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Roberto Clemente

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"10 Movies, 10 Stories of Whiteness" Issue Seven: Dirty Dancing, Jewishness and Who Gets To Be White

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"10 Movies, 10 Stories of Whiteness" Issue Seven: Dirty Dancing, Jewishness and Who Gets To Be White

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"One of the things I couldn’t quite recall about the film was when, and how, the main characters were identified as Jewish. As it turns out, they never are. "

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Full disclosure: Was this whole movie series just an excuse to get the incomparable Sarah Wheeler to write about Dirty Dancing? I mean, probably. You can read all about Sarah at the end of this piece, but suffice to say that if you're not already familiar with her writing, you're in for an absolute treat. This is the second week in a row that I've welcomed in a guest writer, so in honor of this continuing to be the kind of establishment that (thanks to your support) can pay contributors for their wisdom, I've extended the subscription sale through the end of the week (Saturday the 5th). 20% off for a year. What a deal. The link below should do the trick. Oh, and if you're new here and you're not sure what this whole "movie series" is about, you can find an explainer here and all of the previous entries here. I highly recommend the two other guest essays in particular-
I didn't want to rewatch Dirty Dancing, the iconic 1987 film that shaped the cultural ether of my youth. It wasn't because I thought I wouldn't enjoy it. I knew I would, and I did. But I didn't want to burst the tender bubble of my patchy childhood memory of it. I was interested in the film, sure, but also the snippets that had remained salient for me all of these years, and why. Was there something about carrying a watermelon? Did Baby's dad really give the villain a check for medical school, only to rip it up? Did Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze fully bone at some point? Or was the boning only implied?

It's amazing how a film, which I watched many, many times between my childhood and my twenties, can teach you important lessons about family dynamics, class, morality, the threats to women's bodies, and of course, desire, and still leave you with very few sharp details. That's how memory works. And childhood. And culture really - it's just a jumble of impressions we can rarely trace to one specific instance, but which we still believe in, wholly.

Dirty Dancing was released in the eighties, but it is set in August, 1963, the same month as the March on Washington and Martin Luther King's famous I Have A Dream speech, and two years before the first U.S. ground troops were deployed to Vietnam. It tells the tale of a formative summer vacation for the teenaged Baby Houseman (Jennifer Grey) and her family at Kellerman's, one of the many country-ish, upper-middle class resorts that proliferated in places like the Catskills in the '60s.

In my favorite scene from the film, one which displays just how well cast these two leads were, how deftly they shied away from an almost inevitable corniness, Johnny breaks into his own car and drives Baby off the resort grounds, in the rain no less! Baby tells him, "You're wild, you're really wild, you're really really...you're so wild you're crazy and....you're making me laugh!"

While the original script is full of Yiddish, and lines like "I forgot, you read from a different bible" and "Jews hate Catholics" (both spoken by Johnny), the final version in the film has none of that. The writer, Eleanor Bergstein (def a Jew), supposedly based the movie on her own childhood experiences visiting the Catskills, and the dog whistles to other Jews can be found in the final cut. Jews know the movie is about Jews. We recognize the Catskills resort culture, the themes of over-valuing education, the focus on civil rights. We recognized Jerry Orbach, the actor who played Baby's father, as having Jewish blood. Also, there's the thing with the nose. Baby has the kind of nose that many Jewish girls of her generation got surgically corrected (my step-father told me that he had girlfriends whose fathers forced nose jobs upon them). I remember as a child being aware that Jennifer Grey had gotten a nose job post- Dirty Dancing, and understanding that this was somehow both wise and shameful. I could write another 2000 words about the fraught relationship between Jews and nose jobs, but all I'll say about it here is that it serves as another example of how some Jews clamored for classification as White, while others lived, and continue to live, in ambivalence about it.

Without this subtle understanding of the overt Judaism that never made it into the film, Dirty Dancing is a movie about White people and racism and class. It's about ethnic Whites and the scrambling for status in a racialized society. But for a Jew, or someone who sees this movie as not just a race and class and culture movie, but one that deals with race and class and culture as it relates to being Jewish in America, it's a little more complicated than that.

In her 1998 book, "How Jews Became White Folks and What The Says About Race in America," Karen Brodkin writes: "The American ethnoracial map-who is assigned to each of these poles-is continually changing, although the binary of black and white is not." The question of whether Jews are White, and if so, how and why they became White, belies the artificial, often arbitrary construction of race in America, the centerpiece of which are the classifications of White and Black. When I was in graduate school, I remember reading a sociological study of high school students who immigrated from the Dominican Republic to Rhode Island. They were shocked to find themselves, upon arrival, being told they were "Black." To me, Dirty Dancing isn't just about having "the time of our lives," it's about the absurdity of racial politics and the shifting sands of who belongs to what race.

My mother's family grew up going from their home in New Jersey to Kutcher's, a more middle-class version of Kellerman's, in the summer. I visited Kutcher's in the 1990s to celebrate my grandparents 50th anniversary. By then it was a relic of the past, with a depressing vibe and a senior home smell. We played shuffleboard and visited the arcade, where my older cousin won a stuffy from the claw machine and took on a god-like status amongst the younger set. We took in a performance by Chubby Checker, who I conflated with Chuck Berry, a source of great confusion for everyone I spoke to about it.

These places represented a Jewish-American history that I had little understanding of, a world where Jews-excluded from the leisure spaces of non-Jewish Whites- built their own. My mother's father had escaped the pogroms in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, and immigrated to New Jersey where he lived, two families to an apartment with a sheet hanging down the middle. He turned his father's glass cart into an auto-glass shop, married and had kids, and moved to Patterson, a working-class town laden with Jews. My mother was born in 1945, just after the last concentration camps were liberated, and, like many Jewish Boomers, her infancy was shadowed by the aftermath of the war - the rising understanding of what had actually been done to the Jews, the weight of U.S. complacency, which didn't end when the war did (the U.S. did not accept large groups of Jewish war refugees until 1948, but rather, let them languish in horrific "displacement camps.") But growing up in Patterson, my mother never thought much about race and class. They were who they were, and though there were parts of American society that were clearly off-limits to them, they seemed to have what they needed.

When she was ten, for reasons she never quite understood (her father often insisted it was because her mother needed air conditioning), her father moved the family to Glen Rock, a more affluent town where there were no Jews to speak of. When someone painted a swastika (twice), on the family's house, neighbors helped wash it off, and my grandfather sobbed and sobbed because- my mother believed- he was shocked that it could happen here. Crank callers harassed them, telling them to go back where they came from. But it mostly passed. My mother was her high-school valedictorian. At her graduation, her best friend's mom told her she loved her so much she almost forgot she was Jewish. My mother got a scholarship to college, where her roommate slept with the light on and peered down at her sleeping head in the night to see if she had horns. She joined a Jewish sorority, because her friends in the "normal" one had been told if they invited her, it would incite chaos. But in general, she thrived. She did what many Jews of her generation did and joined the civil rights movement. She wrote in her college newspaper about the ills of apartheid. Her parents didn't discourage her from fraternizing with anyone, though they made it clear she should marry a Jew (she did not). She dated Jews, White "goys" (what we call non-Jews), Black men. She moved up in the world.

During college, my mother actually worked summers at Grossinger's, the Jewish Catskills resort that Dirty Dancing's Kellerman's is modeled after. According to her, as in the film, the class wars there were alive and well. The salaried staff- local working-class Whites- despised the White college kids, Jewish and non, who made up the summer staff and whom they considered to be elitist softies infringing on their turf. Of course, this crew had a lot to lose, financially and status-wise, and their frustration about their position as victims of a class system was both understandable and relevant to today's climate. When my mom showed up early to snag a coveted bread basket for each of her dinner tables, the regular staff would swoop in late and move the baskets from her tables to theirs. When she passed by with her arms balancing an overhead tray, they would snatch the tips from her pockets and smile. My mother identified with some of the Jewish clientele - they were interested in her studies, happy to tip her generously since she was making a name for herself as a representative of her people, wanted to talk about Israel and their dismay at racial violence there. They were what us liberal Jews think all Jews are like; curious, intellectual, and deeply compassionate and egalitarian. But then there were the Jewish patrons who let their wealth carry them away. At an all-inclusive resort, they ordered three different breakfasts for their children, leaving heaps of food on the plate, something my mother, whose parents had grown up in abject poverty, found morally reprehensible.

I was raised reform, a sect of liberal Judaism that talks about God but mostly concerns itself with being a good person who moves through the world with kindness, and a sense of just purpose. In an oft-quoted tale in my kind of synagogues, a young Isador Rabi, the Nobel-winning scientist, claimed that his mother asked him every day after school not what he'd learned that day, but whether he'd asked any good questions. This was what Judaism meant to us, at its core. There were plenty of Jews around growing up. To me and my siblings, anti-semitism was over, and we found our elders' obsession with it tiring.

Without a name or face that implied Judaism, I have always been able to choose when to reveal that aspect of my identity - such as when I needed to relate something using a Yiddish word, to ask about plans for the new year, to justify the telling of an off-collar joke. I had sympathy for the trauma of older generations, but I couldn't access their anxiety anywhere in my own body. The good reason for that, of course, was that I'd never experienced discrimination for being Jewish, not once. Though the American Jews who witnessed the Holocaust from afar would never quite let down their guard, they were allowed in on the American dream. And Jews like me were the product of such a dream coming true, which, of course, was deeply tied up in race, and the slow movement of Jews from a racialized group to a religion practiced by people who were mostly (I have to acknowledge the Jews in this country, though they are in the minority, who are not light-skinned) seen as White.

Just after Donald Trump was elected and anti-semitism started popping up again in American culture, the journalist Emma Green wrote an article in the Atlantic titled "Are Jews White." She writes:

"Jewish identity in America is inherently paradoxical and contradictory," says Eric Goldstein, an associate professor of history at Emory University. "What you have is a group that was historically considered, and considered itself, an outsider group, a persecuted minority. In the space of two generations, they've become one of the most successful, integrated groups in American society-by many accounts, part of the establishment. And there's a lot of dissonance between those two positions."

Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, argued that Jews do grapple with race-and in fact, they have been at the forefront of struggles for racial equality like the civil-rights movement. "There's no doubt that the vast majority of American Jews live with what we would call white privilege," he says. "They aren't looked at twice when they walk into a store. They aren't looked at twice by someone in uniform ... That obviously isn't a privilege that people of color have the luxury of enjoying." And yet, even though light-skinned Jews may benefit from being perceived as white, "[Jewish] identity is shaped by these exogenous forces-ostracism, and exile, and other forms of persecution [like] extermination. I think there is this sense of shared struggle ... programmed into the DNA of the Jewish people."

In Dirty Dancing, Baby, and even her father, exemplify the sharing of the racialized struggle that so many Jews find key to their American identities. She is going into the Peace Corps, and even the rich and dorky grandson of Kellerman's owner, who is supposed to be a total d-bag, is planning on journeying down South with the bus boys to join the Freedom Riders. In the script, the Jewish preoccupation with standing by Black Americans is even more pronounced. Baby's dad makes an offhand comment and the tragedy of police setting dogs on protestors in Birmingham. In a very odd scene that was entirely cut from the movie, the Latinx bandleader is trying to coax the young Black trumpet player into the hotel pool by saying "it's not like that here!" When the trumpet player hesitates, Baby pretends to accidentally bump him in, and her dad watches on with pride. Though the movie clearly positions Baby as fumbling and a little thirsty in her attempts to be a do-gooder, it's not clear whether it empathizes with the trumpet player as merely being a vehicle for the Houseman's public morality, or with them for moving the arc of justice along.

Jewish folks often seem to want to be exonerated from racial politics in America, citing their support of Black Americans as evidence of their disinterest in joining in the American tradition of racism. But if you take these deleted scenes along with the film, the writer seems to be reminding us that Jews like the Housemans and the Kellerman family are still racist, but towards the ethnic Whites with whom they are in closer proximity and competition.

In the script, Dr. Houseman gives a speech about his own prejudice towards the Johnny Castles of the world. Though he stands up for Black folks, he has nothing but vitriol for the lower-class Whites. He tells Baby about how Johnny's "kind" used to beat him and his sister up every day on the way to school. The message is; Jews like Dr. Houseman pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. They studied hard. They didn't resort to violence. They are better than, more worthy of the gifts of Whiteness in America than the kind who appear to be wasting them.

And yet, the movie wasn't made in 1963, it was made in 1987, when we had 25 more years of the American racial experiment under our belts. In the sixties, this movie would be explicitly about Jews, it would have been too confusing otherwise. But in the eighties, Jews were so integrated and absorbed by the American racial system that it just seemed to be another movie about White people. And while in the time between the movie's setting and its writing, some racialized groups, like Jews, had been largely granted status as Whites, others were allowed provisional freedoms, and still others continued to be largely oppressed. Is this a movie about nostalgia not just for the doo wop era, but for a pre-civil rights alternate universe that somehow resulted in a different future?

In the end, if you take the era at face value, the message is hopeful. The next generation is not as hung up on racial classification and stratification as the old guard. Yes, Baby is naive, but she maintains the moral high ground. "I'm sorry I let you down, daddy" she tells Dr. Houseman. "But you let me down too." Her father, though he understands more about the complexities of the real world than her, is cowed. His tribalism, which led him to be suspicious of a man with a wild haircut but a heart (and voice! and ass!) of gold, and trusting of a baddie who looked like him, led him astray. He rips up Robbie's med school recommendation letter (not a check after all), apologizes, and returns home, we can imagine, with a little more understanding of where the world is headed.

As a child, I was never made to feel ashamed of my Judaism, as my mother had. But, even coming from the "colorblind" liberal ideology of the 1990s, I was aware that Whiteness was, in some ways, shameful. I was in lots of spaces, in a diverse city, where I was one of only a handful of White people. And though I knew that this fact granted me freedoms my friends of color did not have, I also knew that it was, at the very least, not cool, and at worse, quite bad to be White. As a middle-schooler, when I discovered, and soon became obsessed with, the history of the Jewish Holocaust, I was disturbed, but ultimately more relieved than grieved. Ah hah! I thought. That's proof. My history was not entirely the same as other "White" Americans, like my father's family, Mayflower descendants and enslavers. I was not on the side of the oppressors, but the oppressed. Then I learned about Israel's systematic violence towards and oppression of Palestinians, and the grief came. In the game of racism, everyone gets to play.

So, then, are the questions of whether Jews are White, and what being White even means. Some American Jews are a bit afraid at the moment, and I would hope that somewhere in that anxiety is an acknowledgement of the complex security we've seemingly won here. I ask myself often, what can I learn from my family history? Can I both be proud of my people's commitment to fighting for the freedoms of others and suspicious of our complacency with the process by which we achieved our own freedoms? What is reprehensible in how Jews have distanced ourselves from other Americans, and what is an attempt to hold onto some kind of identity other than the all-consuming one of Whiteness?

As one of the few American ethnic groups who have been repositioned in just a generation or two, and as one that values intellectual and moral relentlessness above all else, I hope Jews keep asking themselves these questions with me. Because like Swayze in the rain, race in America is wild. And like in the film, it isn't always clear who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Sometimes, you're a little bit of both. Maybe that's what Baby understood the summer she grew up. Maybe, as a second generation Jew who has the luxury of stopping to look around me, I am starting to understand that as well.
Sarah Wheeler is so many things: A teacher, an educational psychologist, a mom, and a crafter of very good emails about the NBA and texts about "Pony" by Ginuine. She is also a hell of a writer (Garrett wrote this bio, this is not Sarah bragging about herself) whose work has appeared in The Cut, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, HuffPost, McSweeney's, Romper ( where she writes a regular parenting column) and her own newsletter, Mompsreading. She lives in Oakland, the Catskills of the Bay Area. Yesterday, I got a text from Sarah with a link to "(I've Had) The Time of My Life," the Dirty Dancing soundtrack cornerstone performed by Medley and Warnes with the message "still a banger imho." I agree! It is still a banger. Just listen to that synth bass. And all those tempo changes. But a great song! And one of the 1980's best parenthetical song titles! Did Sarah and I consider calling this essay "(I've Had) the L'Chaim Of My Life?" Not really, but we texted about it. Cooler heads prevailed. Also, Sarah recommended that I share the version that plays at the end of the movie rather than a lesser Youtube clip. Another good call on her part! Just feast your eyes on all that dancing! It's so dirty! As always, the entire Song of the Week playlist is available on Apple Music or Spotify

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"10 Movies, 10 Stories of Whiteness" Issue Seven: Dirty Dancing, Jewishness and Who Gets To Be White

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It all began the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, when Jane Elliott asked her all-White third-grade students “How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl? It would be hard to know, wouldn’t it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. Would you like to find out?”

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It started with a phone call. "Is this Stephen Bloom?" an emphatic voice asked out of the blue one spring morning seventeen years ago. Without waiting for a response, the caller sprinted ahead. "Well, this is Jane Elliott and I want to talk to you!" I had never spoken with or met Elliott before and I had no idea why she'd be calling me. She seemed insistent and determined. The only thing I knew about Elliott was a provocative classroom experiment credited to her.

For a decade, Elliott, a teacher in a small, rural Iowa town, had separated her third-grade students, for two days, into two groups-those with blue eyes and those with brown eyes. On the first day, she told the blue-eyed children that they were genetically inferior to the brown-eyed children. She instructed the blue-eyed kids that they wouldn't be permitted to play on the jungle gym or swings. They'd have to use paper cups if they wanted to drink from the water fountain. They wouldn't be allowed second lunch helpings. The next day, Elliott switched the students' roles. The brown-eyed kids would now be considered inferior. The experiment was Elliott's way of showing eight- and nine-year-old White children what it was like to be Black in America. Starting in the mid-1980s and for the next thirty-five years, Elliott would increase the experiment's voltage by trying it out on adults in thousands of workshops worldwide.

I asked Elliott why she had called me, and without hesitation, she responded, "Because I want you to write a book about me." Elliott's moxie piqued my curiosity, and as soon as I got off the phone, I set out to learn more.

