Category Archives: Culture

Color-Blindness Is Counterproductive

Many sociologists argue that ideologies claiming not to see race risk ignoring discrimination.

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Jeff Robertson /  AP

How many times have you heard someone say that they “don’t see color,” “are colorblind,” or “don’t have a racist bone in their body?” Maybe you’ve even said this yourself. After all, the dominant language around racial issues today is typically one of colorblindness, as it’s often meant to convey distaste for racial practices and attitudes common in an earlier era.

Many sociologists, though, are extremely critical of colorblindness as an ideology. They argue that as the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality have become more covert and obscure than they were during the era of open, legal segregation, the language of explicit racism has given way to a discourse of colorblindness. But they fear that the refusal to take public note of race actually allows people to ignore manifestations of persistent discrimination.

For the first half of the 20th century, it was perfectly legal to deny blacks (and other racial minorities) access to housing, jobs, voting, and other rights based explicitly on race. Civil-rights reforms rendered these practices illegal. Laws now bar practices that previously maintained racial inequality, like redlining, segregation, or openly refusing to rent or sell real estate to black Americans. Yet discrimination still persists, operating through a combination of social, economic, and institutional practices.

Concurrently, it is no longer socially acceptable in many quarters to identify oneself as racist. Instead, many Americans purport not to see color. However, their colorblindness comes at a cost. By claiming that they do not see race, they also can avert their eyes from the ways in which well-meaning people engage in practices that reproduce neighborhood and school segregation, rely on “soft skills” in ways that disadvantage racial minorities in the job market, and hoard opportunities in ways that reserve access to better jobs for white peers.

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf recently argued that the academic left errs in attacking colorblindness. He suggested that encouraging whites to be color conscious and to think of themselves in racial terms would encourage the nativism embraced by some Donald Trump supporters—that a heightened awareness of whiteness would produce a sense of persecution, and encourage some to rally in defense of white rights. He contends that there is some merit to colorblindness that has been ignored by what he describes as “the academic left,” which spends too much time focused on nitpicking colorblindness rather than drawing attention to “macroaggressions” such as “racially tinged hatred and conspiracy theories directed at the first black president” or the convenience of labeling Mexican immigrants rapists “despite the fact that first-generation immigrants commit fewer crimes than native born Americans.”

As a presumptive member of the “academic left” that Friedersdorf critiques, I read the post with particular interest. I think that Friedersdorf makes some important points worth more detailed attention from both academics and those outside the academy who are familiar with the debates and concepts he references. For instance, academic debates can often become divorced from broader audiences. It is way too easy for academics in many fields to ground their conversations, disputes, and discussions among other like-minded scholars. He’s right to note that, by and large, academics can do a much better job engaging with folks outside of our ivory towers.

However, there are some misrepresentations in Fridersdorf’s piece as well. Based on a single statement from one book chapter in an edited volume, Friedersdorf makes the sweeping generalization that “the academic left casts all proponents of colorblindness as naïve.” I’ve read books and articles by numerous sociologists who critique the colorblind ideology, and while they find problems with the ways this perspective allows individuals to ignore patterns of racial bias, I’ve never seen any studies that broadly categorize advocates of colorblindness in this way. What’s more important to sociologists are the consequences of how this ideology has implications for social inequality.

My colleague Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, for example, has written extensively about the idea of colorblindness, charting the ways that it functions as an ideology that legitimizes specific practices that maintain racial inequalities—police brutality, housing discrimination, voter disenfranchisement, and others. His book Racism Without Racists is part of a broad set of sociological research that draws attention to the ways that colorblind ideology undergirds bigger, more problematic social issues.

There are more than a few members of the “academic left” who argue that colorblindness is problematic precisely because it offers a way to avoid addressing social problems.

