June292012

How To Tell People They SOUND Racist

race racial justice social justice Jay Smooth Racist Racism 

June262012
Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America By Eduardo Bonilla-Silva   In the third edition of his highly acclaimed book, Bonilla-Silva continues to challenge color-blind thinking. He has now extended this challenge with a new chapter on ObamaOs election addressing the apparent miracle of a black man elected as the 44th President of the nation despite the fact that racial progress has stagnated since the 1980s and, in some areas, even regressed. In contrasts to those who believe the election of President Obama is a watershed moment that signifies the beginning of a post-racial era in America, he suggests this development embodies the racial trends of the last 40 years including two he has addressed in this book: the rise of color-blind racism as the dominant racial ideology and the emergence of an apparently more flexible racial stratification system he characterizes as Latin America-like. Some material from previous editions, including ‘Answers to Questions from Concerned Readers,’ ‘What is to Be Done,’ and an Appendix detailing interview questions, is now available on the Rowman & Littlefield website through the Teaching/Learning Resources link.   (via Amazon)  

Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America

By Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

 
In the third edition of his highly acclaimed book, Bonilla-Silva continues to challenge color-blind thinking. He has now extended this challenge with a new chapter on ObamaOs election addressing the apparent miracle of a black man elected as the 44th President of the nation despite the fact that racial progress has stagnated since the 1980s and, in some areas, even regressed. In contrasts to those who believe the election of President Obama is a watershed moment that signifies the beginning of a post-racial era in America, he suggests this development embodies the racial trends of the last 40 years including two he has addressed in this book: the rise of color-blind racism as the dominant racial ideology and the emergence of an apparently more flexible racial stratification system he characterizes as Latin America-like. Some material from previous editions, including ‘Answers to Questions from Concerned Readers,’ ‘What is to Be Done,’ and an Appendix detailing interview questions, is now available on the Rowman & Littlefield website through the Teaching/Learning Resources link.
 
(via Amazon)
 

book review books on race social justice racial justice racial privilege American political commentary 

June252012
Love Medicine is Louise Erdrich’s first novel, published in1984. Erdrich revised and expanded the novel for an edition issued in 1993, and this version was considered the definitive edition until 2009 when Erdrich re-edited it.Erdrich explores 60 years in the lives of a small group of Chippewa (akaOjibwa orAnishinaabe) living on theTurtle Mountain Indian Reservation inNorth Dakota. Each chapter is narrated by a different character. These narratives are conversational, as if the narrators were telling a story, often from thefirst-personperspective. There are, however, five chapters that are told from a limitedthird-personperspective. The narratives follow a loose chronology aside from the first chapter (set in 1981). The conversational tone of the novel is representative of the storytelling tradition in Native American culture. It draws from Ojibwa myths, story-telling technique, and culture. It also incorporates the Euro-Indian experience, especially through the younger generations, some of whom have been forced by government policy to accept, if not possess, Euro-American culture. Love Medicine begins with June Morrisey freezing to death on her way home to the reservation. Although she dies at the beginning, the figure of June holds the novel together. Similarly, a love triangle among Lulu, Marie, and Nector is a link among the narratives, even though it is not a persistent theme in the novel. There is also a homecoming (or homing) theme in the novel. The use of multiple themes adds to the storytelling effect of the work. Other themes include: tricksters (in the Native American tradition), abandonment, connection to land, searching for identity and self-knowledge, and survival. (Via Wikipedia)

Love Medicine is Louise Erdrich’s first novel, published in1984. Erdrich revised and expanded the novel for an edition issued in 1993, and this version was considered the definitive edition until 2009 when Erdrich re-edited it.Erdrich explores 60 years in the lives of a small group of Chippewa (akaOjibwa orAnishinaabe) living on theTurtle Mountain Indian Reservation inNorth Dakota.

Each chapter is narrated by a different character. These narratives are conversational, as if the narrators were telling a story, often from thefirst-personperspective. There are, however, five chapters that are told from a limitedthird-personperspective. The narratives follow a loose chronology aside from the first chapter (set in 1981). The conversational tone of the novel is representative of the storytelling tradition in Native American culture. It draws from Ojibwa myths, story-telling technique, and culture. It also incorporates the Euro-Indian experience, especially through the younger generations, some of whom have been forced by government policy to accept, if not possess, Euro-American culture.

Love Medicine begins with June Morrisey freezing to death on her way home to the reservation. Although she dies at the beginning, the figure of June holds the novel together. Similarly, a love triangle among Lulu, Marie, and Nector is a link among the narratives, even though it is not a persistent theme in the novel. There is also a homecoming (or homing) theme in the novel. The use of multiple themes adds to the storytelling effect of the work. Other themes include: tricksters (in the Native American tradition), abandonment, connection to land, searching for identity and self-knowledge, and survival.

(Via Wikipedia)

Louise Erdrich social justice Love medicine Chippewa 

3PM

Colorlines: An American magazine that covers race and politics in society

Articles are primarily composed of essays, investigative reports, think pieces, opinion columns, cultural criticism, fiction, and humor pieces.

Colorlines was established in 1998 by the Applied Research Center, a public policy institute.