Years before the Black Lives Matter movement or the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in the summer of 2020, Elliott, a White woman from out-of-the-way Iowa, had transformed herself into an international authority on all issues of racism and bias. An award-winning network TV documentary had aired about her, followed by a starring role at a headline- sparking White House conference on education. By 1984, Elliott had left her public school teacher's job in Riceville, Iowa (population: 806), sixteen miles from the Wisconsin state line, and had taken the blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment on the road. She tried it on tens of thousands of adults, in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. She traveled to conferences and corporate workshops.

She took the experiment to prisons, schools, and military bases. She appeared on Oprah five times. Elliott became a standing-room-only speaker at hundreds of colleges and universities. In the process, she had turned herself into America's mother of diversity training.

Elliott was so successful at what she did that she was granted membership in the historic pantheon of the West's most revered educators: Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, and Paulo Freire. In 2004, the American publishing giant, McGraw Hill, created a multipanel poster suitable for classroom display that included Elliott along with the other venerated thinkers and teachers. To me, Elliott's separation of students based on their eye color seemed like a risky experiment that raised all kinds of ethical issues. In fact, as I was to learn, the experiment had been inspired by Nazis, as Elliott would be the first to admit. She had lied to impressionable children who trusted her. She had told them that half of the class was less intelligent because of their eye color, because of their genetics.

The experiment became so real that fistfights erupted on the Riceville Elementary School playground. That seemed bad enough. But Elliott did nothing to stop the fights. She encouraged them, based on the children's newly granted superiority or inferiority. That was part of duping the children into thinking that the experiment was real.

Elliott had constructed a gut-wrenching, true-life nightmare in order to make an indelible point that would stay with her students for the rest of their lives. In essence, she tried to induce a dose of racism into the minds of the third graders.

* * *

It all began the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, when Jane Elliott asked her all-White third-grade students "How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl? It would be hard to know, wouldn't it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. Would you like to find out?"

A spontaneous cheer arose from the children. YAAAAAAAAY! And so began one of the most astonishing exercises ever conducted in an American classroom. That spring morning 50 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. "It might be interesting to judge people by the color of their eyes," Elliott teased. "Would you like to try?" Elliott then pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue-eyed kids to wear one. "The browneyed people are the better people in this room," Elliott began. "They are cleaner and they are smarter."

"They are not," one blue-eyed boy said under his breath from the group in the back. "Oh, yes, they are!" Elliott said, her eyes open wide. She wagged her index finger at the blue-eyed boy with the audacity to question her. "Brown-eyed people are more intelligent than blue-eyed people. It's about time you knew the truth. You're old enough to know this."

Elliott issued more directives. "All you brown-eyed children, push your desks to the front of the room." The children looked puzzled. "You heard me. Push them to the front. You're the smarter kids. That's where you belong!" The comment didn't seem to register with the children, so Elliott repeated it. "Go ahead," she told the brown-eyed group. "You ought to be sitting up front. Blue-eyed children, push your desks to the back. As far away as you can!"

She knew that the children weren't going to buy her pitch unless she came up with a reason, and the more scientific to these Space Age children of the 1960s, the better. "Eye color, hair color and skin color are caused by a chemical," Elliott went on, writing MELANIN on the blackboard. Melanin, she said, is what causes intelligence. The more melanin, the darker the person's eyes-and the smarter the person. "Brown-eyed people have more of that chemical in their eyes, so brown-eyed people are better than those with blue eyes," Elliott said. "Blue-eyed people sit around and do nothing. You give them something nice and they just wreck it." She could feel a chasm forming between the two groups of students.

"Do blue-eyed people remember what they've been taught?" Elliott asked. "No!" the brown-eyed kids said. Elliott rattled off the rules for the day, saying blue-eyed kids had to use paper cups if they drank from the water fountain. "Why?" one girl asked. "Because we might catch something," a brown-eyed boy said. Everyone looked at Mrs. Elliott. She nodded. As the morning wore on, brown-eyed kids berated their blue-eyed classmates. "Well, what do you expect from him, Mrs. Elliott," a brown-eyed student said as a blue-eyed student got an arithmetic problem wrong. "He's a bluey!"

Then, the inevitable: "Hey, Mrs. Elliott, how come you're the teacher if you've got blue eyes?" a browneyed boy asked. Just before Elliott could answer, brown-eyed Steven Knode jumped in. "If she didn't have 'em blue eyes, she'd be the principal!" Elliott couldn't help but grin, at least to herself, not just for Steven's insight, but because Mr. Brandmill, the principal, did, in fact, have brown eyes.

Next, she informed the children that no one from the blue-eyed group would be allowed on the playground equipment, because, she said, "They're careless. Everyone knows that. They might break something." Elliott went further, instructing the brown-eyed children not to allow any of the blue-eyed kids to play with them-even if they were friends. "Brown-eyed children need to play only with brown-eyed children. Blue-eyed children, you play among yourselves. There will be no exceptions. Does everyone understand?" "Yes, Mrs. Elliott." Elliott issued more rules. The blue-eyed children would have to wait for the brown-eyed students to finish before being allowed to eat lunch. For recess, the brown-eyed children would get five more minutes. "Do you understand, children? Have I made myself clear?" Yes, Mrs. Elliott!

For the rest of the morning, Elliott was unrelenting. While on the playground, brown-eyed Bruce Fox would later recall, "Mrs. Elliott told a boy who was getting bullied that the next time that happens, 'You smack 'em in the nose.' She put her fingers together in a fist to show how it ought to be done." If blueeyed students were playing jump rope or kickball, Fox remembered, Elliott urged the brown-eyed kids, "You take it away from them! That's your right! Do it! " A brown-eyed student, Debra Anderson, recalled, "One of my friends had blue eyes, and I couldn't play with her. I kinda hung out by myself and played on the swings and the monkey bars. I felt sick."

* * *

At lunchtime, Elliott hurried to the teachers' lounge. She described to her colleagues what she'd done, remarking how several of her slower kids with brown eyes had transformed themselves into confident leaders of the class. Withdrawn browneyed kids were suddenly outgoing, some beaming with the widest smiles she had ever seen on them. She asked the other teachers what they were doing to bring news of the King assassination into their classrooms. The answer, in a word, was nothing.

Back in the classroom, a smart, tall, blue-eyed girl by the name of Carol Anderson, who never had problems with arithmetic, started making all kinds of mistakes when Elliott called on her. When Carol walked across the room, her shoulders slumped and she dragged her feet. Carol had always had a ramrod-straight posture, but since the morning, she had turned into a different person. Anyone could see that all the confidence that had once defined her had disappeared. During recess in the schoolyard, Carol, flushed and red in the face, came running to Elliott, sobbing. Three brown-eyed girls had ganged up on her, and one of them had hit her, warning, "You better apologize to us for getting in our way because we're better than you are! Mrs. Elliott said so!"

On Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, and the brown-eyed kids were told how shifty, dumb and lazy they were. Later, it would occur to Elliott that the blue-eyed kids were much less nasty than the browneyed kids had been, perhaps because the blue-eyed kids had felt the sting of being ostracized and didn't want to inflict it on their former tormentors.

When the exercise ended, some of the kids hugged, some cried. Elliott reminded them that the reason for the lesson was the King assassination, and she asked them to write down what they had learned. Typical of their responses was that of Debbie Hughes, who reported that "the people in Mrs. Elliott's room who had brown eyes got to discriminate against the people who had blue eyes. I have brown eyes. I felt like hitting them if I wanted to. I got to have five minutes extra of recess." The next day when the tables were turned, "I felt like quitting school.... I felt mad. That's what it feels like when you're discriminated against."

Elliott shared the essays with her mother, who showed them to the editor of the weekly Riceville Recorder. He printed them under the headline "How Discrimination Feels." The Associated Press followed up, quoting Elliott as saying she was "dumbfounded" by the exercise's effectiveness. "I think these children walked in a colored child's moccasins for a day," she was quoted as saying. That might have been the end of it, but a month later, Elliott says, Johnny Carson called her. Not an assistant, a producer, or a long-distance operator. It was Carson himself. Before Elliott could catch her breath, Carson announced, "We'd like you to come on the show and talk about the experiment you did on the kids in your class, the one separating the blue-eyed kids from the brown-eyed kids."

Carson's invitation to Elliott to appear on the show had been an experiment itself. A year earlier, Carson had told author Alex Haley for a Playboy interview that he sympathized with Black protesters. In a restrained, allholds- barred interview, he allowed, "It all comes down to just one basic word: justice-the same justice for everyone - in housing, in education, in employment and, most difficult of all-in human relations. And we're not going to accomplish that until all of us, Black and White, begin to temper our passion with compassion."

Elliott flew to the NBC studio in New York City. On the Tonight Show Carson broke the ice by spoofing Elliott's rural roots. "I understand this is the first time you've flown?" Carson asked, grinning. "On an airplane, it is," Elliott said to appreciative laughter from the studio audience. She chatted about the experiment, and before she knew it was whisked off the stage.

Elliott's message on Tonight Show No. 1442 came across blunt and unfiltered. Blacks in America were treated as second-class citizens and Whites didn't have a clue about it. And even if they did, the last thing Whites were about to do was reshuffle the stacked deck Blacks had been dealt. Elliott's solution was to teach children, kids as young as eight years old, the damage that Whites imparted every day to Blacks. And the best approach was to follow Lloyd Jennison's "Indian" maxim: to walk a mile in someone else's moccasins.

Hundreds of viewers wrote letters saying Elliott's work appalled them. "How dare you try this cruel experiment out on White children," one said. "Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but White children, there's no way they could possibly understand it. It's cruel to White children and will cause them great psychological damage." Elliott replied, "Why are we so worried about the fragile egos of White children who experience a couple of hours of made-up racism one day when Blacks experience real racism every day of their lives?"

The people of Riceville did not exactly welcome Elliott home from New York with a hayride. Looking back, I think part of the problem was that, like the residents of other small midwestern towns I've covered, many in Riceville felt that calling attention to oneself was poor manners and that Elliott had shone a bright light not just on herself but on Riceville; people all over the United States would think Riceville was full of bigots. Some residents were furious.

Through persistence, diligence, and perhaps worst of all, in the eyes of Riceville, sheer ambition, Elliott had catapulted herself to immortality. Regarded, respected, revered. Outside Riceville, she was a visionary, a combination of Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, and maybe even Joan of Arc. Inside, she was a con artist. Elliott hated the values that some Riceville parents had instilled in their children. Elliott seemed to know what these young children would grow up to become-unless she imprinted her wisdom on their squishy, developing brains. Elliott's mission was to administer a mind-altering social-experiment inoculation, even though neither the kids nor their parents had asked for such a vaccination.

Elliott is nothing if not stubborn. She would conduct the exercise for the nine more years she taught the third grade, and the next eight years she taught seventh and eighth graders before giving up teaching in Riceville, in 1985, largely to conduct the eye-color exercise for groups outside the school.

For a host of reasons, some serendipitous, others calculated, the experiment Elliott popularized in 1968 multiplied at dizzying, geometric speed. It spread to other teachers and school districts across the nation and around the world. Thousands of teachers and trainers would adopt the experiment and try it out on students young and old. During the dawning era of multiculturalism, hundreds of corporations used the experiment on their workers. For some who sat at Elliott's feet, it changed them for the good. The experiment exposed them to racism and its far-reaching impact. But for others, decades after being tormented by an experiment ostensibly designed to teach about racism, many of her subjects still feel the wallop of Elliott's smack-them-over-the-head method. For more than a few who experienced it, Elliott's self-proclaimed exercise turned into a monster experiment.

* * *

For years scholars have evaluated Elliott's exercise, seeking to determine if it reduces racial prejudice in participants or poses a psychological risk to them. The results are mixed. Two education professors in England, Ivor F. Goodson and Pat Sikes, suggest that Elliott's experiment was unethical because the participants weren't informed of its real purpose beforehand. Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, says Elliott's diversity training is "Orwellian" and singled her out as "the Torquemada of thought reform." Kors writes that Elliott's exercise taught "blood-guilt and self-contempt to Whites," adding that "in her view, nothing has changed in America since the collapse of Reconstruction." In a similar vein, Linda Seebach, a conservative columnist for the Rocky Mountain News, wrote in 2004 that Elliott was a "disgrace" and described her exercise as "sadistic," adding, "You would think that any normal person would realize that she had done an evil thing. But not Elliott. She repeated the abuse with subsequent classes, and finally turned it into a fully commercial enterprise."

Others have praised Elliott's exercise. In Building Moral Intelligence: The Seven Essential Virtues That Teach Kids to Do the Right Things, educational psychologist Michele Borda says it "teaches our children to counter stereotypes before they become full-fledged, lasting prejudices and to recognize that every human being has the right to be treated with respect." Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George Washington University, says the exercise helps develop character and empathy. And Stanford University psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo writes in his 1979 textbook, Psychology and Life, that Elliott's "remarkable" experiment tried to show "how easily prejudiced attitudes may be formed and how arbitrary and illogical they can be." Zimbardo-creator of the also controversial 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which was stopped after college student volunteers acting as "guards" humiliated students acting as "prisoners"-says Elliott's exercise is "more compelling than many done by professional psychologists."

In 2003, Tracie Stewart, a social psychologist at Kennesaw State University in Atlanta, was the lead author in a study to gauge the efficacy of the blueeyes, brown-eyes experiment. Stewart used as her test case a workshop that Elliott conducted in 2000 with students at Bard College, a small, private undergraduate institution in Annandale-on-Hudson, in New York State. So as not to skew their findings, Stewart and her coinvestigators looked for Bard students who hadn't heard of the experiment or of Elliott. Once accepted into the workshop, participants signed informed consent forms: "You should be aware that the learning exercise may be a difficult experience for some. Participants will take part in group discussions during which they may be exposed to harsh comments and uncomfortable conditions.... If you have a medical condition that might be aggravated by stressful situations or feel that you should avoid stressful situations at the present time, do not sign up for this project."

Elliott conducted the experiment, which started early on a Saturday morning and lasted eight hours. She followed her routine, sorting forty-seven participants into a blue-eyed (and green- and hazel-eyed) group and a brown-eyed cohort. The blues were crowded into a small, stuffy room with half the number of chairs as people, while the browns were served a full breakfast in a comfortable setting. Per her drill, Elliott prompted the brown-eyed participants to act rudely toward the other group when the two sections convened. She also gave the brown-eyed students answers to an IQ test she would administer to both groups later that day.

When the two groups merged, Elliott had the blueeyed students, wearing collars, sit in the middle of the room while the brown-eyed group sat on either side as though they were observing the "inferior" group. She proceeded to criticize the blues. She had them stand one at a time and read derogatory passages denigrating blue-eyed people. She scolded their performances. When the browns outscored the blues on the fake IQ test, Elliott amped up her scorn of the blues. She picked a blue-eyed, blond woman for ridicule, announcing to everyone that she wasn't a natural blonde and likely dyed her hair. To another woman, Elliott commented about her "cute butt" and "bedroom voice." All the while, she encouraged the brown-eyed students to join in on the hectoring. The insults got so intense that two blueeyed students started to cry. One got up and left.

The two groups broke for lunch, returned to debrief, watched the 1970 ABC video "Eye of the Storm," ate hors d'oeuvres together in the late afternoon, and then left, the experiment officially over. During the next four to six weeks, both groups were assessed by Stewart and her colleagues to see if the experiment had made any impact on their self-awareness of prejudice and racism.

The results were decidedly mixed. The responses from the students mirrored what participants in the U.S. West pluralism workshops in the 1980s had said. They noted a multitude of insults and pain shared by the participants, but minimal change in attitude. Among the student reactions:

"As a Blue Eyes, I was uncomfortable and on edge. I found myself easily angered by anything Jane Elliott said. I felt frustrated and helpless to stop her charade (she was good at her job)."

"I feel some of it was unethical, however, there were so many positive responses I can only believe that the positive outweighs the negatives.... I've had a few nightmares, but this is typical..."

"Makes people upset; doesn't change much; too negative for me."

"I felt emotionally low after the experiment [exercise]. I wanted to try to forget some of the things that were said or done on the day of the experiment, but I guess that's what made it so effective."

Stewart's thoughts today about the experiment are "proceed with caution." She said that the experiment may have a positive impact on reducing negative racial attitudes "in the short term," but any long-term benefits are negligible. Stewart no longer shows videos of Elliott in her undergraduate psychology classes because "there tends to be a greater focus on Jane Elliott herself than the issue of institutional racism."

A larger, systematic review, published in 2009, that assessed the effectiveness of scores of anti-bias workshops and experiments summarily suggested that further study was needed. "We conclude that the casual effects of many widespread prejudice-reduction interventions, such as workplace diversity training and media campaigns, remain unknown. Although some intergroup contact and cooperation interventions appear promising, a much more rigorous and broad-ranging empirical assessment of prejudice reduction strategies is needed to determine what works." In other words, the social scientists weren't able to say that any crash course to modify racial prejudice works.

* * *

Today, teachers still readily employ the blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment. For many, it is an inspired and clever way to introduce the concept of discrimination and race to youngsters.

In 2009, Elliott took the experiment to Great Britain, where she performed it for a television documentary called The Event in London. There, the thirty participants were adults. Following her script, Elliott threw profanity-laced insults at the collared "inferior" group of blue-eyed participants. As during the experiment's last iteration on The Oprah Show, the experiment imploded. Many of the UK participants refused to tolerate Elliott's bullying and walked out.

The show hired two psychologists to stand in the wings during the experiment in case anyone needed intervention, as well as to provide a sports-style playby- play commentary for viewers at home. One was Dominic Abrams, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent, who today, more than a decade later, doesn't quite know what to think of Elliott or what she did. "She is a very strong personality and did not appear to treat challenge as anything other than a battle to be won. She certainly had no desire to engage with me as a psychologist (or indeed as a person), so other than her brusque manner toward myself and the production team (which may have been partly an extension of her character part for the day), it was difficult to gain a sense of what she might have been thinking or intending," Abrams wrote in an email.