Yet, in addition to suggesting that the academic left casts all proponents of colorblindness as naïve, Friedersdorf also contends that they waste time picking apart this concept rather than addressing “macroagressions” like police brutality and growing expressions of virulent racist hatred.  But Bonilla-Silva, among others, describes the ways that colorblindness sustains these very macroaggressions that Friedersdorf thinks are ignored. In other words, Friedersdorf suggests the academic left wastes time dissecting the concept of colorblindness, and would be better served focusing on more pressing, systemic processes of inequality. But a careful read of sociological literature in this area finds that there are more than a few members of the “academic left” who argue that colorblindness is problematic precisely because it offers a way to avoid addressing these exact social problems. Other sociologists like Jessie Daniels and David Cort focus explicitly on researching hate speech on the internet and the lower rates of crime among immigrants relative to native born Americans, respectively—the very issues that Friedersdorf, by his own admission, charges are important and believes are overlooked by the academic left. Sociologists are actually very involved in highlighting these macroaggressions—and in underscoring the ways colorblind ideology allows them to go ignored.

Advocates of colorblindness, like Friedersdorf, tend to claim that emphasizing whites’ group identity as whites (rather than as individuals) is counterproductive. Rejecting colorblindness and encouraging whites to see themselves as members of a distinct racial group, they argue, will produce nativism. They will cling to, rather than critique, the privileges that whiteness affords, which are jeopardized by a more multiracial society. Friedersdorf calls it naïve to believe that upon focusing on their status as members of a racial group and the privilege and power that affords them, “masses of white people will identify more strongly with their racial tribe and then sacrifice the interests of that tribe.”

This is, in the abstract, a compelling point. The trouble is that the weight of the scholarly evidence directly contradicts this argument. Sociologists like Karyn McKinney, Eileen O’Brien, Joe Feagin, Hernan Vera, and Matthew Hughey, who have studied the pathways and trajectories by which whites become involved in antiracist activism, show that contrary to Friedersdorf’s beliefs, moving away from colorblindness can actually serve as a pathway towards antiracism. In many of these studies, as whites came to understand themselves as members of a racial group which enjoyed unearned privileges and benefits, this compelled them to forge a different sense of white identity built on antiracism rather than simply supporting the status quo. Moving away from the colorblind ideology that sociologists critique—the idea that it’s admirable to profess not to see color, that it’s problematic to see oneself as a member of a racial group—is, according to the research in this area, actually an important step to antiracist activism.

In most social interactions, whites get to be seen as individuals. Racial minorities become aware from a young age that people will often judge them as members of their group.

There’s a strong emphasis on individualism in American culture. Friedersdorf argues that “race is a pernicious concept that robs people of their individuality … the academic left also underestimates how divisive it can be to put anything other than individualism at the center of identity.” But ironically, this focus on individualism is itself a function of group position. Whites, by and large, enjoy the luxury of promoting the importance of the individual, because they benefit from living in a racially stratified society where whiteness is normalized. In most social interactions, whites get to be seen as individuals. Racial minorities, by contrast, become aware from a young age that people will often judge them as members of their group, and treat them in accordance with the (usually negative) stereotypes attached to that group.

Everyone wants to be treated as an individual and recognized for their personal traits and characteristics. But the colorblindness that sociologists critique doesn’t allow for this. Instead, it encourages those who endorse this perspective to ignore the ongoing processes that maintain racial stratification in schools, neighborhoods, health care, and other social institutions. Can color consciousness draw attention to these issues? The research demonstrates that it can lead to more understanding of our racially stratified society and can give rise to a willingness to work for change. So from that perspective, it doesn’t seem worth abandoning just yet.

Originally seen via The Atlantic by: ADIA HARVEY WINGFIELD – A contributing writer for The Atlantic and a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work.

The Plight of the Black Academic

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Being a black professor at a predominantly white university can be just as uncomfortable as—if not more so than—being a black student at one.

Graduates arrive for commencement at the University of California, Berkeley

Noah Berger / Reuters

In his new book, The Scholar Denied, the sociologist Aldon Morris writes that contrary to the discipline’s preferred origin story, the field of sociology was actually founded by W.E.B. DuBois, the first black person to receive a Ph.D. in the United States. DuBois earned his degree from Harvard, but due to rampant racial segregation at the time, he was shut out of many employment opportunities. He ended up working at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black college with few resources, but still managed to do pioneering work in the field of sociology.