Awards

  • Outstanding Magazine Article, GLAAD nomination, 2009
  • Watchdog award winner, Chicago Headline Club, 2008
  • General Excellence Award, Utne Reader, 2007
  • Best Cultural and Social Coverage, Utne Reader, 2005
  • Outstanding Magazine Article, GLAAD nomination, 2005
  • Best Political Magazine, East Bay Express, 2004
  • Best Investigative/In-Depth Article, New America Media, 2004

color lines race social justice website 

3PM
“I swear to the Lord, I still can’t see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.”

Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry.

Langston Hughes poet social justice 

3PM

A GREAT book by legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. Its simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system.

book review books on race blacks civil rights Jim Crow Laws social justice justice system criminal justice race racial justice 

June182012
White like me: reflections on race from a privileged son By Tim J. Wise   Racial privilege shapes the lives of white Americans in every facet of life, from employment and education to housing and criminal justice. Using stories from his own life, Tim Wise shows that racism not only burdens people of color, but also benefits those who are “white like him” — whether or not they’re actively racist. Using stories instead of stale statistics, Wise weaves a compelling narrative that assesses the magnitude of racial privilege and is at once readable and scholarly, analytical yet accessible.

White like me: reflections on race from a privileged son

By Tim J. Wise
 
Racial privilege shapes the lives of white Americans in every facet of life, from employment and education to housing and criminal justice. Using stories from his own life, Tim Wise shows that racism not only burdens people of color, but also benefits those who are “white like him” — whether or not they’re actively racist. Using stories instead of stale statistics, Wise weaves a compelling narrative that assesses the magnitude of racial privilege and is at once readable and scholarly, analytical yet accessible.

book review books on race racial privilege whites Time White social justice Racial Justice 

4PM
Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High  By Melba Pattillo Beals   In 1957, Melba Pattillo turned sixteen. That was also the year she became a warrior on the front lines of a civil rights firestorm. Following the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education,Melba was one of nine teenagers chosen to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School. Throughout her harrowing ordeal, Melba was taunted by her schoolmates and their parents, threatened by a lynch mob’s rope, attacked with lighted sticks of dynamite, and injured by acid sprayed in her eyes. But through it all, she acted with dignity and courage, and refused to back down. This is her remarkable story.  

Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High

 By Melba Pattillo Beals

 
In 1957, Melba Pattillo turned sixteen. That was also the year she became a warrior on the front lines of a civil rights firestorm. Following the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education,Melba was one of nine teenagers chosen to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School.

Throughout her harrowing ordeal, Melba was taunted by her schoolmates and their parents, threatened by a lynch mob’s rope, attacked with lighted sticks of dynamite, and injured by acid sprayed in her eyes. But through it all, she acted with dignity and courage, and refused to back down.

This is her remarkable story.

 

book review Blacks books on race Little Rock Brown vs Board of Education Civil rights social justice 

4PM
When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia’s parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run “Quiet War” in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia’s pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication.Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness aand healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe, while medical community marks a division between body and soul, and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former. Lia’s doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness, qaug dab peg—the spirit catches you and you fall down—and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices.Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.  

When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia’s parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run “Quiet War” in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia’s pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication.

Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness aand healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe, while medical community marks a division between body and soul, and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former. Lia’s doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness, qaug dab peg—the spirit catches you and you fall down—and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
 

book review books on race American Medical system Hmong social justice 

4PM
Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal By Randall Kennedy   In the wake of his controversial national best-seller, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Randall Kennedy grapples brilliantly and judiciously with another stigma of our racial discourse: “selling out,” or racial betrayal, which is a subject of much anxiety and acrimony in Black America. He atomizes the vicissitudes of the term and shows how its usage bedevils blacks and whites, while elucidating the effects it has on individuals and on our society as a whole.Kennedy begins his exploration of selling out with a cogent, historical definition of the “black” community, accounting precisely for who is considered black and who is not. He looks at the ways in which prominent members of that community—Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Barack Obama, among others—have been stigmatized as sellouts. He outlines the history of the suspicion of racial betrayal among blacks, and he shows how current fears of selling out are expressed in thought and practice. He offers a rigorous and bracing case study of the quintessential “sellout”—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, perhaps the most vilified black public official in American history. And he gives is a first-person reckoning of how he himself has dealt with accusations of having sold out at Harvard, especially after the publication of Nigger.Lucidly and powerfully articulated, Sellout is essential to any discussion of the troubled history of race in America.

Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal

By Randall Kennedy

 


In the wake of his controversial national best-seller, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Randall Kennedy grapples brilliantly and judiciously with another stigma of our racial discourse: “selling out,” or racial betrayal, which is a subject of much anxiety and acrimony in Black America. He atomizes the vicissitudes of the term and shows how its usage bedevils blacks and whites, while elucidating the effects it has on individuals and on our society as a whole.

Kennedy begins his exploration of selling out with a cogent, historical definition of the “black” community, accounting precisely for who is considered black and who is not. He looks at the ways in which prominent members of that community—Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Barack Obama, among others—have been stigmatized as sellouts. He outlines the history of the suspicion of racial betrayal among blacks, and he shows how current fears of selling out are expressed in thought and practice. He offers a rigorous and bracing case study of the quintessential “sellout”—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, perhaps the most vilified black public official in American history. And he gives is a first-person reckoning of how he himself has dealt with accusations of having sold out at Harvard, especially after the publication of Nigger.

Lucidly and powerfully articulated, Sellout is essential to any discussion of the troubled history of race in America.

race Sellout social justice book review books on race Blacks American political commentary history of race 

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