Guardian journalist Andrew Anthony was less sanguine. Writing about the British iteration of the experiment, Anthony noted, "Nowadays, grey-haired and mean-eyed, she's honed her shtick to that of a drill sergeant or prison commandant. She describes herself as the 'resident bitch for the day,' and speaks to the blue-eyed contingent as though they were criminally stupid or stupidly criminal. 'Keep your fucking mouth shut,' she tells one smiling blue-eyed young man. 'I don't play second banana.' The performance suggests someone who would be a natural in a Maoist re-education camp: self-righteous, vindictive and unswervingly convinced of her case."

Anthony concluded that Elliott was "more excited by White fear than she is by Black success."

Elliott defends her work as a mother defends her child. "You have to put the exercise in the context of the rest of the year. Yes, that day was tough. Yes, the children felt angry, hurt, betrayed. But they returned to a better place-unlike a child of color, who gets abused every day, and never has the ability to find him or herself in a nurturing classroom environment." As for the criticism that the exercise encourages children to distrust authority figures-the teacher lies, then recants the lies and maintains they were justified because of a greater good-she says she worked hard to rebuild her students' trust. The exercise is "an inoculation against racism," she says. "We give our children shots to inoculate them against polio and smallpox, to protect them against the realities in the future. There are risks to those inoculations, too, but we determine that those risks are worth taking."

* * *

Elliott remains as sharp-tongued, contrary, resolute, and opinionated as ever. She has updated her lectures to include a range of contemporary issues: the concept of race ("There's only one race, the human race"); the Black Lives Matter movement ("It's insane what we've been doing to people of color for the last 250 years"), White supremacists ("They're coming out of the woodwork"), persistent women ("'Bitch' is an acronym for 'Being in Total Control, Honey'"), former President Trump ("He is basing his political philosophy on writings of Adolf Hitler"), racism among White evangelicals ("Jesus did not look like the little Pillsbury Doughboy"), and oppression of Native Americans ("We call Native Americans 'savages' but it was Whites who killed them and stole their lands"). Her most recent lectures mention COVID-19, as well as the LGBTQ and Latinx communities. Elliott hasn't given up her interest in public education, which is at the center of any presentation she gives ("We could destroy racism in two generations by changing what is taught in classrooms all over the United States, but first we'd have to change the level of racism among the teachers").

For decades, Elliott has issued sweeping generalizations, including her oft-repeated declaration that all Whites in America are racists. "If you are looking at a White person who was born, reared, and schooled in the United States, then you are looking at a racist," she told an audience at the University of Northern Colorado as far back as 1993. "Blacks aren't racist; they are only reacting to the actions of Whites."

Elliott often refers to herself as "a faded Black person." When she spoke with actress Jada Pinkett Smith on her Facebook Watch show, Red Table Talk, in 2018, she said, "My people moved far from the Equator and that's the only reason my skin is lighter. That's all any White person is." She concedes that as a White woman speaking about how some Black people might feel, she may be guilty of accusations that she's a charlatan and a poseur. "There are those Blacks who ask me what a White woman like me is doing talking about their experience, since I can't possibly know what it's like to walk in their shoes. Sometimes I'm accused of just running another White woman's game. Those are valid criticisms."

What truly motivated Elliott to introduce an experiment to a roomful of third graders and to make two days last more than five decades? Perhaps she was seeking an exit from what she envisioned would be her own humdrum life. She had something personal to prove, a game of one-upmanship amid a landlocked sea of naysayers who had looked down on her ever since she'd been born. What was it about her that seemed to require that she push the limits, shocking everyone-starting with children? Was it to make up for the shortcomings the locals had assigned her? Was it to make her father proud? Was it to get back at the locals and their sense of what it meant to be successful, particularly as a woman? Was it to show the other teachers in the chatty teachers' lounge how horribly wrong they were?

Classroom No. 10 was way too small for Elliott. Her dream was to teach everyone.

Based on the author's 2021 book Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality, published by University of California Press, excerpted with permission. © 2021 by Stephen G. Bloom

About the Author

Stephen G. Bloom is a professor of journalism at the University of Iowa and author of six nonfiction books: Postville; Inside the Writer's Mind; Tears of Mermaids; The Oxford Project; The Audacity of Inez Burns; and Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes.

Stephen Bloom on The Michael Shermer Show

Listen to Michael Shermer's conversation with Stephen Bloom exploring the never-before-told true story of Jane Elliott and the "Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment" she made world-famous, using eye color to simulate racism. Shermer and Bloom discuss: Jane Elliott and how she came to conduct her famous experiment * reactions to it (in the classroom, locally, nationally, internationally) * whether the "experiment" was really more of a demonstration * public interest, from Johnny Carson to Oprah Winfrey * the questionable ethics of the experiment * what it reveals about tribalism, racism, obedience to authority, role playing, social proof * whether the experiment reveals hidden racist attitudes or creates them in children * Does it indicate bad apples or bad barrels? * race sensitivity training programs, then and now (and why they don't really work) * what drives moral progress * the future of journalism.

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Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: On Race and Jane Elliott's Famous Experiment on Prejudice

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One of the most famous experiments in education - Jane Elliott's "blue eyes, brown eyes" separation of her third grade students to teach them about prejudice - was very different from what the public was told, as revealed in this excerpt from the in-depth story about what really happened in that classroom.

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What we (don't) talk about when another White person is caught trying to pull off a racial hoax.

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1. So many people are registering for Barnraisers fall cohorts! It's very exciting! But there's also more time if you haven't yet. Everything you need to know (including the understandable question "what are you talking about, Garrett?" can be found here).

2. This might just be me, but the end of the year/beginning of the year is a relatively slow period in terms of folks supporting this work (which you can do either by subscribing to The White Pages or donating to Barnraisers). That's completely understandable- this was a really expensive holiday season for so many of us. If, however, this project is one you value and you are in a financial position to toss in for a subscription (either for you or a donated one- the latter of which helps me to be able to be generous about comping subscriptions), know that it is profoundly appreciated.

3. This is coming later in the day than I'd like; thanks for your patience. I was sick this weekend (something flu-ish that isn't Covid; you know the drill) and though I'm through the worst of it (and I'm tired enough of being in bed that I legitimately wanted to write), I'm still pretty sluggish. Shout out to everybody else fighting something right now.

UPDATE: After finishing this essay, I discovered that Allure had just published an interview with the very famous (and very White) pop star Gwen Stefani, where she repeatedly claims to be Japanese because she loves Japanese culture so much. My commentary on that story: Gwen, truly, you didn't need to prove this essay's thesis!
It was so easy to make fun of Rachel Dolezal. You remember Rachel, right? We don't forget our shared pariahs. She was, of course, the White woman from rural Montana who built her career by pretending to be Black. Her multi-year public hoax and/or private delusion was revealed in 2015. There were so many jokes! Jokes about her hair and her spray tan. Jokes about her clumsy interviews, where she stumbled over what should have been simple questions about her parents' racial identity. Joke about her claims to be "transracial," which of course is a made up thing that does not exist. Jokes about the Spokane of it all- of course she had been able to pull off the con in such an overwhelmingly White place.

Back in 2015, Dolezal mockery was a rare ecumenical sport. For conservatives, she was a particularly wacky example of batty liberal extremism. She wasn't the exception that proved the rule, but the exception that somehow was the rule. If she was lying about transracialism, then the logic went, then all those transgender people must also be lying. For liberals, she was a clear example of a White person who had Made A Mistake, and goodness knows that we love our collective sin-eaters. For White social justice acolytes, it was clear what she had done wrong, which makes for terrific chest pouting and grand statement making. For people of color, she was a cartoon, one only a few steps beyond the thirsty cultural appropriation that, well, a whole lot of us White people dabble in whenever our favorite rapper says that word we're not supposed to say.

The jokes were easy. Everybody could agree. Dolezal was in the wrong. We were all in the right for noticing she was in the wrong.

She wasn't the first, though. There have been a steady stream of race liars throughout American history, each one a wild story. There was the abolitionist Martha Griffith Browne, who published the Autobiography of a Female Slave in 1857, which would have been a powerful book if not for the fact that it was made up- Browne was a White former slave-owner, not a Black former slave. There was Mezz Mezzrow, a cool cat jazz musician and prodigious marijuana trafficker who claimed to have evolved so far from his Midwestern Jewish roots that he had become, in his words, a "voluntary Negro." Far out, Mezz! And of course, there was former Klan member and George Wallace speechwriter Asa Earl Carter, whose faux-autobiography about growing up Cherokee- the Education of Little Tree- fooled millions (even Oprah!) and was adapted into a movie. What did Little Tree learn? The same thing millions of others of White people have learned over the years... that we can all be Cherokee if we just claim it hard enough.

The trend hasn't ended with Dolezal either. Over the past couple of years, Madison, Wisconsin- a place so central to American Whiteness that it has single-handedly kept House of Pain's legacy alive - has been America's undisputed capitol for White people lying about their race.

It was in Madison that Jessica Krug-- a White woman from an affluent Kansas family-- first started referring to herself as a person of color (she would eventually identify as "Jess La Bombalera," the Bronx-born child of a drug-addicted, physically abusive Puerto Rican mother, which should win an award for the most tired and dangerous cultural stereotypes packed into a single fib). Krug's deception was unearthed in 2020, the same year that the Black Co-President of UW-Madison's formidable Teacher's Assistant Association-- CV Vitolo-Haddad-- was revealed to actually not be Black at all but Italian American.

Last week, another well-known Madison activist, nibiiwakamigkwe- who claimed to be Two-Spirit, Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Cuban and Jewish- was outed as a White person from a Milwaukee exurb named Kay LeClaire. In the few years that LeClaire identified as nibiiwakamigkwe, they co-founded a Queer Indigenous tattoo and art studio, received multiple civic and campus grants, were featured in a number of publications and launched a successful campaign to get a music venue called The Winnebago to change its name. In an editorial after the campaign had concluded, LeClaire (as nibiiwakamigkwe) wrote accusingly about how the name change had only come about "in response to their anger and the potential loss of white people's money rather than misrepresentation of and education from Indigenous peoples" adding, "once again, white folks' emotions, labor, and intentions carry more weight than ours."

LeClaire was correct about that part at least. White emotions, labors and intentions do carry more weight. We do generally get what we want, in just about any setting and scenario. And usually, what we want is fairly predictable- we want to maintain power. If there's a line, we want to be at the front of it. If there's a need for change or sacrifice, we'd like to avoid it, thank you very much.

So why is it that one of the things we consistently and frequently want is to run from Whiteness?

As I write this, the most popular movie worldwide is the second installment in a blockbuster series about how (mostly White) humans go to another planet, meet an Indigenous tribe of tall blue aliens, and do a whole lot of murdering and colonizing.

The hero of those films is a White guy who first pretends to be a tall blue alien for selfish purposes but then falls in love (with both their culture and the Chief's daughter) and-- through the magic of cinema-- literally becomes a blue alien before saving his new tribe from destruction. While virtually all the other humans are craven, money-grubbing murderers, by abandoning his race/species, our hero's sins are cleansed and he gets to ride on flying dragons and super cool dolphins, commune with his new species' benevolent tree Goddess, and even make love using his new tail and eventually become the patriarch of a tall, blue family! That's even further out than my man Mezz Mezzrow ever went. Our hero lives the dream, pulling off the transition from Whiteness and never having to issue a desultory apology or resign from his position with the TA Association.

Meanwhile, the most popular television program in the U.S. is a show about a very particular (imagined) version of the American West where both a fictional tribe and intensely brooding White ranchers are equally threatened by Californian developers.

At one point in that show's third season, a Native character who has been established as one of that program's voices of Authentic Indigenous Wisdom (she teaches an anti-colonial American History course at the local university) has a heart-to-heart with her father-in-law, the show's Rugged White Cowboy Protagonist. Reflecting on how hard the rancher has had to fight to keep his land, the theoretically radical Professor offers him the ultimate absolution for his various White sins.

"When this land belonged to my people a hundred and fifty years ago, children were stolen, men were killed, families herded away like cattle, and nothin's changed except you're the Indian now."

Those are two immensely honest pop culture institutions right there. The ultimate goal of both isn't to oppose colonization, land theft and genocide- be it on a fictional planet or in the valleys of Big Sky Country. The goal isn't to have empathy for and to support the cause of communities who've borne the brunt of colonialism and White supremacy. It's to eventually be either so empathetic or put-upon yourself that you literally become them.

I understand this impulse. I really do. Obviously, its a close cousin to trends I've covered in previous issues- cultural appropriation, the invention of "Black friends," the desperate attempt to claim identity markers that others may view as being more interesting or sympathetic than generic Whiteness. The same impulse that leads us to cheer on James Cameron's Avatar protagonist when he "goes Native" or to nod knowingly when Yellowstone's Indigenous characters offer their White rancher neighbors their begrudging respect also leads millions of White people to seek absolution in our love of Lizzo and Beyoncé or our ability to order food "Thai spicy" or our claim that our great great grandma was a real Cherokee princess, actually.

It's an impulse borne of understandable guilt. It is the ache of a phantom limb that remembers, however unconsciously, that we too one had a shared ethnic identity, but that our ancestors traded some or all of it for assimilation and a few notches up on the racial caste system. It is our jealousy of communities of color or Indigenous nations for their (real or perceived) social solidarity. It is so many things, all of them understandable, but none of them necessarily helpful politically.

I learned about Kay LeClaire and her identity deception from an article in Madison365, a publication focused on that city's communities of color. The article stood out from others I've read about Dolezal or Krug or other racial imposters, in that it gave particular voice to Indigenous Madisonians who were impacted by LeClaire's lies. There's a lot of hurt in their quotes, understandably so. Beyond the individual betrayal, White people who invent Indigenous identities for themselves further muck up an incredibly complicated evolving conversation within Native communities about what constitutes Native identity and how to move past problematic and colonialist blood quantum systems. There are layers of hurt, anger and betrayal here.

There's also deep insight, not just as to why LeClaire might have perpetuated her hoax, but why a town like Madison- an archetypal bastion of alternatingly smug and guilt-ridden White progressivism- keeps falling for deceptions like hers. One of the article's most powerful lines comes from Kristi Goforth, a Sault Chippewa politician in the Madison area who had mentored LeClaire.

"There's this appetite in Madison to just really want (diversity) and want to believe it so badly," she said. "It's like a craving for it. We're craving culture here. And so then when someone like Kay comes forward, dressed as she did, and, you know, really being a loud voice for Native issues, it was fully consumed." [Emphasis mine]

This is what we collectively missed when we all just mocked Rachel Dolezal seven years ago. Race imposters aren't as anomalous as we like to believe, because whenever they pop up, they have a willing White audience desperate for a Black, Brown or Indigenous truth teller who talks directly to us, who berates our racism and privilege, but who also has a seemingly endless well of energy for us and our institutions. We want somebody who will tell us we're wrong but who keeps showing up at our White events and applying for our White grants and maybe, just maybe, befriending our White selves.

Who better to square that circle for us than somebody who has lived a life of unrestricted access to White institutions, power and social dynamics? Their specific grift is in pretending to be somebody they're not. Our collective grift, though, is in hoping that if we just attach ourselves to a wise Black, Brown or Indigenous activist- be they real or fabricated- we too may be delivered onto a salvation beyond Whiteness. It's a symbiotic relationship, one that serves a wide variety of White emotions, but that has no positive impact on the world. It would be much more helpful if we all were willing to say "well, we're White, and we feel all sorts of ways about it, but how can we be useful?" But so often- when White people are thinking racially- efficacy or helpfulness isn't at the forefront of our mind. We just want to make a bad feeling go away so that we can go back to our lives.

Rachel Dolezal couldn't will herself to be Black, no matter how well she learned how to braid hair or how many African American Studies courses she took. Kay LeClaire couldn't will themselves to be Anishinaabe, no matter how many times they appeared in public in full regalia. So too can't any of us outswim the waves (the emptiness, the guilt, the isolation) of Whiteness by ourselves. This boat we're in may be completely fabricated, it may be built on lies told by silver-tongued imperialists and capitalists, but we're in it together and we don't have any hope of turning it around if we keep trying to swim to shore alone.
Song of the week: I was thinking about choosing a Madison band for the song of the week (justice for Rainer Maria!), but I made that off-hand reference to House of Pain up above and now I can't stop thinking about everybody's favorite '90s Irish rap lunkheads. House of Pain is fascinating in a broader consideration of racial cosplay because they were Irish Americans from Los Angeles who cosplayed as... Irish Americans from South Boston and New York! That's worth unpacking, I think! What did or didn't constitute an unassimilated Irish identity in 1990s America? Anyway, here's a music video that begins with Denis Leary telling you how to be a real Irish dude. As always, you can find the collected song of the week playlist on Apple Music or Spotify. White Pages Subscriber Discussion Of The Week: In further preparation for my upcoming article about Yellowstone, I want to hear about how your "home" (or a community you care about) has been depicted in media: What you've appreciated about it, what you hate about it, what you're torn about. I'm particularly curious if any of us have had the experience of "Oh wow, that artist really got my home RIGHT!" (I have, by the way! Which is saying a lot because I come from a place- the American West- which is so often poorly and problematically depicted. I'll share it tomorrow!) but I'm also here for shared commiseration on all the ways that our homes have been depicted unhelpfully. That drops tomorrow for paid subscribers (and as always, if you would like to be part of the fun but can't afford a subscription, just email me at garrett@barnraisersproject.org).

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It Probably Isn't A Good Sign That This Keeps Happening

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So many people are registering for Barnraisers fall cohorts! It's very exciting! But there's also more time if you haven't yet. Everything you need to know (including the understandable question "what are you talking about, Garrett?" can be found here).

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The Mental Health Cost of Code Switching on Campus

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The Mental Health Cost of Code Switching on Campus

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Robinson Cook, a Black senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is tired. "Code-switching is exhausting," Cook says. "If I could get away with it, I'd say exactly what I want to say the way I want to say it. But nobody wants that."