Morris describes in clear detail the ways that DuBois’s emphasis on race as a socially constructed—rather than biological—phenomenon threatened white elites of his day, who much preferred Booker T. Washington’s message that blacks should accept and embrace their subordinate status. Furthermore, many white sociologists co-opted DuBois’s innovative research designs, empirical methods, and scientific approach, while failing to credit him as their originator. Morris argues that consequently, DuBois’s centrality to the discipline of sociology and his role as one of the preeminent analysts of race relations have been obscured.

DuBois lived and wrote his most famous books during the early part of the 20th century, but how different are circumstances for black academics today?

The recent student demonstrations at University of Missouri, Yale, Amherst, Emory, and other universities have drawn much-needed attention to the challenges that minority students, particularly black ones, face at predominantly white colleges and universities. There’s a great deal of research—including the work of the sociologists Joe Feagin and Wendy Leo Moore—showing that the conditions black students are protesting are serious, widespread, and often ignored. In one account, Feagin shares a story of a black student who waits after class to ask a white professor a question about that day’s lecture, only to be told “I thought you were waiting to rob me or something.” Another student describes “one of those sad and angry nights” when, walking to the dorm, white students drove by yelling racial slurs and throwing beer cans at him.

In Wendy Leo Moore’s study of elite law schools, she offers similarly wrenching examples. For instance, there is the white professor who punishes a black female law student for discussing the offensiveness of racial slurs, but does not challenge the white male law student who comments during a class discussion that black students are intellectually inferior. As Moore describes, even the ways law schools teach students to focus on “individual intent” means that social, academic, and legal practices that discriminate against students of color can be summarily dismissed if white social actors “didn’t mean any harm.” Thus, no matter how invidious the action, no matter the consequences of the behavior, legal reasoning centers on individual whites’ intentions and discounts the lived experiences of people of color.

For faculty of color, similar processes are frequently at play. In fact, predominantly white colleges and universities may even be more reluctant to recruit and hire faculty of color than students of color. While students matriculate at an institution for a short period of time and then leave, the tenure system means that faculty of color may remain at a university for decades, even a lifetime. With this longer time frame, these professors develop more of a stake in the school, and may be more empowered to push for the reforms many colleges resist. For universities that see no real reason to change their existing practices, traditions, and organizational cultures, bringing in a critical mass of faculty of color is often a stated goal that never materializes.

Indeed, when it comes to faculty diversity, the numbers suggest a pretty bleak picture. Blacks constitute less than 10 percent of the professoriate, and these numbers thin out the higher the academic rank. And as lots of research shows, when these professors are in the numerical minority, their experiences aren’t all that different from what DuBois encountered as he attempted to navigate higher education in the early 20th century: exclusion, marginalization, and the consistent message that, as a black person, he was not suited for the academy and that his ideas were unwelcome. Indeed, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s recent suggestion that blacks are best suited for “less advanced, slower track school[s] where they do well” are strikingly similar to the arguments about black inferiority that DuBois confronted in the 19th century—the very assertions he was able to debunk with scientific research.

Many faculty members and administrators will dismiss this lack of diversity as a pipeline issue, claiming that they simply can’t find “qualified” candidates of color to fill faculty positions. But as was the case in DuBois’s day, many historically black colleges and universities are populated by faculty of color, many of whom are exemplary researchers and teachers who work with a fraction of the resources offered at elite, predominantly white universities. “Qualified” candidates of color are there. They simply are not proportionately represented in historically white institutions.

For faculty of color who do seek and find employment at predominantly white schools, research suggests that the issues they face are in some ways similar to those that students of color have described in the recent wave of protests. For example, in a recent study, the professors Ebony McGee and Lasana Kazembe noted that black faculty were racially stereotyped at work, including being generally expected to entertain and perform for colleagues in ways that were not expected of their white counterparts. Other black professors report that if they study issues related to race, their research is assumed to be less credible, serious, and rigorous than their white peers—even if white colleagues also study racial issues. Black faculty also do a disproportionate amount of service work—jobs that are expected of workers but not explicitly required. These can include mentoring and advising students and junior faculty, serving as a faculty advisor for campus clubs, or being on committees.

