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Confronting Race & Racism
May 2013
Contents
Ryan Anderson
Agustin Fuentes
Nicole Truesdell
Francine Barone
Douglas La Rose
Candace Moore
Steven Bunce
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
The latest issue of Anthropologies containing a collection of short pieces on race and racism is now available. Check out the table of contents below for the complete list of articles including my own submission on the public perception of anthropology and race (with a hint of the digital). I recommend reading the entire issue which offers a good mix of personal anecdotes from life and stories from the field as well as hard-hitting academic commentary. Standouts include Ryan Anderson's intro, and Doug La Rose and Steve Bunce's papers, which go beyond simply rehashing American ideas about race. All of the pages are open to comments and discussion, so let's keeping talking about race and/in anthropology.
May 2013
Contents
May 2013
Contents
I was not planning on weighing in on this topic of much media and public attention, until I read this AAA/HuffPo piece. Racial and ethnic conflict, nationalistic labels, perceptions of distance and of inter-racial or race-related violence are all topics that I explored rather thoroughly in my PhD thesis (titled Urban Firewalls for some of these exact reasons). What initially started out as a brief comment in response to Ashkuff's post at the OAC has evolved into something more, and I am posting it here with some duality: 1) as an anthropologist analyzing concepts of social distance, and 2) more subjectively as a citizen of the United States who has recently returned from abroad to a country where it is easy to feel like a foreigner on the wrong side of a firewall. Race is a powerful word, yet it is in key ways little more than an arbitrary label; it's just another term wielded by those threatened by difference to put distance between the Self and the Other. For anthropologists, it's fascinating stuff. Yet I can't address it only as an anthropologist or remove all personal emotion here. I'm culture-shocked, and you should be, too. I say this as a concerned citizen: the question is not whether or not Zimmerman is guilty (he shot an unarmed person), it's what the hell are we doing (we let him have the gun in the first place)?
In somber cases like that of Trayvon Martin, it is worrying that race/ethnicity are so easily played to suit the whims of commentators and politicians obliviously clowning around in a giant election year performance. So wearing my citizen hat, I argue that race is being used here once again to draw attention away from more critical issues bubbling at intense heat right below the surface. By fixating on race, we avoid asking other questions that Americans are afraid to ask out loud ... or at least afraid to answer. I'm talking about gun control and personal (in)security and the rampant fear and distrust between Americans that causes them to not only buy, carry and use lethal weapons, but also to demand them as a basic right of all citizenry while healthcare, on the other hand, is seen as a privilege to be earned. Popular media outlets have once again shown twisted, misanthropic acceptance of the act of shooting someone, to ruminate instead on the whys and wherefores of race.
Back up past race for a moment. Why is it acceptable to talk about "standing one's ground" with "deadly force" as if it should be anything but reprehensible (let alone legal) to inscribe hatred and fear into the very geography, street by street? In the US, it makes no difference what "race" you self-ascribe to or are inadvertently shoved into, or even if you reject the concept entirely. Like the religious trying to condemn an atheist to their imaginary hell, the concept of "race" continues to stubbornly be used to categorize even those who dismiss its validity, and to determine the various levels of freedom (not nearly an absolute concept in the hands of patriots, it seems) that each category of person should be afforded or have restricted.
That's the irony of a democracy run by and for special interest groups, where civil rights are wantonly thrown to the wind, and where putting "positive" before "discrimination" is meant to cancel it out. All Americans - yes, all, like it or not - are engaged in this ongoing game of hatred and distrust using the dated and meaningless category of "race" to mask the fact that the "land of the free" is anything but.
Back to the anthropologist hat now, conceptualizing a sliding scale of nearness and distance to categorize one's social and physical environment is universal and natural. It is one of the most basic and fundamental traits of humanity: to divide up our sensory world in order to better manage it and better manage ourselves in it. Dealing with the problematic gray areas and taboo zones and semi-permeable imagined boundaries is what being human is all about. There is no "us" without "them" and vice versa. In-groups and out-groups have always been a reality for human and non-human primates alike. Yet it seemingly takes the infinite stupidity of present-day America to repackage the autonomic fight or flight response into deadly "stand your ground" legislation.
If this were happening in any other place, we anthropologists would be poking and prodding its peculiarity, unable to restrain ourselves from passing judgment or even taking action. Do we feel powerless to affect change in our own societies? In the case of the US, I feel like a majority of voices in the public sphere - social researchers included - are guilty of taking the race debate at face value. Not challenging the race paradigm is not "objective"; it's lazy and probably even negligent. So I venture here that, save the most obvious and superficial details, the critical reality of the Trayvon Martin case cannot be explained away by "race". And as long as we keep arguing that it can, this dangerous word will continue to gain currency.