Code-switching, or the process of shifting from one dialect to another depending on the setting, is a practice deeply ingrained in American society. Although code-switching can sometimes refer to switching quickly between languages, it more commonly references a habit of conforming to the dominant culture through a change in dialect - which can have much higher stakes for some than it does for others. For Black people, it's a constant shift between African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and white standard English, but it can also be the difference between succeeding and failing in white-dominated spaces.

For Black college students especially, code-switching can at times feel like a requirement for fitting into a space so heavily saturated with white peers, professors, and standards of academic excellence. Many have noted that people who use AAVE are incorrectly viewed as less intelligent, making white English the language of academia. Experts have noted how harshly people are judged based off of dialect and pattern of speech. Studies show that teaching students to efficiently code-switch at a young age can help them get jobs or gain acceptance into highly ranked colleges later in life. For the students who feel they must conform to that to succeed, a code-switch can be not only an inconvenience, but a huge emotional toll and a detriment to mental health.

"When it comes to the classroom, a lot of people choose to code-switch in order to navigate other people's negative biases against them," Preshuslee Thompson, a training and development specialist at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, said. "Code-switching can often be a way to let white people know that you can navigate a space, or even that you belong in a space."

"Black English is often not recognized as a distinct dialect in the United States," Thompson said. "This causes people to assume that it is broken or less-educated English, which is not the case."

In schools, the nuances between white English and AAVE can often impede Black students' learning. Not only must Black students read and write in a different dialect to perform well in class, they must do so to be accepted by white peers and authority figures.

"Everyone's heard the idea of a 'white voice,'" Cook said. "I know mine more than I know my real voice. When you're Black and you want something from a white person - admission to school, job offers, you name it - you don't stand a chance if you don't speak their language."

Changing the way you speak, particularly in the face of discrimination, can take a mental toll.

"Code-switching can cause people to not be fully present in the moment because they are monitoring every word that comes out of their mouth," Nanika Coor, a psychologist in Brooklyn, said. "Over time, that can become very traumatic for a person. It can also affect a student's ability to perform, both in school and in other aspects of their life."

On campus, that can mean dealing with a constant internal monologue telling Black students they are not smart enough - or white enough - to fit in or thrive in university.

"I constantly feel a subconscious pull to code-switch," Aja Isabel, a junior at Columbia University, said. "It's an impulse I work daily to suppress, which has a huge emotional impact."

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The Mental Health Cost of Code-Switching on Campus

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Robinson Cook, a Black senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is tired. "Code-switching is exhausting," Cook says. "If I could get away with it, I'd say exactly what I want to say the way I want to say it. But nobody wants that."

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It's More Than Racism: Isabel Wilkerson Explains America's 'Caste' System

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It's More Than Racism: Isabel Wilkerson Explains America's 'Caste' System

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Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson says racism is an insufficient term for the systemic oppression of Black people in America. Instead, she prefers to refer to America as having a "caste" system.

Wilkerson describes caste an artificial hierarchy that helps determine standing and respect, assumptions of beauty and competence, and even who gets benefit of the doubt and access to resources.

"Caste focuses in on the infrastructure of our divisions and the rankings, whereas race is the metric that's used to determine one's place in that," she says.

Wilkerson notes that the concept of caste has been around for thousands of years: "[Caste] predates the idea of race, which is ... only 400 or 500 years old, dating back to the transatlantic slave trade."

Caste, she adds, "is the term that is more precise [than race]; it is more comprehensive, and it gets at the underlying infrastructure that often we cannot see, but that is there undergirding much of the inequality and injustices and disparities that we live with in this country."

Wilkerson's 2010 book,The Warmth of Other Suns, focused on the great migration of African Americans from the South to the North during the 20th century. In her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Wilkerson says that acknowledging America's caste system deepens our understanding of what Black people are up against in the United States.

Interview Highlights
On hearing a Nigerian-born playwright say that there are no Black people in Africa
It's so shocking to our ears, because, of course, we say that there is an entire subcontinent of people who we would view as Black, but what she was saying was that until you come to the United States, they themselves do not see themselves as Black, they are Igbo ... or they are Yoruba or whatever it is that they are in terms of their ethnicity and identity.

It is only when they enter into a multilayered caste structure ... a hierarchy such as this, do they then have to think of themselves as Black. But back where they are from, they do not have to think of themselves as Black, because Black is not the primary metric of determining one's identity.
On how being "white" is an American innovation
It's an innovation that is only several hundred years old, dating back to the time of the transatlantic slave trade. And that is because before that time, there were humans on the land wherever they happened to be on this planet, and because of the way people were living on the land, they were merely who they were.

They were Irish or they were German or they were Polish or Hungarian, and only [thought of themselves as white] after the transatlantic slave trade, only after people who had been spread out all over the world converged in this one space - the New World - to create a new country, a new culture where all of these people were then interacting and having to figure out how they were going to relate to one another.

That is when you have a caste system that emerges, a caste system that emerges that instantly relegates those who were brought in to be enslaved ... to the very bottom of the caste system, and then elevated those who looked like those who had who created the caste system - meaning those who were British and Western Europeans - at the very top of the caste system. And anyone who entered that caste system had to then navigate and figure out how were they [were] going to manage, how are they [were] going to survive and succeed in this system. And also upon arrival, discovering that they were assigned to a particular category, whether they [wished] to be in it or not.

That means that until arriving here, people who were Irish, people who were Hungarian, people who were Polish would not have identified themselves back in the 19th century as being white, but only in connection to the gradations and ranking that occurred and was created in the United States - that is where the designation of white, the designation of Black and those in between came to have meaning.
On where people of color who are not Black fit into the caste system
There was a tremendous churning at the beginning of the 20th century of people who were arriving in these undetermined or middle groups that did not fit neatly into the bipolar structure that America had created. And at the beginning of the 20th century, there were petitions to the Supreme Court, petitions to the government, for clarity about where they would fit in. And they were often petitioning to be admitted to the dominant caste.

One of the examples, a Japanese immigrant petitioned to qualify for being Caucasian because he said, "My skin is actually whiter than many people that I identified as white in America. I should qualify to be considered Caucasian." And his petition was rejected by the Supreme Court. But these are all examples of the long-standing uncertainties about who fits where when you have a caste system that is bipolar [Black and white], such as the one that was created here.
On the surprising origin of the term "Caucasian"

There was a physician, a German physician in the 18th century who had this obsession with skulls, and he collected these skulls from all over the world and his effort to determine who was supreme in humanity. So he had skulls from all over the world, and he identified the most beautiful skulls as having come from the area around the Caucasus Mountains. And as a result of that, because they were, in his view, so beautiful, he decided to identify this skull as Caucasian clearly, and to name the group to which he belonged as Caucasians.

In other words, this was the group that was the most beautiful and perfect of all groups of humanity. This was a group that he presumed himself to belong to - though he was German. And this was the group that he described as European, and thus the word "Caucasian" actually refers to people who come from the Caucasus Mountains.

Now, what's fascinating about that as well is that the very people who were from that region of the world actually are among those who had the most difficult time gaining entry to the United States as citizens as white in the early 20th century, because they did not qualify based upon the preferences for those who were from Northern European ancestry.
On how the U.S. used immigration as a legal way to maintain the caste system
Curating the population means deciding who gets to be a part of it and where they fit in upon entry, and so there is a tremendous effort at the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, with the rise of eugenics and this growing belief in the gradations of humankind that they wanted to keep the population closer to what it had been at the founding of the country. And so there was an effort to restrict who could come into the country if they were not of Western European descent.

Tremendous back and forth, tremendous efforts on the part of eugenicists who then held sway in the popular imagination, tremendous effort to keep out people who we now would view as part of the dominant group. It was a form of curating who could become a part of the United States and where they would fit in, and they used immigration laws to determine who would be able to get access to that dominant group.
On why the Nazis studied American Jim Crow laws
I have to say that my focus was not initially on the Nazis themselves, but rather on how Germany has worked in the decades after the war to reconcile its history. But the deeper that I got, and the more that I looked into this, the deeper I searched, I discovered these connections that I would never have imagined.

It turned out that German eugenicists were in continuing dialogue with American eugenicists. Books by American eugenicists were big sellers in Germany in the years leading up to the Third Reich. And then, of course, the Nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate. But what they did was they sent researchers to study America's Jim Crow laws. They actually sent researchers to America to study how Americans had subjugated African Americans, what would be considered the subordinated caste. And they actually debated and consulted American law as they were devising the Nuremberg Laws and as they were looking at those laws in the United States.

They couldn't understand why, from their perspective, the group that they had identified as the subordinated caste was not recognized in the United States in the same way. So that was the unusual interconnectedness that I never would have imagined.
On the Nazi reaction to America's "one drop rule," which maintained that a person with any amount of Black blood would be considered Black
That idea of the one drop rule, that was viewed as too extreme to [the Nazis]. It was stunning to hear that. ... The Nazis, in trying to create their own caste system, what could be considered a caste system, went to great lengths to really think hard about who should qualify as Aryan, because they felt that they wanted to include as many people as they possibly could, ironically enough, and as they looked at the United States, it did not make sense to them that a single drop of Black blood would make someone Black, that they could not and did not accept. And in defining and creating their own hierarchy, they ended up coming up with a different configuration that actually encompassed more people into the Aryan side than would have been considered than the equivalent would have been in the United States.

Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper adapted it for the Web.

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It's More Than Racism: Isabel Wilkerson Explains America's 'Caste' System

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Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson says racism is an insufficient term for the systemic oppression of Black people in America. Instead, she prefers to refer to America as having a "caste" system. Wilkerson describes caste an artificial hierarchy that helps determine standing and respect, assumptions of beauty and competence, and even who gets benefit of the doubt and access to resources.

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Naturally Native: The first film about Native women created by Native women.

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Naturally Native: The first film about Native women created by Native women.

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The first mainstream feature film funded and produced entirely by Native American. Starring Valerie Red-Horse, Irene Bedard, Kimberly Norris Guerrero

Naturally Native follows the lives, loves, pain, joy and relationships of three sisters as they attempt to start their own business. Of American Indian ancestry, but adopted by white foster parents as young children, each sister has her own identity issues and each has chosen a very different career path.

Now dedicated to starting a Native cosmetic business, they attempt to overcome obstacles both in the business world and in the home. A touching love story of family and culture, Naturally Native also interweaves a subtle, but strong wake-up call regarding the treatment of Native people in corporate America. Naturally Native also provides some insight into tribal infrastructure and gaming issues.

A Red-Horse Native production, Naturally Native is the first film about Native American women written, directed, produced and starring Native American women. Co-directed by Valerie Red-Horse and Jennifer Wynne Farmer ("Pumpkin Man"), the film stars Valerie Red-Horse ("The Secret of Lizard Woman"), Irene Bedard ("Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee"), Kimberly Norris (TNT's Geronimo), Pato Hoffmann (TNT's Geronimo), Mark Abbott ("Squanto: A Warrior's Tale"), Collin Bernsen (Cover Me) and Mary Kay Place (The Rainmaker).

The film was written and produced by Valerie Red-Horse, executive produced by Dawn Jackson and Co-produced by Yvonne Russo.

The director of photography was Bruce Finn, the production designer was Kee Miller and the editor was Lorraine Salk. Naturally Native was shot in the Los Angeles area in October and November 1997 with a total of 19 shooting days.

"...Beautiful and intelligent siblings, Valerie Red-Horse, Irene Bedard and Kimberly Norris Guerrero deliver such strong, committed portrayals that the sisters and the issues they confront become very real. Stirring... heartfelt and illuminating film." Kevin Thomas, LOS ANGELES TIMES

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Naturally Native: The first film about Native women created by Native women.

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The first mainstream feature film funded and produced entirely by Native American. Starring Valerie Red-Horse, Irene Bedard, Kimberly Norris Guerrero Naturally Native follows the lives, loves, pain, joy and relationships of three sisters as they attempt to start their own business.

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Black And Biracial Americans Wouldn't Need To Code Switch If We Lived In A Post-Racial Society

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Black And Biracial Americans Wouldn't Need To Code Switch If We Lived In A Post-Racial Society

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Opinion

What the persistence of code-switching tells us about race, opportunities and making connections in America today.

Photo credit:Annapurna Pictures

Written by Chandra D.L. Waring, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

Boots Riley's film Sorry to Bother You does anything but apologize.

In telling the story of Cassius, a young black man who becomes an extraordinarily successful telemarketer after he starts using his "white voice," it showcases the magnitude of racial and class oppression.

Colloquially, Cassius' use of a "white voice" is known as code-switching, and the film highlights something that most African-Americans could probably tell you: The ability to code-switch is often a prerequisite to becoming a successful black person in America.

As a race scholar and sociologist, I've studied biracial Americans who engage in code-switching. I found that the ability to deftly code-switch has some real advantages. But it also has its fair share of pitfalls.

More broadly, it has led me to wonder what the persistence of code-switching tells us about race, opportunities and making connections in America today.

Adapting to the dominant culture
Code-switching is the practice of interacting in different ways depending on the social context, and it isn't limited to race. Most of us interact differently when hanging out with friends than we would during a job interview.

However, due in large measure to structural inequality and centuries of segregation, different cultural norms and ways of speaking have emerged among white and black Americans.

But because dominant culture is white, whiteness has been baked into institutions as natural, normal and legitimate. So there's much more incentive for people of color to code-swich - to adapt to the dominant culture to improve their prospects. White people rarely, if ever, feel this same pressure in their daily lives.

For this reason, the notion of a person of color deploying a "white voice" in the workplace (or anywhere in American society) isn't a new phenomenon.

Biracial people create somewhat of a different dynamic due to their backgrounds. Often they have to navigate groups that are either all white or all black. In each instance, they're outsiders who need to send certain signals - or avoid certain landmines - to fit in.

In my research, I explain how black and white biracial Americans deploy what I call " racial capital."

I interviewed 60 black-white biracial Americans and asked them how their lives were shaped by race. I soon realized that they seemed to be pulling from a repertoire of resources in order to break down racial barriers and establish in-group membership among whites and blacks.

I categorized this repertoire into four areas: knowledge, experiences, meanings and language.

The language category involves code-switching.

For example, one of my interviewees bragged about her ability to code-switch: "To some people, I'll say 'He was handsome!' versus 'He fine as hell, girl!' And I think I'm the baddest because I can talk to this group and that group in the same way that they talk."

But this doesn't always work. One person I interviewed explained that when he didn't dap properly at his predominately black barbershop, the other patrons laughed at him and treated him like an outsider.

Other times, people are "caught in the act," meaning people witness them interacting differently in ways that are shaped by race. This makes others question their authenticity, which ultimately jeopardizes any connection.

One participant in my study told me that he is perpetually self-conscious about code-switching out of fear that someone would witness his behavior and question his authenticity.

Another participant echoed his concern: "I feel almost bad sometimes when someone sees [me code-switch]," she said, "because they are like 'What's going on?' Especially my boyfriend - he'll be like 'Who are you?'"

And one person I spoke with said that it was "humiliating" when others saw him code-switch because people "just don't understand."

These are the costs of code-switching, and my participants continually risked being misunderstood and treated as outsiders.

Because of societal pressures, it's a risk black and biracial people are clearly willing to keep taking.

An oppressive script
Code-switching would not be necessary if white privilege hadn't been embedded in every social institution in American society for centuries. More and more, researchers have been able to show how racism has been rooted in how American society is organized.

In the workplace, black people face more obstacles to career advancement and a growing racial wage gap. In education, schools in poor black neighborhoods receive less resources, while teachers mete out disproportionately harsh disciplinary treatment for students of color. In politics, we see a lack of proportional representation among elected officials and recently witnessed the election of a president who routinely disparages people of color. In entertainment, there is a lack of diverse, nuanced, fully human characters of color. Even in religion, deities have been whitewashed.

Despite this documented reality, there are those who think that racism in America is a myth, that reverse racism is a threat or that our society is largely colorblind - a convenient way to avoid grappling with the severe discrepancy between societal values like equality and the reality of structural, intergenerational inequality.

I argue that there would be no need for racial capital if we were truly in a "post-racial" society - that is, a society where race carried no meaning.

Why would black and biracial Americans feel compelled to change the way they interact - the words they use - if race no longer mattered?

Although my study is about biracial Americans engaging in code-switching to bond with whites and blacks - and "Sorry to Bother You" is about a monoracial black man engaging in code-switching to perform well in his job - for everyone involved, code-switching serves the same purpose: to create a connection that will generate opportunities.

Yet the fact that code-switching is blatantly referred to as the "white voice" in the film underscores the power of whiteness - and the persistence of white privilege.

Even though we are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, we are seeing racial tensions rise. Rampant racial inequality is evidence that white privilege continues to prevail.

In the film, Cassius' manager fervently urges him to "stick to the script."

There is no room for individuality, nuance or variation, which precisely captures the oppression of being compelled to code-switch.

Whiteness is the script, and code-switching is merely a strategy to adapt.

Race relations will continue to deteriorate unless our society's script undergoes some serious revisions.

Chandra D.L. Waring, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Race and Ethnic Studies, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Black And Biracial Americans Wouldn't Need To Code Switch If We Lived In A Post-Racial Society - Blavity

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Written by Chandra D.L. Waring , University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Boots Riley's film Sorry to Bother You does anything but apologize. In telling the story of Cassius, a young black man who becomes an extraordinarily successful telemarketer after he starts using his "white voice," it showcases the magnitude of racial and class oppression.

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I've spent my entire adult life trying to unlearn the racism I grew up with in Dallas

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I've spent my entire adult life trying to unlearn the racism I grew up with in Dallas

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I grew up in Dallas in the 1950s and '60s, and I learned white racism at the kitchen table. I learned it on my segregated street, Channel Drive. I learned it in my segregated elementary school, F.P. Caillet. I learned it at the Majestic Theatre, where my grandmother took me to see How the West Was Won in 1962, where she explained that the upper balcony was "their special place, the Negroes," using the polite term of reference at the time.