And there are gender dynamics present as well. The sociologist Roxana Harlow found that black female professors had to manage gendered racial stereotypes that they were “mean” and “cold” in the classroom, stereotypes that are commonly applied to black female professionals more generally. And this says nothing of the racialized assumptions that many students (and fellow faculty) bring with them to the university—that black Americans, and by extension, black professors, are less knowledgeable and credible than their peers of other races, regardless of the subject matter they teach. This means that in practice, black faculty routinely face students, coworkers, and administrators who assume that they are not truly qualified for or capable of faculty work—all the while concealing the understandable feelings of frustration and annoyance that result. The overall message is that, like black students, black faculty simply do not belong.

Though these issues are complex and won’t be solved easily, universities could begin doing more to support faculty and staff of color. DuBois defined the premier problem of the 20th century as the issue of the color line, and this certainly shaped his experiences in higher education. It doesn’t have to be this way today.

Originally seen via The Atlantic by: ADIA HARVEY WINGFIELD – A contributing writer for The Atlantic and a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work.

How Hillary Clinton could win the White House by March

First, crush Marco Rubio, and then take the rest of the year off.

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(Source: Getty Images/ Chip Somodevilla)

Hillary Clinton’s only real competition among Republicans is Marco Rubio. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are too extreme for most Americans, and truly leave her unparalleled in experience and political clout.

If Hillary Clinton and her allies are smart, they’ll spend their $50 million-plus campaign war-chest over the next few months making sure Marco Rubio doesn’t get the Republican nomination.

They’ll run ads in the primary states trashing the Florida senator among conservatives — cleverly hiding the source of the ads behind secretive super PACs with conservative-sounding names.

They’ll encourage Democratic activists to cross over to GOP primaries to support Rubio’s extremist opponents.

Hillary herself may even help out by making a couple of high-profile speeches in which she praises Rubio for his “moderation” and “bipartisanship” — especially, she might say, “on the subject of immigration.” Nothing could hurt the young senator more with the GOP base.

Obama could take him golfing.

Following this week’s Republican debate, it looks increasingly like the race is down to three candidates: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, real-estate huckster Donald Trump and Rubio.

If the GOP goes ahead and picks Cruz or Trump, Hillary could probably take the rest of 2016 off to work on her inauguration speech. Both men are extremists, and are traveling with more baggage than Kim Kardashian. The only people who think they are remotely electable in a general election are the increasingly narrow group of people who make up the Republican party base.

We’re talking about people who think “Benghazi” is one of the top three issues facing America.

Who think global warming is a sinister “one-world” plot to take away our pickup trucks and make us all slaves.

And who think 300 million guns are making us all “safe” while 5-year-old Syrian refugees are going to kill us.

The biggest single fact: While individuals rise and fall from poll to poll, overall the four extremist candidates of Trump, Cruz, Rand Paul and Ben Carson have been consistently sharing about 65% in GOP polls.

It’s hard to credit, but the party of Abraham Lincoln has apparently become the party of Jefferson Davis. “Angry white men of the South, arise!” (Yes, Carson, an evangelical Christian, is African-American — showing that even the most conservative coalitions can evolve.)

Meanwhile, the party is losing millennials, professionals, the college-educated, women and Hispanics by wide margins. Good luck with that.

Rubio, on the other hand, could pose a serious challenge to Hillary. He’s a young, telegenic Hispanic American. Her best chance to stop him is now, not next fall.

Yeah, I know, people will say I’m only writing this because I’m part of the fancy-pants, pointy-headed elitist East Coast liberal media and therefore cheering for Hillary.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

As a member of the media, I stand to gain the most if America elects an extremist wacko who generates lots of news, most of it bad. Trump would be the best. Under President Trump, no journalist would want for a job, and no website for eyeballs — at least until he was impeached, America declared bankruptcy or nuclear war killed us all. Failing Trump, any of the other GOP extremists would be just fine. Among the Democrats, Bernie Sanders would be pretty good for the news business too.

