to this by saying that if you look at the progress that African Americans have made materially, it’s very minimal (they continue to have high rates of incarceration, poverty, joblessness, lack of education, etc.). At the same time, if you look at the progress they’ve made culturally, it’s been much more significant in terms of what sorts of things can be said in polite company and what social and cultural consequences there are for being a racist or saying things that are racist. And when you take that same approach looking at the progress of women, it’s pretty much the exact opposite: materially, women have made great strides in terms of access to education and closing the wage gap and breaking through various glass ceilings; whereas culturally, our society seems to have taken dramatic steps backwards (think Maxim, the Man Show, etc.).

Ezra Klein then adds a little to this point by pointing out how much easier it has been for Barack Obama to kind of step outside of his “box” merely by being “out of the ordinary” in terms of the stereotype of black men: he’s well-educated, articulate, and all the rest; and therefore society at large embraces him as a symbol of progress and hope. For Hillary Clinton, it’s much more difficult for her to step outside of her gender and therefore critics of Clinton can say things in a sexist way that a critic of Obama could absolutely never say in the equivalent racist way. Klein attributes this in part to the point Hayes made earlier: because women have been much more successful at ingraining themselves in the power structure of our society, they present much more of a threat to the traditional order. To put it crudely, Hillary Clinton reminds white men of their female supervisor whom they feel uncomfortable with. Whereas the privilege that white men enjoy is not particularly threatened by black men, who continue to suffer the material effects of institutionalized racism. It’s therefore much easier and even compelling to embrace a black man like Obama than a white woman like Clinton.

After typing all this, I realize that I’ve pretty much done nothing but sum up the discussion between Klein and Hayes rather than contribute much in the way of my own thoughts, but I guess I’d just say that this is a big part of why, even though I’m an Obama supporter, I wouldn’t be saddened if Hillary managed to win the nomination: a big portion of the progress that women have yet to make in this country deals much more with cultural attitudes than material benefits, and the opposite is true of African Americans. And while electing a woman as President will help to make progress on the cultural sexism front, electing a black man as President will do little to make progress on the material racism front (and quite likely would even hurt that progress to some extent, as white people will congratulate themselves for electing a black man and start thinking the civil rights movement has come much further than it really has).

I’m dreading the onslaught of attacks on this post from the more conservative-minded contributors to this blog who will find this whole discussion either boring or irritating, placing far too much focus on race and sex than on practical policy considerations. But to head that argument off at least a little, I would point out that the policy distinctions between Hillary and Obama are rather minimal, which allows for these sorts of consideration to come much more to the forefront. They are also just genuinely important considerations, I think, but particularly so given that this is a primary contest between two candidates who largely agree on policy.

Also, not that I think anybody will listen to this, but I would again say that the entire discussion between Klein and Hayes is quite interesting, and if you’ve got an hour to kill (as I do, thanks to a wonderful faculty retreat at Georgetown which has given me a really long weekend), you should check it out.