I learned racism at my high school, where the football team's fight song was "Dixie" and the mascot was Johnny Reb. I suppose I learned it the same way as those panicky whites who pull a gun or call police on the clear and present danger of a black couple enjoying a picnic by the lake or a black co-ed dozing off during exam week in the common room of an Ivy League dorm.

I have spent my entire adult life trying to unlearn it, mainly through intercultural and interracial social justice action. For the past four years, I have been a key organizer of the movement in Dallas to take down Confederate statues and monuments. I started working on the issue after a cruel and ignorant boy, steeped in white supremacy, shot to death nine African Americans in a Bible study class at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, and after I saw his sneering picture online, holding a Confederate flag and a pistol.

Yet if I look in a mirror, my skin is as white as any "states' rights" enthusiast. Which of us is "whiter"? Jefferson Davis and John Brown were both white. Which tradition defines "whiteness"? The man who wrote The Turner Diaries, a fantasy of victorious whites in a race war, William Pierce, was white; so was the author of "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," Henry David Thoreau, whose essay has inspired protests against racism and colonialism from Selma to Mumbai. Which one embodies "whiteness"? The conservative crusader against the Equal Rights Amendment, Phyllis Schlafly, was white; so was the radical feminist poet, Adrienne Rich. Which one represents "white women"?

But even if "whiteness" is not monolithic, all whites benefit materially from white privilege. Can we reject that? Are we even conscious of it? Here is the inescapable dilemma for white people who want to be part of the work of liberation, who aspire to a life based on something other than the enjoyment and protection of white advantage.

I hate to see today's neo-Confederates and Nazis, or their less upfront brethren of the "I'm not a racist, but -" and "all lives matter" variety, claim the right to define what it means to be a white person.

I am trying to stand in a different tradition. Thoreau lived in Concord, Mass., a traditional New England town, proud of its iconic status in the founding of the nation. In the decades after 1830, Concord began to change. The Thoreau family became part of the abolitionist movement, and their home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Thoreau's mother Cynthia and sisters Sophia and Helen were founders of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1837, which hosted lectures by William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown. Helen Thoreau was a close friend of Douglass.

Henry regularly hid escaped slaves at his Walden Pond retreat or, under cover of night, took them to other safe houses. He would accompany them part of the way on northbound trains out of Concord, to make sure they weren't arrested. Other townspeople, their names lost to history, did the same.

After John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, Thoreau spoke out in support of Brown, helping to change his image from that of a madman to something like a saint. He also helped another Harper's Ferry leader, Francis Jackson Merriam, probably the most wanted man in the country at the time, escape to Canada. After Brown's execution, the Thoreaus and other Concord families took in his daughters, Annie and Sarah, and provided for their education.

Franklin Sanborn, who directed the school the girls attended, had helped plan the Harpers Ferry attack. When federal marshals arrested him April 3, 1860, almost the entire town physically blocked their carriage from leaving. The townspeople showered the carriage with rocks and threatened to free Concord's schoolmaster by force. The marshals left Concord that night without their prisoner.

We will never know the names of Thoreau's neighbors who saved a freedom fighter in a little town long ago, who defied the Fugitive Slave Act to shelter runaways from the House of Bondage. I recount their story because these anonymous people of conscience are - us. And we are them, today, if we claim their legacy. "Let your life," Thoreau wrote, "be a counter-friction to stop the machine."

Do not think I am making a special plea for "good white people." I am making a different case. I had the pleasure of speaking on a program with the comedian and social activist Dick Gregory just a few months before he died in 2017. I spoke first, about police brutality in Dallas, receiving a nice round of applause. Gregory stood up to speak, looked toward me, smiled and said, "I like this brother." I was beaming, of course, to be complimented by a hero of mine since high school. Then he pointed at me and said, "But I'm not giving him any applause. Hell, he's doing what he's supposed to be doing! He knows it. I like this brother, but I'm not giving him anything extra." He gave me instead the gift of discomfort.

It's often said that a chain has two ends, that the people at both ends are enchained. Maybe - but the experience is fundamentally different at each end. White racism is a curse to its victims, but it is a spell on its beneficiaries.

Who put this curse on me, and how can I end this oppression? That is a different question than, how did I fall under this spell, and how can I end this delusion? I struggle with these questions every day. I want to face the truth about myself and others.

But I can't wait for a complete and satisfying answer before I try in good faith to join with others, in action, to free ourselves from delusion and oppression.
John Fullinwider, co-founder of Mothers Against Police Brutality, is a longtime educator and community organizer in Dallas. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

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I've spent my entire adult life trying to unlearn the racism I grew up with in Dallas

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I grew up in Dallas in the 1950s and '60s, and I learned white racism at the kitchen table. I learned it on my segregated street, Channel Drive. I learned it in my segregated elementary school, F.P. Caillet.

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As An Eritrean Woman, Softening My Views On The Negativity Of Colorism Is Something I Can No Longer Do

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As An Eritrean Woman, Softening My Views On The Negativity Of Colorism Is Something I Can No Longer Do

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Community Submitted

The battle on both the inside and outside.

Photo credit:Anna Boyiazis

Recently, I was in Addis Ababa sitting in the well acclaimed Effoi's pizza parlor, chuckling at the menu as my eyes gazed upon the pulled pork pizza named "Diaspora." Though I cannot be sure, in that moment I could't help but link the name choice with the cultures general abhorrence for pork. In my head, I chuckled some more whilst taking bites into my vegetarian pizza that fed me to my heart's content.

Diaspora. That's the label we have been given here, and that is the label given to us there.

I'm sad to admit that I have always felt displaced whilst managing my dual identity. On one side, I am a British Londoner, and on the other I am an Eritrean woman who's parents come from two villages with several syllables between them.

On my trip to Addis, one moment that stood out for me the most was whilst I was at a hair salon with my cousin. We both complemented a hairdresser with rich chocolate skin. She shook her head, chuckled and said, "I am not beautiful. I am too black," in a matter-of-fact tone. Though I am no stranger to the experience of hearing Ethiopian and Eritrean people make colorists comments, I realized it was the first time I had heard it in English. Previously, I had always heard in said in Tigrinya (my native language), and perhaps that was how I was able to compartmentalize it. I had put it into the box of other dated and ignorant things I had become accustomed to hearing in Tigrinya.

"Sorry?" I questioned, as my heart sank. "My family told me I am too black, they all have skin colors like you two" she responded whilst smiling profusely, almost as though it were in efforts to reassure us that we still had a chance at being beautiful.

Again, hearing it in English really shook me to my core. Hearing it in the language in which I use to fight for people's rights and to share my views was powerful. In her suffering, I felt displaced and I felt extremely narcissistic for it. It wasn't that I didn't feel for this woman's self esteem, it was also just so incredibly sad that I couldn't transfer to her a different point of view. I felt extremely unsettled by the fact that this beautiful woman did not have access to the different beauty standards I did to realize that she is gorgeous beyond belief.

When I think about why I feel displaced in my culture, I feel it most because I do not subscribe to a lot of the ideas that are so shamelessly passed around. I am saddened that surrounding the very lackluster tightness on human rights, there is a rigorous and sturdy tightness on the idea of beauty and how a woman ought to look and be. I was sad that as I drove past copious amounts of young women standing on the corners of the streets as a sex workers, the biggest topic at hand was the lightness of your skin and the love of petite frames. If not for my British, Western experiences, I wouldn't be so sensitive to these matters. In the same breath, it causes me so much confusion to view my own home to be the root of such flawed views as I battle the daily discrimination of being a black woman in the UK. How can I be so infuriated at the unconscious bias and microaggressions I experience at work when my culture practices overt acts of aggression and I am, for the most part, complicit. To me, my mild reactions to colorism is my idea of being complicit.

Whilst drinking coffee another day, an older lady made a passing comment about the air in Addis Ababa "not being the type of air that darkens your skin" as a highlight of her trip to Addis Ababa. Whilst anyone with half a brain can see and understand that air has very little to do with how much you tan, I shrugged off her comment and gently responded to her in Tigrinya whilst I took another sip of my coffee. I didn't challenge her, nor did I question what she meant. Speaking Tigrinya took me back to my dormant self - the one who doesn't challenge or question problematic ideologies. When it is in Tigrinya, I do not fight back as hard. When I am my Eritrean self, I always feel disarmed.

The Diaspora community sits on the cusp of two conflicting worlds. We are made to feel like outsiders in the homes that we have created for ourselves, so we march, project and push for more. But when we return back home to our "real" homes, we are faced with issues that conflict with the values that having access to education has equipped us with, so we reduce ourselves, soften our views and sometimes stay mute for fear of standing out. Most times, speaking up against these issues is what further sets us apart. It is what makes us the name of pizza at Effoi's. The unfavored alternative.

So here I am, a child of the diaspora sitting in London on a Thursday night not sure who I am. But one thing the trip has taught me is to fight the same fight I fight in the Western world when I am around natives of my home. How can I attend Black Lives Matter marches whilst sitting mute whilst my aunties talk about how "dark" somebody is, how "coarse" somebodies hair is, how we are not "Tselim" (black), like the rest of Africa?

It is only when we start these journeys and we bring our two different ends closer together that I believe we will feel less so displaced and rather we will view ourselves as being layered, multifaceted human beings.

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How Interior Designer Ajia Monet Was Able To Defy The Odds And Create A Successful Business Out Of Her Passion

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As An Eritrean Woman, Softening My Views On The Negativity Of Colorism Is Something I Can No Longer Do - Blavity

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Recently, I was in Addis Ababa sitting in the well acclaimed Effoi's pizza parlor, chuckling at the menu as my eyes gazed upon the pulled pork pizza named "Diaspora." Though I cannot be sure, in that moment I could't help but link the name choice with the cultures general abhorrence for pork.

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What it's like to be a white woman named LaKiesha

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What it's like to be a white woman named LaKiesha

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what it's like to be a white woman named lakiesha - cnn

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What it's like to be a white woman named LaKiesha

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When you're a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman named LaKiesha, life can get complicated. This Ohio woman with a name that blurs racial boundaries says people often treat her as an imposter.

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Check out a teaser trailer for Seventy Years of Blackness: Untangling Race and Adoption. 

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Check out a teaser trailer for Seventy Years of Blackness: Untangling Race and Adoption. 

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I'm reading an email from a white man. It is about 15 paragraphs of poorly written vitriol, telling me in far too many words about how wrong I am. About everything. I'm wrong about feminism. It's unnecessary. And by the way, the wage gap doesn't exist. I'm even more wrong about racism. There is no more racism. It's been over a very long time and maybe if people like me would just get over the past we'd be motivated to get off of our asses and get real jobs. As proof of how wrong I am, he's included links to youtube videos made by other white men saying pretty much the exact same thing as him. He has also inserted a few graphs. He consistently calls me "Ms. Oluo" and reiterates a few times that he "means no disrespect" but it is clear from his insistence that I read all of his horrible paragraphs and that I "learn a little more" about "my people" that he means every bit of disrespect his poorly phrased sentences are capable of conveying and more.

He suggests that I try being "less angry" as if it is not anger that propelled him through a google search of my name, to my website, to my contact page, then to his email, and then through the writing of a billion paragraphs complete with charts and footnotes. He says "less angry" as if I am not currently adding his email into a file with countless other long-winded missives, dismissals and violent threats from white men who decided to take the time out of their day to let me know in sometimes very disturbing ways that they need me to be "less angry."

In closing he puts his full name and title. He's a woodcarver and personal trainer. And, apparently, expert on race and gender studies.

Somebody needs to stop telling these white boys that they can be anything they put their mind to.

I say that in jest. A lot. But I'm only half joking. Actually, I'm not joking at all. Somebody really does need to stop telling these white boys that they can be anything, and that they can have everything. Because it is not true, and it was never true, and we're the ones who have to pay when they find that out.

Angry black woman.

I'm the angry black woman. I'm the shouting, take no shit, finger-wagging, side-eye giving black woman. I am angry about a lot of things. I'm angry about police brutality and systemic poverty and the school to prison pipeline. I'm angry because the community I love is threatened daily and has been for hundreds of years.

There is righteous anger born of love. Born of the desire to protect those that you love and the life that you love. Anger born of the need to hold tight what little joy and beauty you've been able to find in a hostile world.

I was never told by this society that I could be anything and I could have everything. I was always told to settle for less. And my anger and the anger of so many other marginalized people has always lied in that reality. The truth of the situation.

But white male anger is steeped in a lie. It is fighting for what they were never going to have. For the promises that were never going to be fulfilled. White men are the only people allowed to fully believe in the American dream and perhaps that is the cruelest thing to have ever been done to them and the world that has to suffer their anger as they refuse to let go of a fantasy that we were never allowed to imagine ourselves in.

White men who shoot up schools and workplaces are not murderous monsters, or mindless thugs. They are "lovesick" or "misunderstood" or "tragic." Hundreds of thousands of words are dedicated to finding the reasons why someone with so much promise could have fallen so far.

But how much promise was there really?

How much promise is there in a life where you are told that all you have to do is exist in order to inherit a kingdom. How much promise is there in a life where your mediocrity is constantly applauded and every hero looks like you and every love interest is a supermodel, but at the end of the day you will be working in a cubicle with everyone else and your only consolation is that you will be making $1.50 an hour more than the women and people of color in your office?

How much promise is there in being told that your culture is the only one worth knowing, and that your language is the only one worth speaking? How much promise is there in never having to say you are sorry, never having to say you are wrong, never having to say you don't know?

Many Americans love to laugh at the ridiculousness of monarchy. At these backwards countries who believe that simply by being born, these bluebloods deserve to rule entire populations. But what is white male supremacy in America if not an overabundance of kingdom-less monarchs who can't even speak French?

A few weeks ago I was sitting at a stoplight and realized that I wasn't quite as sure how to get home as I'd initially thought. As I punched the "home" button on my Waze app on my phone I heard shouting to the right of my car. I looked over and there was a white man in an SUV waving his arms at me and yelling. He was furious that I'd dared to look at my phone in my car. He was oblivious to the fact that I was trying to actually be a safer driver by knowing where I was actually going. He just knew that he had pulled up next to me and I had my phone in my hand and he had to do something. He leaned out of the window of his SUV and spittle flew out of his mouth as he angrily shouted.

I looked straight ahead as he screamed, becoming angrier and angrier. I was afraid that he might be armed, he seemed out of control. The light turned green and I pulled forward, but the man next to me was too busy yelling to notice right away. Then, angry that I had pulled forward before him, he sped ahead with such force that I could hear his tires squeeling. He peeled in front of me and then had to swerve out of the way at the last minute to avoid hitting a car that was stalled around the corner. I shook my head in wonder at the absurdity of it all.

I wrote about the weird event on facebook, figuring if anything, it would be entertaining to my friends. Within a few seconds a commenter, a white woman, said, "Let me guess, this was a white man?" She had her own story about being yelled at for driving in a way that a white man disapproved of. Soon, many others were sharing their stories. Women who had been threatened. One woman who had been yelled at by the same man twice on two different occasions, a man who apparently yelled at women so often that he was unable to recognize her the second time. One woman talked about a rock being thrown at her car because a white man didn't like how she drove. One white man tried to drive a friend of mine off the road. Another rammed a woman's car.

The road was for men. It was supposed to be theirs like so much else was. And if they couldn't boss women around at work, if they didn't have a wife at home to scream at, goddamnit they were going to take control of the roads.

"Nobody cares about white men," is a sentence I hear far too often. In facebook comments, tweets, article responses, emails, the op-eds of major national papers. Nobody cares about the white men left behind. Nobody cares about the white men who are collecting unemployment, or working middle management, or not getting regular blow jobs. Nobody cares about the white men whose hair is thinning and dad-bod is settling in and they never got to walk into a party with a hot girl on their arm and now it's too late. Nobody cares about the white men who have to learn new terms like "privilege" or "cultural appropriation" or "social justice" - terms that don't do anything to explain why they aren't rich or powerful or happy.

But of course, everyone cares about white men. Do you want a movie about what it feels like to be a middle-class white man who has never gotten to skinnydip naked in the middle of the night with a hot girl? Oh it's an entire genre. Do you want a really long think piece about how hearing the phrase "black lives matter" and having to go to community college instead of Harvard even though you only had a 2.3 gpa turned you into a neo-Nazi? If someone hasn't written it yet, they will. Do you want a great American novel about how being a white dude working a secure, middle-management job with full health and retirement benefits makes you want to open fire at the next company potluck? Pretty sure your local librarian can point you to a few dozen.

And in all these tales, these articles and movies and songs - white men are angry. Justifiably angry, because they were supposed to be so much more than this. But nobody explains why.

Why were they supposed to be so much more?

Why were they all supposed to have powerful or rewarding work? Why were they all supposed to have loving and beautiful wives? Why were they all supposed to be exempt from recessions or layoffs or just plain old bad luck?

Why were they supposed to have everything when everybody can see that there has never been enough everything to go around?

Being rejected by girls will be a valid reason as to why a white man drives his car into a group of women. Being laid off will be a valid reason as to why a white man opens fire in an office. Being "frustrated" will be a valid reason as to why a white man leaves bombs on the doorsteps of black families. Being unpopular will be a valid reason as to why a white man shoots up a school.

But living in systemic poverty with no job prospects won't be a valid reason for why a black man sells loose cigarettes on the street. Being frustrated by constant harassment by police officers won't be a valid reason for why a black woman refuses to put out her cigarette at a traffic stop. Living in a neighborhood with no jobs, no infrastructure, underfunded schools, and no dependable police presence won't ever be considered a valid reason for higher crime rates in black and brown neighborhoods.

Because we were never supposed to expect any of those things. We were never supposed to expect jobs or police protection or investment in our communities or quality education. We were never supposed to expect to see ourselves in movies or read about our heroism in novels.

Whatever there was to expect - we weren't supposed to expect any of it to come to us.

And white men expected more of it to come to them than ever existed.