For journalists, Hillary Clinton would be a terrible president. It would be four or eight years of guaranteed boredom — unless she divorced Bill, say, or had a fling with a male intern in the Oval Office.

Yet, facts are facts. At this point, it seems almost certain it’s going to be Clinton and Rubio. And if Hillary Clinton has smarts, she’ll make sure it isn’t Rubio.

Eight years ago, Rush Limbaugh and right-wing Republicans inserted themselves into the Democratic primary process by launching “Operation Chaos.” Perhaps some Democrats may feel it’s time to return the favor.

If pro-Clinton allies are smart, they’ll create new secretive super PACs with names like “Patriots for American Values” and “Veterans for American Families” and “Patriotic American Veterans for American Family Values.”

And then they’ll swamp the airwaves in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and elsewhere with ads trashing Marco Rubio among conservatives.

Say he’s soft on Hispanics, Muslims and other non-Aryans.

Say he’s for “amnesty.”

Say he’s a “career politician” who’s “never had a real job.”

And take a leaf out of the New York Times’ preposterous stories and say that he’s fiscally irresponsible because he had to pay late fees on his credit cards a couple of times. Oh, yeah, and he once leased a Lexus with his own money.

They’ll tie Rubio’s personal loans to the issue of the rocketing national debt. “If Marco Rubio can’t even handle his own finances, how can we trust him with America’s?” No, it makes no sense, but what’s that got to do with anything?

Stay tuned.

Published: Dec 18, 2015

United Nations: U.S. Is Failing Women

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(Gary Cameron/Reuters)

MOVING BACKWARD

From health care to wages, America is failing women on every level, according to a new report.

Earlier this month, human rights experts from the United Nations visited a backwards country where women are paid significantly less than men, where women are drastically underrepresented in the national legislature, where the percentages of women living in poverty and dying during childbirth are rising, where pregnant women in prisons are shackled during childbirth, and where women face intimidation and harassment while trying to access health care.

When they returned from their trip, they said they were “shocked” by what they found and chided the nation for being one of just seven—including Iran, Somalia, and Sudan—that hasn’t yet ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

You’ll be forgiven if you haven’t heard of this place before. It’s an obscure nation called the United States of America.

On December 11th, a UN working group on legal discrimination against women concluded its ten-day tour of the United States, which included meetings in Washington D.C. and visits to Alabama, Oregon and Texas. Between them, the experts in the working group, led by Eleonora Zielinska of Poland, have decades of experience in law, public policy, diplomacy, academia, and government.

What they found, essentially, was that the U.S. hypocritically fails to measure up to the very standards that it sets for other countries when it comes to women’s human rights.

“The United States, which is a leading state in formulating international human rights standards, is allowing its women to lag behind international human rights standards,” the group concluded in a statement, released to the press in advance of a full report coming in June 2016.

Their statement is an eye-opening description of the country from an outsider’s perspective that may recall that time you read “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” in grade school: When the U.S. is de-centered, it seems woefully unadvanced relative to its wealth.

“We acknowledge the United States’ commitment to liberty, so well represented by the Statue of Liberty which symbolizes both womanhood and freedom,” the statement began. The praise mostly stopped there.

Despite currently having “the highest level of legislative representation ever achieved by women” in the country, the U.S. still ranks at a mere 72 in the world in terms of the percentage of female lawmakers. With women holding just 19.4 percent of congressional seats, the U.S. falls well below Rwanda, Mexico, Uganda, Pakistan, and most developed nations.

The group also concluded that women play an essential role in driving the growth of the U.S. economy but suffer disproportionately from the global recession’s aftereffects and from persistent income inequality, with a wage gap of 21 percent. On top of these overarching disparities, non-white women, pregnant women, and new mothers face even more challenges in employment.

“[W]e are shocked by the lack of mandatory standards for workplace accommodation for pregnant women, post-natal mothers and persons with care responsibilities, which are required in international human rights law,” the experts noted.