... to buy bullets with.
I normally don't blog on politics, but I guess I've been inspired by the monumental presidential election in the US this week. I don't mean to be too cynical (okay, I do), but the entire event has been an excessive performance bearing little to no accountability ($170 million?) or resemblance to reality. Like many people this week, I've heard and read a lot of political commentary, and ignore most of it. But one finally got to me and prompted this blog post.
Dick Morris, political consultant and chief tactician for the Clinton/Gore re-elect campaign was made famous for his strategy of "triangulation" - or the faux-bipartisan watering-down of issues - to grab voters (whom I guess we can only characterize as indecisive and non-committal) by appearing republican, democratic, and neither, all at the same time. Oh, actually, scratch that - he's famous for that whole "allowing a prostitute to listen in on calls with the President" thing.
So, clearly an authority on American politics, his pre-inauguration day post on TheHill should doubtlessly be taken as a prophetic view into the Obama administration's plans for the future. Let's begin.
2009-2010 will rank with 1913-14, 1933-36, 1964-65 and 1981-82 as years that will permanently change our government, politics and lives. [...] Simply put, we enter his administration as free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden — a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.
Within a year the US will go from a pseudo-democratic oligarchic republic with dictatorial tendencies to a pacifistic social democracy? It may be time to book my ticket home after all.
... Roosevelt passed crucial and permanent reforms that have dominated our lives ever since, including Social Security, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, unionization under the Wagner Act, the federal minimum wage and a host of other fundamental changes. Obama’s record will be similar, although less wise and more destructive. He will begin by passing every program for which liberals have lusted for decades, from alternative-energy sources to school renovations, infrastructure repairs and technology enhancements. [...] Freed of any constraint on the deficit — indeed, empowered by a mandate to raise it as high as possible — Obama will do them all rather quickly.
Let me get this straight. In an attempt at the biggest social reformation in American society since Roosevelt, Obama will spend American tax dollars at an exponentially increasing rate - like a child who just received a wad of birthday cash from a generous (or perhaps senile) old relative. And he'll waste it on completely useless junk and non-essentials like ... education, infrastructure, technology and energy. What would an (imitation of a) European social democracy be without clean and well-maintained streets and towns, safe schools, technological advancement and environmental awareness? So I take it that Morris is just as perturbed as I am that up until now the federal deficit has been irresponsibly run up to astronomical proportions buying sophisticated sandbox equipment to fight unilateral wars in countries most Americans can't find on a map, and is as excited as I am that if we are all going to be forced into debt it will be for a more progressive reason.
And, as government imposes ever more Draconian price controls and income limits on doctors, the supply of practitioners and equipment will decline as the demand escalates. Price increases will be out of the question, so the government will impose healthcare rationing, denying the older and sicker among us the care they need and even barring them from paying for it themselves. (Rationing based on income and price will be seen as immoral.)
I'm a little confused here. The suggestion is that the United States' new socialized healthcare program will be so cheap, effective and efficient that all forms of privately funded care will be abandoned in favor of a system which responsibly prices its services and limits disproportionately inflated salaries and costs. As a result, the sick and weak will be required to, well, die rather than pay for care. Do these assertions count as domestic terrorism yet? This doesn't resemble anything in "Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden", where prescription costs are capped, but there are first-rate medical practitioners in the national system as well as private healthcare alternatives for those who choose to pay for them. Both choice and a guarantee for healthcare, in a "democracy"? Who woulda thunk it?
I've always had trouble understanding why Americans are so hard to convince regarding socialized healthcare, but look who has been writing the handbook. There are ways for responsible administrations in a democratic government to provide all citizens with affordable healthcare and thereby diffuse the overwhelming domination by pharmaceutical companies while continuing to produce new medicines and technologies to fight disease. It probably starts with recognizing that making healthcare universal - not exclusive - does not make it worthless just because anyone can access it. Healthcare isn't (shouldn't be) a commodity comparable to a pair of designer jeans on markdown.
And Obama will move to change permanently the partisan balance in America. He will move quickly to legalize all those who have been in America for five years, albeit illegally, and to smooth their paths to citizenship and voting. He will weaken border controls in an attempt to hike the Latino vote as high as he can in order to make red states like Texas into blue states like California. By the time he is finished, Latinos and African-Americans will cast a combined 30 percent of the vote. If they go by top-heavy margins for the Democrats, as they did in 2008, it will assure Democratic domination (until they move up the economic ladder and become good Republicans).
This sickens me. Those immigrant-loving Democrats (raise your hand if you're American and your family has never included any immigrants) have just managed to win the jackpot, luring in all those dark-skinned, illegal folks to bolster the party. First they connive their way into our borders and next they'll vote democrat down the line because they won't know any better until they have achieved the income that will afford them the knowledge to vote Republican. How insightful. Morris makes the phrase "good Republican" seem like an oxymoron. It sounds like his solution to this dilemma posed by ethnic minorities might have the fraction "3/5" in it (Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the US Constitution ring a bell?).