And as I watch white men scramble to justify the brutality they visit upon the rest of the world in rage over a life that they think they lost, even though it never was and was never going to be theirs I sometimes wonder what is worse?

Having to fight to get what you've been told you have no right to ask for? Having to fight for your very humanity and your right to exist?

Or fighting to punish those who you think stole something from you that never actually existed and throwing your comforts and privileges to the ground in disgust because they insult the greatness you'll never achieve?

I don't know. I mean - I do know. Because the rage that ruins these white men's joy and consumes their mediocre beings and turns them violent will turn on me and countless other black people, brown people, disabled people, queer people, trans people, and women of every demographic. Because while I have to fight for my life and the lives of my community members I will also have to fight an angry white man who thinks that somehow I, or someone like me, got that bit of success or talent or visibility that was destined for him. That somehow, while dealing with micro-aggressions, macro-aggressions, a racist school system, education system and entertainment system - while trying to stay healthy with a racist healthcare system and stay employed in a racist employment system - I had time to steal the greatness that he was supposed to be and....I don't know... smoke it or eat it or something. Because a white man would rather murder strangers who look like me than admit he got conned. And other white men would rather call it justified than ridiculous and pathetic.

And it is ridiculous and pathetic.

Maybe instead of telling white men they can be anything and they can have everything, we should start asking why they ever thought that everything was there to be had and why they ever thought they deserved it in the first place.

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The Anger of the White Male Lie - Ijeoma Oluo - Medium

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I'm reading an email from a white man. It is about 15 paragraphs of poorly written vitriol, telling me in far too many words about how wrong I am. About everything. I'm wrong about feminism. It's unnecessary. And by the way, the wage gap doesn't exist. I'm even more wrong about racism.

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Racism ‘won’t go away’ even if we’re all mixed-race in the future

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Racism ‘won’t go away’ even if we’re all mixed-race in the future

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The idea of 'divide and conquer' harks back thousands of years.

Whether it is by gender, class, wealth or race, humans love walling themselves into distinct categories then using those categories to create hierarchies.

In the case of race, this hierarchical distinction ended up with slavery, countless programmes of ethnic cleansing and the retention of 'othering' based on the colour of skin even to the present day.

But what happens if we take away these racial categories that divide us into subgroups?

If, instead of defining as black, white, Asian or any other singular category, we defined ourselves as a little bit of everything, would it herald the dawn of a more accepting, 'post-racial' age?

And would that mean racism would end?

The mixed-race population is the fastest-growing ethnic group in the UK with 2.2% of the population now identifying as having mixed heritage, up from 1.2% in 2001.

International migration is increasing at between 1% and 2% every year, and over 240 million people are living in a country different from where they were born.

The latest projections suggest that by 2050, up to 30% of the UK population will be from ethnic minorities and the number of people who identify as mixed-race in the UK could rise to 4.2%.

Global travel has never been more accessible and improving tolerance has allowed for the relative normalisation of interracial, heterosexual marriage - in this country at least.

One in five younger people in the UK say that they disapprove of mixed-race marriages compared to one in four aged 55 and over - according to a study conducted by anti-racist organisation People In Harmony.

But will multiraciality really be the end of racism in the future?

To answer that we need to understand where racism comes from.

Scientists generally agree that the concept of race is not grounded in biology or genetics but relies on cultural ideology rather than science.

But that doesn't mean that race doesn't exist.

The impact is still very real, with racist laws still in place in some countries.

It becomes all the stranger when geneticists argue that all non-Africans descend from a few thousand homo-sapiens who left Africa around 60,000 years ago (though the exact date is now disputed).

But if racism is a man-made social structure, does that mean that man can also destroy it?

Before we can think about the future of racism, we have to deep dive into the past.

'The origins of racism are rooted in colonialism so we are going back to the 15 th century,' Prof Peter Wade, professor of social anthropology at the University Of Manchester, tells Metro.co.uk.

'Prior to that, there were already lots of ideas about blood in the sense of ancestry.

'In the 14 th century, people in Spain and Portugal who had Jewish or Muslim ancestry were discriminated against, legally.

'They were then transmitted to the New World when the Spanish and the Portuguese travelled there and began to take on ideas about the inferiority of black, African blood and indigenous blood too.

'The transatlantic slave trade, the conquering of Indigenous peoples, the genocide of Indigenous peoples and so on, exacerbated those kinds of beliefs.'

But how has a set of ideologies formed seven centuries ago endured until today? Prof Wade says that the concept of racism isn't rigid.

'Racism as an ideology or the set of structures that create racialised inequality change all the time,' he says.

'Now that colonialism no longer exists and the transatlantic slave trade doesn't exist, nevertheless, racism is able to adapt to different kinds of economic and political scenarios.'

This slippery adaptability is the tricky thing about racism and makes it hard to predict when or how it could ever be eradicated in the future.

It has shifted many times before.

The Irish and the Italians were once groups seen as distinct from white people but, as they sought to distance themselves from black people, they were ultimately accepted as white.

In the US, the perceived threat of becoming a majority non-white nation coincides with a rise in hate crimes for three consecutive years.

The goal posts are always moving in favour of whoever holds the most power at that particular moment in history.

And studies have shown that this fear of a loss of power is causing white Americans to develop 'negative attitudes' towards people of other races.

The best of The Future Of Everything (story continues below)

Progressive campaigners are looking for an end to hate crimes and racial definitions.

Removing binary racial categorisations is ambitious but, if that happens, will another arbitrary ranking system just take its place?

The idealised view from supporters of a truly mixed-race future is a population where everyone is mixed to a similar degree, removing the need or desire for racial hierarchies.

There are parts of the world where this 'mixing' has happened already.

'The unequivocal lesson from Latin America is that even when everyone is mixed, racism doesn't go away,' explains Prof Wade, who has written books on race in Latin America.

'In Latin American societies, mixture has been going on for 500 years. A majority of people in these societies would recognise themselves as mixed.

'Nevertheless, we still see very clear racism, simply because some people see themselves as, and are, more European and less black or indigenous than others. Not everybody is equally mixed.

'In a theoretical future scenario where everyone is mixed to the same extent, and we were all the same shade of brown - racism might still exist, but it would take a very different form.'

Even if everyone is mixed, human beings will never look exactly the same.

Prof Wade says even the most minuscule differences are enough to generate racial categorisations.

'Human beings are incredibly attentive to fine degrees of difference,' he says.

'We are always going to be ready to attribute significance to those differences and to make hierarchical distinctions, so that some people can claim superiority based on exactly what they look like, in terms of familiar aspects like skin colour, hair type or nose shape.'

Interracial families and mixed-race children are frequently held up as bastions of a liberal, progressive future, but the reality is that mixed-race societies can also uphold racism.

Outside of Latin America, there aren't many - if any - countries that claim to have a mixed-race majority population, but some Caribbean countries have a large proportion of mixed inhabitants.

Nearly a quarter (24.2%) of the population of Trinidad and Tobago identify as mixed.

But, like in Cuba, Brazil and the Dominican Republic, racism still persists in these countries.

There are high levels of anti-black racism and state violence in Trinidad and Tobago today.

Despite the evidence against it, the promise of a mixed, 'post-racial' future is still alluring for many.

Lise Funderburg, author of Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity, thinks 'an opportunity' to end racism can be found with multi-racial individuals were

'If we can't slot people into familiar categories, perhaps we'll be forced to reconsider existing definitions of race and identity, presumptions about who is us and who is them,' she wrote in National Geographic

'Perhaps we'll all end up less parsimonious about who we feel connected to.'

The implication is that the very presence of mixed-race people can somehow aid conflict resolution and reduce society's need to compete, dominate and divide.

There is in fact evidence that supports the possible social benefits that mixed-race populations can help to achieve.

Research found that white people are more open to discussing race-related issues after exposure to a mixed-race person.

But can these 'qualities' really help to eradicate racism in the future? Or is that a dangerous rhetoric?

Academics think the idea that we 'won't see colour' if everyone in the future is a similar shade of brown, is far too simplistic - that it ignores the causes and implications of racism that run so much deeper than skin tone.

'I think the idea that a growing mixed-race population will offer some kind of cure for racism is highly idealistic and even dangerous,' explains Dr Remi Joseph-Salisbury, sociology professor at Manchester University.

'Such ideas belie the deep-rooted nature of racism, and run counter to the historical and contemporary lived experiences of mixed-race people.

'The desire to romanticise mixed-race people as a solution to society's racial ills is not reflective of reality. It is only reflective of the kind of stories that society would like to believe about itself.

'To bring an end to racism, society would really need to grapple with its past and to consider how its institutions systematically disadvantage racially minoritised communities.

'This is a far greater task than merely celebrating Meghan Markle.'

Dr Joseph-Salisbury thinks that the superficial idolisation of mixed-race people could also have damaging consequences for other minority groups.

'Whilst compliments on our hair and skin-tone might appear benign, they are tied to a wider system of anti-blackness that pathologises those with darker skin-tones and tighter hair,' he says.

'Put more simply, if we have the good hair, by implication, who has the bad hair?'

A lot of hopes are being pinned on mixed-race communities. Is it fair or even remotely realistic to ask interracial families to carry the burden of racial resolution?

The increased visibility of the mixed-race population may have the potential to 'positively shift racial attitudes' but, as study author Duke University psychologist Sarah E. Gaither has said, 'trying to ignore race effectively means trying to ignore racism, which lets the current racial inequities continue'.

If that's the case, more beige babies won't mean less racism.

Experts think that in order for us to move forward, we need an honest, rigorous dissection of our past, and a reevaluation of the social systems in place today that still actively oppress millions of minorities.

'One school of thought says that capitalist society, and also liberalism, liberal democracy, is inherently a society that depends on inequality,' Prof Wade says.

'In its very constitution, inequality is rooted in there.

'If you have a capitalist society then you're always going to have inequality, and racism feeds on that.

'And in that scenario, if you want to get rid of racism - and sexism and patriarchy - then you have to overturn capitalism and have a completely different kind of society.'

Clearly, this is a big ask.

And what of humanity's ever-present need to divide and separate itself?

Separating out all the issues into right and wrong will never be a case of black and white.

The Future Of Everything

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Racism 'won't go away' even if we're all mixed-race in the future

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The idea of 'divide and conquer' harks back thousands of years. Whether it is by gender, class, wealth or race, humans love walling themselves into distinct categories then using those categories to create hierarchies.

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Japanese store apologizes for ad saying “women who want biracial children” should wear kimono

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Japanese store apologizes for ad saying “women who want biracial children” should wear kimono

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Japan is a country that continues to hold on proudly to its cultural traditions, but according to a controversial poster that resurfaced recently, there are times when the country holds on to some archaic ways of thinking too.

The poster in question actually first appeared in 2016, but after it was shared on Twitter this week, it quickly became a talking point once again. Created to advertise the wares of kimono retailer Ginza Iseyoshi, there are four posters in the series, with several containing controversial messages.

銀座いせよしのポスターの昭和臭...本当にこれが東京コピーライターズクラブの新人賞？冗談...ハーフはペットじゃないし着物は自分のために着るんだよ。ドアを開けてくれた人の好意を「自動ドア」なんて失礼な言い方しないでくれ。「年収の高い男なら... twitter.com/i/web/status/1...
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回遊魚ながよ (@221BNagayo) June 19, 2019

The poster that's causing the most controversy online is the one that shows a kimono-clad woman crossing an intersection. At the top of the poster is the message: "For those who want to give birth to a haafu child", with haafu being the Japanese word used to describe a "half-Japanese" biracial person.

銀座いせよしの広告、女性は産む機械だという思想が政治家だけでなく、社会の隅々まで、女性を相手に商売する人々にまで浸透しているということがよくわかる https://t.co/RLKzxOrkkU
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YH (@90934384) June 19, 2019

The fact that half-Japanese children are being viewed as a hot commodity or accessory has angered people online, and the fact that an advertising campaign would support this kind of thinking has people incensed. The implication of this message also suggests that wearing a kimono will help women to attract a foreign man.

Adding to the anger online is the fact that two other ads in the series also play up to the notion that a woman's style of dress will open doors for her when it comes to netting a rich man. The poster pictured on the left in the tweet below says, "When you wear kimono, doors become automatic sliding doors".

これ今気づいたんだけど他のポスターもやばいな...... 「着物を着ると、扉が全て自動ドアになる」 「ナンパしてくる人は減る。ナンパしてくる人の年収は上がる」 男性のことも女性のことも馬鹿にしてる https://t.co/FBxWXQAdFj
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望子 (@pansypopjasmine) June 19, 2019

And the one below says: "The number of men who hit on you will decrease. The income of those who do hit on you will increase".

銀座いせよしの2016年のポスターとキャッチコピーはハーフの子を産みたいあなたへの火力が強いけどこれも相当気持ち悪い、着物着て歩くと男避けしつつ金持ちには見初められるよってことですか？ https://t.co/xVjgglYsKo
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食パン🍞 (@bczel8bczel8) June 19, 2019

These messages, which focus on dressing to attract a man rather than for one's own self, had people wondering who was responsible for the copy on the posters. However, people were left reeling when they discovered that the ads were actually written by a female copywriter, who even won a copywriting award for the posters from Tokyo Copywriter's Club in 2016.

私達はペットでも人形でもありません。 この屈辱を想像出来ますか？ もううんざりです。 iseyoshi.info/blog/2016/06/p... https://t.co/W9Oo155pOh
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GRAY PRIDE (@graypridejapan) June 19, 2019

The backlash online was intense, prompting Ginza Iseyoshi to publish a formal apology on their website, which read:

"We have received a number of comments regarding the posters put out by our company in 2016. These posters were intended to attract the attention of people who had no previous interest in kimono, however, we are taking your opinions seriously and will use them as a reference when it comes to future marketing campaigns. We would also like to inform you that we have removed the posters from this page."

While it's disappointing that the ads were ever published in the first place, it's good to see that the company, which was founded in 1879, has chosen to listen to the women of today and change their outdated ways of thinking to align more with the current times. And here's hoping more people realise that having a biracial child in Japan is far more complicated than simply adding a cool accessory to your wardrobe - after all, as Naomi Osaka will tell you, it's not easy being half-Japanese.

Source: Net Lab
Featured image:Twitter/@90934384
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Japanese store apologises for ad saying "women who want biracial children" should wear kimono

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Japan is a country that continues to hold on proudly to its cultural traditions, but according to a controversial poster that resurfaced recently, there are times when the country holds on to some archaic ways of thinking too.

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#BBQBecky and the Crime of Living While Black

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#BBQBecky and the Crime of Living While Black

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#BBQBecky and the Crime of Living While Black

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Baratunde Thurston analyzes why white Americans keep calling the police on black Americans for drinking coffee, walking to work and just...

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Post by TED.

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When White People Are Uncomfortable, Black People Are Silenced

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When White People Are Uncomfortable, Black People Are Silenced

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When White People Are Uncomfortable, Black People Are Silenced

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Social media makes it easy for those who don’t want to hear the truth.

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P&G GOES FROM ‘THE TALK’ TO ‘THE LOOK’ TO ILLUSTRATE THE UNCONSCIOUS BIAS THAT PLAGUES BLACK MEN

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P&G GOES FROM ‘THE TALK’ TO ‘THE LOOK’ TO ILLUSTRATE THE UNCONSCIOUS BIAS THAT PLAGUES BLACK MEN

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Mumbai doctor commits suicide because of colleagues’ caste discrimination

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Mumbai doctor commits suicide because of colleagues’ caste discrimination

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Payal Salman Tadvi, 26, was pursuing post-graduate studies in obstetrics and gynecology. Her harassers, three doctors, have been suspended. People should look upon each other as human beings, says CBCI's Office for Dalits.

New Delhi (AsiaNews) - A young Mumbai doctor took her own life because she could no longer take the insults of her colleagues, who denigrated her because of her tribal origins.

The victim, Payal Salman Tadvi, was 26 years old, and belonged to the Tadvi Bhil Adivasi, a listed disadvantaged community.

She worked at the state-run BYL Nair Hospital and was a second-year post-graduate student in obstetrics and gynecology.

Speaking to AsiaNews, Fr Z Devasagayaraj, national secretary of the Office For Scheduled Castes/Backward Classes of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI), said: "We condemn the insults uttered in any place to denigrate the caste origins of people. "

"India needs to grow, to mature. I'm not just talking about economic growth, but above all social growth. It must learn to be truly inclusive, to respect others. If you don't look at others as human beings, you will only see them as a member of a caste, a Dalit, a Muslim or a tribal. This is a discrimination by birth."

The doctor's suicide took place on 22 May. her desperate gesture opens an unprecedented window on caste discrimination even among the higher echelons of Indian society.

Caste divisions were formally abolished by the 1950 Constitution, but the discrimination of and tribal groups is still rooted in a caste mindset.

Once known as "untouchables", Dalits are given the humblest and the most degrading jobs, such as the manual collection of excrement.

According to government data, India's disadvantaged communities number around 201 million out of a total population of 1.2 billion.

The victim's mother said her daughter had long suffered from the insults of other doctors, in particular three senior colleagues.

"Whenever she used to speak to me on phone, she would say that these three (senior doctors) people torture me as I belong to a tribal community, use casteist slurs," she explained.

Dr Salman Tadvi, assistant medical professor at the R. N. Cooper Hospital in Mumbai, is the victim's husband. They married in 2016.

His wife's harassment began immediately after her arrival at the hospital. Her colleagues "would go to the toilet and wipe their feet on her mattress and litter it. When she would be away, they would taunt her that she was spending time with her husband."

The Maharashtra Association of Resident Doctors (MARD) suspended the three accused: Hema Ahuja, Bhakti Mehar and Ankita Khandilwal. Yesterday some student organisations, including the Students Federation of India, organised a demonstration to demand justice.

"We are surprised that such discrimination occurred in a large city like Mumbai, the commercial capital of India," said Fr Devasagayaraj. "Rising intolerance is not a good sign for the country."