Indeed, the U.S. consistently falls at or near the bottom of international parental leave rankings because it requires no paid leave, only 12 weeks of unpaid time off.

The working group was also discouraged by the fact that the percentage of women living in poverty had increased over the last decade from 12.1 to 14.5 percent, and that the maternal mortality rate increased by 136 percent from 1990 to 2013. Both of these figures vary by ethnicity: non-white women earn less than white women and African-American women die during childbirth at three to four times the rate of white women.

The statement listed off even more human rights violations and shortcomings in the United States: contraception exemptions in insurance plans courtesy of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, the criminalization of women in prostitution, a lack of “adequate and quality sex education” with an inordinate focus on abstinence, and widespread discrimination against immigrant women.

What they found, essentially, was that the U.S. hypocritically fails to measure up to the very standards that it sets for other countries when it comes to women’s human rights.

“While all women are the victims of these missing rights, women who are poor, belong to Native American, Afro-American and Hispanic ethnic minorities, migrant women, LBTQ women, women with disabilities and older women are disparately vulnerable,” they concluded.

But the experts were especially concerned by the current state of reproductive rights in the United States. They visited abortion clinics in Texas and Alabama and witnessed firsthand that “many of the clinics work in conditions of constant threats, harassments and vandalizing.”

“Although women have a legal right to terminate a pregnancy under federal law, ever increasing barriers are being created to prevent their access to abortion procedures,” they observed.

The late November shooting of a police officer and two civilians at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood center took place “just before the start of [their] visit,” they said, and “once again demonstrated the extreme hostility and danger faced by family planning providers and patients.”

“We urge the authorities to combat the stigma attached to reproductive and sexual health care, which leads to violence, harassment and intimidation against those seeking or providing reproductive health care, and to investigate and prosecute violence or threats of violence,” they advised.

Above all, the working group urges the U.S. to finally ratify CEDAW. As Amnesty International notes, the U.S. currently has “the dubious distinction of being the only country in the Western Hemisphere and the only industrialized democracy that has not yet ratified this treaty,” first adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979.

Ratifying CEDAW would require the U.S. to commit “to incorporate the principle of equality of men and women in their legal system.” The U.S. Senate has never voted on the treaty.

“We understand the complexity of federalism,” the working group noted, “but this cannot be regarded as a justification for failure to secure these rights.”

Published by Samantha Allen via The Daily Beast

Buzzing: The Voice Season 9 Has a Winner! The New Champ Is …

The Voice Season 9 Has a Winner! The New Champ Is …

It’s been a while since Team Adam took home the crown. But when Carson Daly named Jordan Smith the winner of The Voice’s ninth season Tuesday night, Adam Levine earned his third win of the competition.

Just last week, his cover of Queen’s “Somebody to Love” temporarily dethroned Adele’s top spot on the iTunes singles chart. But it was Monday night’s fog-filled performance of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” from The Sound of Music that secured 22-year-old Smith’s title as the Season 9 champ. Smith reprised the song at Tuesday’s finale after Daly announced his victory.

The Kentucky native also picked “Mary, Did You Know” as his Christmas selection, and sang alongside his coach to The Beach Boys classic “God Only Knows” during the first part of the finale. Team Adam showed their love for the ’60s pop-rock group weeks earlier with a rendition of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”

Smith shined from the beginning, when his unique cover of Sia’s “Chandelier” wowed all four coaches during the Blind Auditions. While Levine was the last to turn around, Smith ultimately chose the Maroon 5 frontman who shares his ability to consistently tap into his falsetto range.

The pop singer continued to stun throughout the season, with a rendition of Sam Smith’s “Like I Can” during the battle round, and Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain” in the knockouts.

With his victory, Smith receives $100,000 and a recording deal with Republic Records. Smith succeeds Season 8 winner Sawyer Fredericks, who hailed from Team Pharrell.

You can read EW‘s full recap of the Season 9 finale here.

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This article originally appeared on Entertainment Weekly. For more stories like this, visit ew.com.

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