And he will enact the check-off card system for determining labor union representation, repealing the secret ballot in union elections. The result will be to raise the proportion of the labor force in unions up to the high teens from the current level of about 12 percent.
I get it now. Morris is running President Obama's re-elect campaign.
There are many more things that set me off, but these are the ones I had the patience to write about. And another thing, while I'm on the soap box, why should it take an African-American president to cure the perennially ailing race relations in the US? So much commentary has surrounded this idea that we've all been waiting since the Constitution was ratified to finally be able to do something about social disparity on the basis of race. Somehow I still feel we're standing around hoping that voting was all we had to do. It wasn't. Obama has walked many miles, but when all the balloons and bunting are cleared away, he can't fix this on his own. Republican, Democrat or unaffiliated, are you in?
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Every day, I browse the news several times on various sites and, more often than not, cringe helplessly at what I read. "Journalistic truth" is some subset of reality to which I do not hold the decoder ring. What makes me most angry is that the perspectives of major news agencies and media outlets (even those said to be liberal and leftist) perpetuate an egotistical, xenophobic and ignorant approach to both world affairs and domestic issues. The US is not alone in this despicable behavior - it is almost universal.
When I found this rant by Maximilian Forte on Open Anthropology, I was thrilled that someone else notices what I see. I'm sick of being called a Euroliberal when I'm Stateside because I criticize the way that Israel, Palestine, Muslims and America are portrayed on the nightly news.
This deserves to be quoted:
I agree wholeheartedly; except that perhaps it is humanity that should be left to this spent planet, while the rest of us move along to somewhere with less smog.
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When I found this rant by Maximilian Forte on Open Anthropology, I was thrilled that someone else notices what I see. I'm sick of being called a Euroliberal when I'm Stateside because I criticize the way that Israel, Palestine, Muslims and America are portrayed on the nightly news.
This deserves to be quoted:
So THE WORLD trembles with love at the mere mention of “Obama,” while all those who oppose Israeli genocide and demonstrated against it were “Muslims.” In the meantime, the only real threat to peace is Hamas, and its bottle rockets. Palestinians, not being white, European, privileged allies of the U.S., unlike Israelis, are less than human, and less than important, except as “obstacles.” All that Israel ever does is respond and get provoked, it never initiates — a pristine white victim of irrational brown people, you can almost hear its maiden-like screams across the white Atlantic.
With “reporting” like this, the media will keep anthropologists in business for a long time to come, as we try to clean up the damage they cause in creating a deranged culture of war and hatred. And it is hatred, a subtle, insidious, and racist hatred that motivates and encourages AP to write the kind of articles about Gaza as it has.
In the meantime, as the message sinks in deeper that anyone who protests is a Muslim, or Jew hater, is it a wonder that some militaristic knuckleheads appear on this blog to insinuate that the author is somehow pro-Taliban, Taliban-leaning, or a Taliban sympathizer? It is a world of bleak ignorance, and self-destructive war lust that these people live in. If only they could live on another planet, and leave this one to humanity."
I agree wholeheartedly; except that perhaps it is humanity that should be left to this spent planet, while the rest of us move along to somewhere with less smog.
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A Belgian businessman rejected a Nigerian job applicant because the businessman said his own dog was racist and would bite non-whites, Belgian media reported on Saturday. The 53-year-old man Nigerian told De Standaard newspaper he arrived at the Belgian's wrought-iron business and was immediately confronted by the barking dog. The Belgian turned the man away before he could even enter, and wrote on his labour office letter that he could not hire the man because of his colour, adding there was a risk the dog would bite him. The local labour office has concluded that the Belgian was racist and has removed him from its list of potential employers. "My dog is racist. Not me," the Belgian told De Standaard. The Nigerian, who has lived in Belgium for 32 years, said it was not the first time he had been rejected for a job because of his colour, although other employers had been more subtle. He told the newspaper that he did not wish to lodge a formal complaint because he did not wish his family in Nigeria to hear about the case. [source]
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The local government in Treviso has ordered the northern Italian city's Chinese restaurants to remove red lanterns from their windows because they look too "oriental." "It's spoiling the appearance of the city," the head of the council's town planning department, Sergio Marton, told Corriere della Sera daily. "The Chinese put up all sorts of stuff: lanterns, lions, dragons, there's even one (establishment) that did its whole front in oriental style." [more]
Well, as one Flickrer notes, "At least the food was ok".
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Well, as one Flickrer notes, "At least the food was ok".
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