For the Catholic leader, the "caste mindset is widespread both in cities and rural areas and is creating a new form of fundamentalist way of thinking, understood not only as religious intolerance, but also as a caste idea of ​​hierarchy".

The positive thing "is that civil society has been stirred to condemn atrocities against human beings, including Dalits. What used to be a sporadic incident today has become the order of the day.

"People are losing hope, but we must not stop speaking out and expressing our condemnation. We must focus above all on education in schools. This is where we teach respect for others, conveying to children the value of equality "

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INDIA Mumbai doctor commits suicide because of colleagues' caste discrimination

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Payal Salman Tadvi, 26, was pursuing post-graduate studies in obstetrics and gynecology. Her harassers, three doctors, have been suspended. People should look upon each other as human beings, says CBCI's Office for Dalits. New Delhi (AsiaNews) - A young Mumbai doctor took her own life because she could no longer take the insults of her colleagues, who denigrated her because of her tribal origins.

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Hispanics with darker skin are more likely to experience discrimination than those with lighter skin

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Hispanics with darker skin are more likely to experience discrimination than those with lighter skin

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About six-in-ten U.S. Hispanic adults (58%) say they have experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity, though their experiences vary by skin color, according to a recently released Pew Research Center survey.

About two-thirds of Hispanics with darker skin colors (64%) report they have experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly regularly or from time to time, compared with half of those with a lighter skin tone. These differences in experiences with discrimination hold even after controlling for characteristics such as gender, age, education and whether they were born in the U.S. or abroad.

Latinos with darker skin are more likely than those with lighter skin to report a specific incident of discrimination. A majority of Latinos with a darker skin color (55%) say that, because of their race or ethnicity, people have acted as if they were not smart, compared with 36% of Latinos with a lighter skin color. Similarly, about half of Latinos with darker skin (53%) say they have been subject to slurs or jokes, compared with about a third of those with a lighter skin color (34%).

Regardless of skin color, Hispanic experiences with discrimination can differ from those of other groups. Hispanics with darker skin tones are less likely than black Americans to say that people have acted as if they were suspicious of them, or to report having been unfairly stopped by police. Even so, comparable shares of Hispanics with darker skin tones and black Americans say they have been subject to slurs or jokes.

By contrast, Hispanics with a lighter skin tone have had experiences with discrimination that are similar to those of non-Hispanic whites. Among both groups, about a quarter say people have acted as if they were suspicious of them, roughly a third have been subject to slurs or jokes, and about two-in-ten (19%) say they have been treated poorly in hiring, pay or promotion. It is important to note that about half of Hispanics (52%) identify their race as white, a share that increases to about two-thirds (68%) among those with the lightest skin color.

While darker skin color is associated with more frequent experiences with discrimination among Hispanics, this link is less clear among black adults. For blacks, gender and education had a greater effect on their experiences with specific incidents of discrimination than their skin color.

The survey also asked Latinos what race people would ascribe to them if they walked past them on the street. About seven-in-ten (71%) say others see them as Hispanic or Latino, while two-in-ten (19%) say white and less than 5% mention other races. Latinos who say others view them as nonwhite are more likely than those who say they are viewed as white to say they have experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity (62% vs. 50%). Latinos who say others see them as nonwhite are also more likely to say they have experienced people acting as if they were suspicious of them or as if they were not smart.

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Hispanics with darker skin are more likely to experience discrimination than those with lighter skin

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About six-in-ten U.S. Hispanic adults (58%) say they have experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity, though their experiences vary by skin color, according to a recently released Pew Research Center survey.

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These Americans share what it feels like to be told: 'Go back to where they came from'

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These Americans share what it feels like to be told: 'Go back to where they came from'

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people's experiences of being told to 'go back to where you came from'  - cnn

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What it feels like to be told to 'go back' to where you came from

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Over the weekend, President Donald Trump attacked a group of progressive Democratic congresswomen by sarcastically suggesting that "they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came."

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Latinos Face Discrimination When Up for Promotion, Even in the Military

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Latinos Face Discrimination When Up for Promotion, Even in the Military

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Share On Social!

Latinos historically face discrimination in the hiring and promotion processes.

A few years ago, a Harvard study found that one-third of Latinos say they were discriminated against when applying for jobs (33%) or when being paid equally or considered for promotions (32%).

Now a recent report says discrimination extends to military promotions.

Latinos Rarely Promoted to High Military Ranks

Latinos have a "proud and indeed enviable" record of military service.

Today, the Latino share of the active-duty force has continued to rise. In 2015, 12% of all active-duty personnel were Latino, up from 9% in 2004, according to Pew Research.

But between 1995 and 2016, only one Latino had become a three-star general, even as the number of active-duty Latino officers more than doubled, from 6,117 to 15,033, during that period, according to a study by Casaba Group, a Latino veterans group, reports.

Across the services, diversity increases as rank decreases, particularly for Latinos.

A Latino former Air Force pilot told The Hill that a cultural tendency among Latinos to avoid self-promotion has also played a role in keeping Latinos away from the top posts. The study also evaluates professional positions within Department of Defense agencies, including the Pentagon and, according to the Latino pilot, "the Army has been slow to respond when confronted with the issue."

A study suggested that naval aviators also say that they were kicked out of training due to racial bias, according to military.com.

"[The aviators] allege the subjectivity of flight evaluations and the utter lack of diversity in fighter aviation contribute to an atmosphere of implicit or unconscious bias that leaves minority aviators on the margin at a greater disadvantage than their white counterparts," according to the report.

The issue of "white nationalism" also persists.

A poll of Military Times readers found prevalence of racist views among troops.

"About 22 percent of service members who participated in the survey last fall said they have seen signs of white nationalism or racist ideology within the armed forces," according to the report. "Among non-white service members in the poll, incidents of racism and racist ideology increased from 42 percent in 2017 to more than half those surveyed in 2018."

Discrimination in Promotions in Other Fields?

In the 2017 Harvard study, significant differences occurred between low-income and high-income Latinos in personal experiences of discrimination.

Latinos who earned $25,000 or less per year are more than twice as likely as their higher-earning peers to report personal experiences of discrimination when it comes to being considered for promotions.

Non-immigrant Latinos are more likely than immigrant Latinos to report various experiences of individual discrimination. This includes slurs and negative assumptions about their race or ethnicity.

In education, 60% of Latino faculty say racial discrimination on the job is a source of stress, according to a new report from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Regarding recruitment and treatment of women and professors of color, half of respondents in the survey said that their institutions placed a high value on promoting gender diversity in the faculty and administration.

Almost half of Latino/a faculty (42.5%) and 39.2% of Black faculty agreed that there was a lot of racial conflict at their college or university.

In contrast, only 25% of White faculty shared the same perception about racial conflict.

The Future

Latino will power the U.S. economy to a better future. By 2020, U.S. Latino purchasing power will top $1.7 trillion, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth.

As the Latino population continues to grow, so will its presence in the military.

Iraq War veteran Rep. Anthony Brown said more needs to be done to address discrimination in the military, according to the Military Times.

"White nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and extremism have no place in United States and cannot be allowed to spread in the armed forces," Brown said, according to the report.

"These hateful ideologies run counter to the values and ideals of our nation - principles every soldier, sailor, airman, and marine are fighting for. As we confront threats around the globe, we cannot sacrifice the values that makes us a shining example for the world."

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Latinos Face Discrimination When Up for Promotion, Even in the Military | Salud America

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Share On Social! Latinos historically face discrimination in the hiring and promotion processes. A few years ago, a Harvard study found that one-third of Latinos say they were discriminated against when applying for jobs (33%) or when being paid equally or considered for promotions (32%). Now a recent report says discrimination extends to military promotions.

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Overcoming Mental Health Stigma in the Latino Community

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Overcoming Mental Health Stigma in the Latino Community

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Some Latinos view mental illness as a sign of weakness. Others think it's a personal issue to be kept quiet. Others fear being labeled "loco," Spanish for "crazy."

Mental health disorders are prevalent among Latino ethnic groups in the U.S. The Hispanic Health and Nutrition Examination Survey reported that 28 percent of Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. had depression symptoms. So did 13 percent of Mexican Americans and 10 percent of Cuban Americans. ¹

However, only 20 percent of Latinos with a mental disorder talk about it with a primary care physician, according to the U.S. Surgeon General's report, Mental Health: Culture, Race, and Ethnicity. ² And only 10 percent pursue treatment from a mental health provider.

"Mental health issues have a stigma ³ in the Latino community," says psychiatrist Diana Lorenzo, MD, of Cleveland Clinic's Center for Behavioral Health. "Many Latinos would prefer to ignore these conditions over talking about them openly."

Originally from Argentina, Dr. Lorenzo completed her psychiatry residency at Cleveland Clinic. She joined the Cleveland Clinic staff in 2016, when she began leading the mental health care of Spanish-speaking patients at the Hispanic Clinic at Cleveland Clinic Lutheran Hospital, located in a Cleveland neighborhood with a large Latino population. In a little over a year, her caseload has increased more than 16-fold.

Dr. Lorenzo credits five factors - outlined below - in helping her improve Cleveland-area Latinos' access to mental health care.

1) Removing the language barrier

Communication is essential to diagnosing mental disorders, so understanding what patients are expressing is critical. Using an interpreter may help, but a psychiatrist who speaks the patient's native language - and can interpret cultural nuances and jargon - is often most effective, says Dr. Lorenzo.

2) Collaborating with primary care physicians (PCPs)

Since Latinos with a mental health concern are twice as likely to consult a PCP rather than a mental health provider, collaborating with primary care clinics is vital to reaching this population. "Latinos typically won't claim they've had a panic attack, for example, but they will report the somatic symptoms, like chest pain and shortness of breath," says Dr. Lorenzo. "PCPs are the ones to identify the psychological root of the symptoms and refer patients for appropriate care."

3) Encouraging family involvement

Latinos have strong family networks, says Dr. Lorenzo. Family support can help alleviate the stigma of a mental disorder and embolden patients to address it. "I encourage my patients to bring their parent, spouse or child to their appointments," she says. "Sharing information with family members increases their understanding of the disease and helps them better support the patient."

4) Offering sensitive, culturally competent treatment

Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and similar severe mental illnesses are especially stigmatizing - labeled "locura" (Spanish for "craziness") by many Latinos. More common disorders, such as depression and anxiety, are regarded as merely "nervios" ("nervousness") and perceived as short-term, easier to treat and not requiring medication. As such, Dr. Lorenzo is cautious about recommending pharmacotherapy to her patients. ⁴ "Latinos tend to view psychotherapy as more acceptable," she says. "If appropriate, I often recommend that first, then add medication later if needed."

5) Educating about the physiologic roots of mental illness

Lack of information and misunderstanding fuel the stigma. Providing details about diagnoses, discussing treatment options and answering questions may be the best way to eradicate stigma. "Explaining the biological underpinnings of mental health disorders is enlightening to many Latinos," says Dr. Lorenzo. "When they understand that chemicals in the brain play a primary role, they view the diseases differently."

Helping Latinos overcome their community's stigma about mental illness is difficult. But the more that physicians understand Latino culture and work to raise awareness of mental health disorders and symptoms, the better.

"When a Latino patient does disclose information indicating possible depression, anxiety or another mental health concern, we need to address it immediately," says Dr. Lorenzo. "For them to open up, they must really be struggling."
Providers in Northeast Ohio can refer Latino patients for mental health appointments or triage at Cleveland Clinic's Hispanic Clinic by calling 216.444.5812.
References

1. Guarnaccia PJ, Martinez I, Acosta H. Mental health in the Hispanic immigrant community: An overview. In: Gonzalez MJ, Gonzalez-Ramos G, eds. Mental Health Care for New Hispanic Immigrants. Philadelphia: Haworth Press; 2005:21-46.

2. Mental health care for Hispanic Americans. In: Mental Health: Culture, Race, and Ethnicity - A Report of the Surgeon General. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; 2001.

3. Interian A, Ang A, Gara MA, et al. Stigma and depression treatment utilization among Latinos: utility of four stigma measures. Psychiatr Serv. 2010;61:373-379.

4. Lewis-Fernandez R, Das AK, Alfonso C, et al. Depression in US Hispanics: diagnostic and management considerations in family practice. J Am Board Fam Pract. 2005;18:282-296.

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Overcoming Mental Health Stigma in the Latino Community

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Some Latinos view mental illness as a sign of weakness. Others think it's a personal issue to be kept quiet. Others fear being labeled "loco," Spanish for "crazy." Mental health disorders are prevalent among Latino ethnic groups in the U.S. The Hispanic Health and Nutrition Examination Survey reported that 28 percent of Puerto Ricans living in the U.S.

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‘Why Do You Hate Us?’ He Asked. ‘Because You’re Mexicans,’ She Replied.

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‘Why Do You Hate Us?’ He Asked. ‘Because You’re Mexicans,’ She Replied.

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A video still image from YouTube shows Esteban Guzman, left, with the unidentified woman who unleashed a diatribe against Mexicans. Credit Credit via Youtube

A man and his mother were doing yard work in California when a woman unleashed a diatribe against Mexicans, and - invoking President Trump - called them rapists, animals and drug dealers.

The encounter was captured in a video that was posted on Twitter early Monday morning and had been viewed more than two million times by night.

In the video, which lasts about 35 seconds, the man - identified as Esteban Guzman - went back and forth with the unidentified woman, who at one point appeared to make a vulgar gesture with her middle finger.

"Why do you hate us?" Mr. Guzman asked.

"Because you're Mexicans," the woman said.

Mr. Guzman told the woman that "we're honest people." She laughed and countered with her own impressions: "Rapists. Animals. Drug dealers." She mentioned the president, who has made similar remarks about undocumented immigrants coming across the border, often from Mexico.

Mr. Guzman defended himself during the exchange, asking, "How many people have I raped?" and, "How many drugs have I dealt?"

It's unclear when the encounter occurred, or what happened before or after the video recording.

Mr. Guzman did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday night. The Guardian reported that he works in information technology and does construction on the side.

Mr. Guzman, 27, was with his mother clearing a yard in Running Springs, about 80 miles east of Los Angeles, when the woman approached, The Guardian said.

The woman told his mother to "go back to Mexico," Mr. Guzman told The Guardian. "She said we were all illegals," he said. "I told her, 'I'm a United States citizen.'"

Tensions concerning race and immigration have been playing out across the country, as Mr. Trump has taken a hard line against illegal immigration.

During his 2015 announcement that he was running for president, he assailed immigrants from Mexico, saying: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."

The president recently defended his use of the word "animals" to describe dangerous criminals trying to cross into the United States illegally, saying he had been referring to members of the brutal transnational gang MS-13.

The video prompted an outpouring of support for Mr. Guzman on social media, as people apologized for what he had gone through and many assured him that they did not share the woman's views.

On Facebook, Mr. Guzman attributed the racism he has experienced to Mr. Trump.

"Thanks to him everywhere I go I am a rapist, an animal, and drug dealer," Mr. Guzman wrote. "You don't know what it feels like to be hated so much."

He said that while he can handle racial slurs, it's "another story" when someone yells at his mother.

"PLEASE," he wrote, "WE NEED TO WORK TOGETHER TO STOP RACISM!"

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'Why Do You Hate Us?' He Asked. 'Because You're Mexicans,' She Replied.

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A man and his mother were doing yard work in California when a woman unleashed a diatribe against Mexicans, and - invoking President Trump - called them rapists, animals and drug dealers. The encounter was captured in a video that was posted on Twitter early Monday morning and had been viewed more than two million times by night.

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Starbucks apologizes to Latino customer for racial slur written on his drink cup

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Starbucks apologizes to Latino customer for racial slur written on his drink cup

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A Latino man says that when he received his drink order at a Starbucks coffee store in a Los Angeles suburb, it came with a racial slur written on it.

On a label indicating the customer's name, the word "Beaner" was typed.

The incident comes two weeks ahead of Starbucks' planned meeting of staff at its more than 8,000 U.S. stores to discuss racial profiling and other issues. The all-hands meeting results from fallout over the manager's decision to call police last month after two African-American came to a Starbucks in Philadelphia and didn't buy anything.

In the latest case, the customer, who only identified himself as Pedro, told KNBC-4, the NBC affiliate in Los Angele s that he was buying two drinks at the Starbucks in the Los Angeles suburb of La Cañada Flintridge and saw the derogatory term for a Latino person on both cups.

Pedro said he didn't think it was an accident because the barista had called his name once his order was done, according to the TV station. He declined the offer of a $50 gift card, which he called "insulting," but he's scheduled to meet with Starbucks officials on Thursday.

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A Latino man said a racial slur was written on his Starbucks drink order, according to media reports. (Photo: KNBC-4)

Starbucks said in an e-mail that company officials met with the customer Thursday morning at one of the local stores and that he accepted their apology.

"This kind of mistake is unacceptable and we will take additional steps to assess what happened here and how our partners can be better," Starbucks said.

On the afternoon of May 29, Starbucks is closing all 8,000-plus of its U.S. company-owned stores and its corporate offices for racial-bias training for its employees.

That company-wide education effort was announced after the national outrage stemming from the arrests of Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson on April 12 at a downtown Philadelphia restaurant. They were sitting in the coffee shop without ordering anything to eat or drink, because they were waiting to meet a third man for a business meeting. Nelson asked to use the bathroom, but was told restrooms were for paying customers only. A staffer, who is no longer a Starbucks employee, called 911.

The company apologized to Nelson and Robinson for what happened and CEO Kevin Johnson met with the two men. They reached a financial settlement with the Seattle-based chain.

Last week, Starbucks changed its bathroom policy to make restrooms available for people who haven't purchased anything from the restaurant.

CLOSE
Follow USA TODAY reporter Zlati Meyer on Twitter: @ZlatiMeyer
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2IpX92B

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Starbucks apologizes to Latino customer for racial slur written on his drink cup

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CLOSE A Latino man says that when he received his drink order at a Starbucks coffee store in a Los Angeles suburb, it came with a racial slur written on it. On a label indicating the customer's name, the word "Beaner" was typed.

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'Reverse Racism' Is A Giant Lie – Here's Why

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'Reverse Racism' Is A Giant Lie – Here's Why

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'Reverse Racism' Is A Giant Lie – Here's Why

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STRUGGLING WITH MY IDENTITY AS A WHITE PASSING LATINA

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STRUGGLING WITH MY IDENTITY AS A WHITE PASSING LATINA

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As a white-passing Latina, it is difficult negotiating identity when myself and others are pushed away from the culture we identify with.

With the belief Latinos all have darker skin, it is difficult to imagine a person with pale skin or lighter hair to identify as Latino. Phrases such as 'what are you?' or 'where are you from?' are common for anyone white passing to hear.

Being passing means passing as a white person, usually without others noticing your ethnic background. Growing up white passing meant peers questioning my identity before and after I would tell them I'm Mexican.

As a youth, this hurt me because it became harder to separate who I really was and who society told me I was. I had trouble fitting in at school among other Latinos because they would try to prove I am white as if I do not know my own family history. Or I would be told that I do not look Mexican so, therefore, I am not. To the Latino students, I was just another white girl in class and the only place I felt real acceptance among other Latinos was my family.

In high school, I remember a specific time someone asked if I was Mexican. Before I could answer, another Latina student jumped in and said, "No, she's not. She's Chicana. Her parents are Mexican but she's not."

This happened about five years ago and I still remember it as an experience where I didn't feel accepted among my Mexican peers. I knew my ethnicity would not have been questioned if I was darker. It was then I realized for certain people, I will never be enough to be referred to as Mexican or Latina.

I also got the 'you must be white' comment or the 'your skin is too white to be Mexican.' Even though being Latino does not mean brown as a young child, it hurt my feelings hearing these comments.

Latino means coming from a country where Spanish is spoken, which should be all-encompassing. But when googling 'Latino' or 'Mexican,' photos of people with dark skin and indigenous clothes make up most of the results.

It was clear people were using the stereotype that Latinos have dark skin and are indigenous looking when they questioned my ethnicity.

To others, feeling Mexican was wrong. Every time my parents or sisters went somewhere, someone looked at them and said, "They look Mexican, you look white." Sometimes I nervously laugh but it's awkward when someone points it out. At times, it's funny but it got hurtful after a while.

It was difficult for myself to imagine an ethnicity with a wide variety of shades because I felt I didn't fit into the same category as a person of color. Through these experiences, being white passing made me insecure in who I was.

I would think about how much easier it would be if I could just tan more, have a more Mexican name and have curly hair like my sister. This is an issue I have discussed with other Latinos, this feeling of having to prove their Latinidad to others because their appearance was 'too white.'

Despite feeling excluded from my own culture at times, it is important to admit the privilege that comes with being white passing.

In college, I had a professor that was trying to place me in an internship and he asked if I was comfortable working with marginalized communities such as Latino, Hmong or African American families. When he said this, I laughed and said I am Hispanic. It was clear my professor didn't know but it was in that moment I understood how others see me and one of the first things my professor noticed was my privilege.

Since I look white, I have never and will not be followed in a store under suspicion I might be stealing. I am seen as less deviant and more desirable to some men. It becomes easy to forget the struggle of immigration your own people have gone through when no one has ever asked if I am 'legal.' I carry all the benefits of being white and it becomes easy to fit in with my white peers, but I can not deny the culture that helped me become the person I am.

It has taken myself more than 20 years to realize it is okay to admit the privilege I have as someone who appears to be white, but to also remember my true identity and embrace it.

Even though others might not consider myself to be Latino, it feels wrong to deny the only culture I have known and to forget the journey my ancestors went through to provide me with a comfortable life in the United States.

The more confident I have become in my own pale skin, recognizing my privilege and confronting ignorance, the more I have learned only I can diminish my identity by not claiming my Latinidad.

Being Latina is more than color.

Replaying in my head are the memories I have watching my grandma cut the spikes off the nopales, the excitement I have when unwrapping tamales during the holidays and the connection I have to Mexican music. My connection to the culture has had nothing to do with my skin.

It is time to stop pushing others away because they do not look the part despite being proud to claim their heritage.

GABRIELLE RIVAS

WHO IS SHE? Gabrielle Rivas, 21, is a senior at Fresno Pacific University. She is a double major in Communication Studies and Sociology. She enjoys talking about current events, reading news and drinking coffee until the sun goes down. After college, Gabrielle wants to pursue a career in journalism. 📝

INTERESTING FACT: Gabrielle enjoys old episodes of Law & Order S.V.U.

FEATURED AREA: News.

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Struggling With My Identity As A White Passing Latina- The kNOw Youth Media

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As a white-passing Latina, it is difficult negotiating identity when myself and others are pushed away from the culture we identify with. With the belief Latinos all have darker skin, it is difficult to imagine a person with pale skin or lighter hair to identify as Latino. Phrases such as 'what are you?'

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Deportation worries fuel anxiety, poor sleep, among U.S.-born Latinx youth

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Deportation worries fuel anxiety, poor sleep, among U.S.-born Latinx youth

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The rise of anti-immigration rhetoric and policies in the United States following the 2016 presidential election may be taking its toll on the health of California's Latinx youth, including those who are U.S. citizens, suggests a new study led by University of California, Berkeley, researchers.

The study tracked the mental and physical health of U.S.-born children of Mexican and Central American immigrants in California in the years before and after the 2016 election. It also asked about their sleep quality and their degree of worry about the personal consequences of U.S immigration policies.

Nearly half of the youth reported worrying at least sometimes about the impacts of U.S. immigration policy on their families. Those with more worries also experienced higher anxiety and poorer sleep quality than their peers.

When the researchers compared the youth's well-being before and after the election, they found that anxiety symptoms increased more markedly among individuals who reported more worry about immigration policies.

"We're seeing an increase in anxiety that is related to kids' concern about the personal consequences of U.S. immigration policy, and these are U.S.-born citizens," said Brenda Eskenazi, the Brian and Jennifer Maxwell Endowed Chair in Public Health in UC Berkeley's School of Public Health.

"Further, these are kids in California, a sanctuary state with more protective policies for immigrant families, compared to many other states," Eskenazi said. "So, this study is probably reflecting the best-case scenario of how children of immigrants in other states are being affected."

Eskenazi is the lead and corresponding author of a paper describing the results that appears June 24 in the Journal of the American Medical Association: Pediatrics.

The research drew upon mental and physical health data of 397 Latinx youth that was gathered by the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas (CHAMACOS), a longitudinal study of Mexican farmworker families in California. Each participant in the study had at least one parent who was an immigrant; the documentation status of the parents was unknown.

Researchers assessed teens' blood pressure, body mass, anxiety and depression symptoms and overall health at the age of 14, before the 2016 presidential election, and again at the age of 16, during the year after the election.

At their evaluations at age 16, teens also completed the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, which assessed their sleep quality, and the Perceived Immigration Policy Effects Scale (PIPES), which gauged their levels of concern about the effects of U.S. immigration policies on their families.

Between 41% and 45% of the teens reported on the PIPES survey that they worried at least sometimes "about the impact of immigration policies on the family," "about family separation due to deportation" or "that a family member would be reported to immigration officials." Teens with those concerns experienced higher anxiety levels and worse sleep than the others.

"These results are problematic, because high levels of anxiety are not necessarily fleeting," said Nancy Gonzales, dean of natural sciences at Arizona State University and co-author on the paper. "They can impact other aspects of children's well-being including their ability to stay focused in school, and if they are living with prolonged anxiety, that also has long-term effects on their physical health and susceptibility to problems like alcohol and substance abuse."

Co-author Julianna Deardorff, an associate professor in the Maternal and Child Health Program in UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, noted that the higher levels of anxiety faced by these teens is likely piled on top of other challenges and responsibilities that come with living with immigrant parents, including being an English translator for Spanish-speaking family members and helping relatives navigate U.S. services and institutions. The fear of having a family member reported may also keep them from seeking treatment, Deardorff added.

"It's not just that these youth are faced with the prospect of ICE coming to their door and taking away their parents, but in addition to that, they are having to navigate through settings that may not feel friendly in this political climate, in order to help themselves and their parents," Deardorff said.

The team is currently following up with the teens at age 18 to see if the increase in anxiety observed the year following the election has continued. It also is assessing the teens' academic performance and whether they are engaging in high-risk behaviors.

Study co-authors also include Carolyn A. Fahey, Katherine Kogut, Robert Gunier and Nina Holland of UC Berkeley and Jacqueline Torres of the University of California, San Francisco.

This work was supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Institutes of Health (NIEHS, NIH) (R01 ES021369, R01 ES026994, P01 ES009605 and R01 ES017054), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA, NIH) (R01 DA035300) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (R82670901, RD83171001 and RD83451301).
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The US will end asylum protections for Central Americans and others who cross through Mexico to reach the southern border, the Trump administration announced Monday, a sweeping, unprecedented move that will quickly be challenged in court.

The new move, which bars asylum for any individual who crosses through a third country but does not apply there for protection before reaching the US southern border, takes effect Tuesday in the form of a regulatory change.

It becomes the latest in a series of attempts by the Trump administration to actively deter asylum seekers from reaching the border. The details of the plan and efforts to implement it were first reported by BuzzFeed News in May, and experts say it would keep hundreds of thousands of people fleeing violence from entering the US.

"With one regulation the US is nearly entirely turning its back on this asylum flow," Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told BuzzFeed News.

Multiple Department of Homeland Security officials who spoke with BuzzFeed News voiced concerns about the administration's move.

"It's fucked up," one official said. "There's a reason people apply for asylum in the US - we have a robust asylum system. Other countries on the route to the southern border don't."

Another said it would be blocked in court.

"Flatly inconsistent with our treaty obligations. Flies in the face of decades of case law. Destined to be enjoined and or struck down immediately," the official said.

Another DHS official said the move was not only mistaken, but it would backfire on the administration.

"This administration continues to pervert the 1980 Refugee Act and its later amendments by passing regulations that burden its own employees with overly cumbersome, ill-conceived new 'standards,'" the official said. "This rule will effect all those who reach our southern land border but may have fled from anywhere in the world. It does nothing to fix our broken immigration system, which is at its breaking point because the administration's mismanagement."

Administration officials have been working on the plan for weeks, considering it a potential solution to the high rate of families crossing the border.

"Until Congress can act, this interim rule will help reduce a major 'pull' factor driving irregular migration to the United States and enable DHS and [the Department of Justice] to more quickly and efficiently process cases originating from the southern border, leading to fewer individuals transiting through Mexico on a dangerous journey," said acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan.

Advocates said they would move to sue immediately.

Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the Immigrants' Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the group would immediately sue.

"The Trump administration is trying to unilaterally reverse our country's legal and moral commitment to protect those fleeing danger. This new rule is patently unlawful and we will sue swiftly," he said.

The ACLU previously filed a lawsuit over the administration's attempt to ban asylum for those who crossed the border without authorization. The policy was later blocked in federal court and has since not been implemented.

The new regulation would make anyone traveling through Mexico by land to the southern border ineligible for asylum if they did not first seek protection before reaching the US. Immigrants could attempt to receive protection through a process that would be much more difficult.

The ban would apply not just to Central Americans but other non-Mexican nationalities, including Cubans, Haitians, and Venezuelans who in recent months have applied for asylum at the southern border in higher numbers.

The new rule allows for a few exceptions, including if an immigrant was a victim of severe human trafficking or if they traveled through a third country that did not have adequate asylum protections. The person could also avoid the new ban if they can prove that they applied for protection in a third country and later were ordered a final denial. It's unclear how many people could fit these categories.

"This latest regulation is an attempt to close down one of the few remaining avenues for people in need of protection," said Ur Jaddou, former chief counsel for the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. "The only ray of light for those seeking safety is that Congress was clear when it enacted the asylum law and this attempt to circumvent it by regulation will likely see the same fate of other Trump administration attacks on the law and result in a federal court injunction."

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The battle over how to project the future population of the United States has profound political implications.

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The battle over how to project the future population of the United States has profound political implications.

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.

Image

Voters waiting to cast their ballots in Florida on Tuesday. Credit Credit Brynn Anderson/Associated Press

The question of whether America will become a majority-minority nation - and when that might happen - is intensely disputed, of enormous political import and extraordinarily complex.

Two articles that appeared in the opinion section of The Times over the past few years made the case that misleading statistical artifacts used by the Census Bureau have increased the fear of a majority-minority America, a fear that played a crucial role in the 2016 election.

Both Richard Alba, of CUNY, in " The Myth of the White Minority," and Herbert Gans, of Columbia, in " The Census and Right Wing Hysteria," argued that questionable census classifications led to an undercount of America's white majority. This anxiety over the decline of white hegemony, in turn, helped propel a segment of conservative voters to cast ballots for Donald Trump.

Not so fast, say William Frey of Brookings, Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland and Justin Gest of George Mason University. They argue that mixed-race Americans who identify as white are not always viewed - or accepted - as white by other Americans. As Mason put it to me in an email, "people who are racially motivated to dislike immigrants" will "not be assuaged by the argument that one day immigrants will just be white people."

But before continuing with this point, let's turn back to Alba. Following up in the Washington Post in 2017, Alba addressed the interrelated questions of how mixed-race Americans classify themselves, how the census classifies them and how the census classification deals with the offspring of racially and ethnically mixed parents.

Alba writes:

Currently, 14 to 15 percent of infants born in the United States are multiethnic or multiracial, a number that was just 11 to 12 percent in 2000. But despite the fact that most of those children have a white parent, inadequacies in the census classifications mean that the great majority of them are identified as nonwhites. This is important, because most partly white individuals behave like whites in sociological terms. They grow up in neighborhoods with many whites, have white friends as adults, think of themselves mostly as white or partly white, and marry whites.

In addition, according to Alba, "when individuals report having Hispanic ancestry, the Census Bureau assumes, following the O.M.B. standards, that they are only Hispanic regardless of their answers to the race question." In other words, Hispanics who describe themselves as white are classified as minorities, not as whites.

The census provides data illuminating Alba's argument. From 2000 to 2017, non-Hispanic whites fell from 69.1 percent of the population to 60.7 percent. The declining percentage of non-Hispanic whites is the basis for census predictions that whites will become a minority sometime in the early 2040s.

The census defines as Hispanic or Latino "a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race." In the 2010 census, there were 50.48 million Hispanics, 53 percent of whom self-identified as white.

The Census Bureau explains that it

considers race and ethnicity to be two separate and distinct concepts. What is race? An individual can report as White, Black or African-American, Asian, American Indian and Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, or some other race. Survey respondents may report multiple races. What is ethnicity? Ethnicity determines whether a person is of Hispanic origin or not. For this reason, ethnicity is broken out in two categories, Hispanic or Latino and Not Hispanic or Latino. Hispanics may report as any race.

When Hispanics who identify themselves as white are added in, the white share of the population actually grew modestly between 2000 and 2017 from 75.1 percent to 76.6 percent.

This raises a question: If the census dropped the binary non-Hispanic white-minority division and instead stressed the large number of people of mixed ancestry who self-identify as white, would the anxieties of whites fearful of a majority-minority America be lessened?

A second question is how many Americans who are currently inclined to see immigrants as outsiders and as threats to the nation's culture will perceive those coming from Asian, Latin American, African, Middle Eastern and North African nations as part of the American mainstream - even as more of those migrants intermarry. And what about the second-, third- and fourth-generation offspring of increasing numbers of Latino-white and Asian-white unions?

Trump has driven home not only to his base but to many others the message of a threatening majority-minority future.

Alba himself worries that the majority-minority prediction has become lodged in American thinking. In an email, he wrote that

the notion of the majority-minority society has a powerful hold on the public imagination at the moment. But I continue to believe (or hope) that another view of the evolution of our society can eventually win out, especially given the toxic impact on our politics of the majority-minority idea.

Alba's hopes received a boost from a survey of 2,600 non-Hispanic whites conducted in July 2016, during the campaign, by Dowell Myers and Morris Levy, political scientists at the University of Southern California.

They asked one half of the respondents to read a story about the "conventional narrative about the decline of non-Hispanic whites" and the other half to read a story detailing "the growth of Hispanic and Asian-American populations" but that "also mentioned the rise of intermarriage and reported the Census Bureau's alternative projection of a more diverse white majority persisting the rest of the century."

Of those who read the first version, "46 percent of white Democrats and a whopping 74 percent of Republicans expressed anger or anxiety when reading about the impending white-minority status." Of those who read the second version, "only 35 percent of white Democrats and 29 percent of white Republicans expressed anger or anxiousness."

Justin Gest, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and the author of the book " The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality," is far less optimistic. He wrote by email:

The image of these immigrants has been contaminated by Trumpian portrayals of criminals, benefit hunters, and opportunistic job competitors. Further, the vision of a more hybridized whiteness is still a couple decades away, and political minds are notoriously myopic.

It is not, Gest argued,

a strategy to reassure white Trump supporters, "Don't worry. Those immigrants will soon be white too." There is a pervasive perception that Latinos, Africans and Asians are simply too different, too far removed from what Sam Huntington called the "American creed."

Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, shares Gest's pessimistic assessment. As a general rule of thumb, Mason argued, "people don't respond well to being told that they'll think differently one day. It comes across as patronizing and can cause them to stick to their original idea even more strongly."

Mason believes that even though growing numbers of those with mixed parentage think of themselves as white, many other whites are not currently prepared to accept that claim:

It doesn't matter if someone identifies as white as long as other people consider them to be nonwhite. In fact, I'd argue that the Dubois concept of the "wages of whiteness" requires that some groups NOT be white.

Bart Bonikowski, a professor of sociology at Harvard, argues that in the contemporary political climate, the fear of cultural disruption has become so pervasive on the right that realistic facts and figures make little difference. As he wrote in an email:

My sense is that actual levels of migration, shifts in immigrants' ethnic identification, and changing rates of intermarriage are, at best, only loosely coupled with perceptions of cultural threat among white voters, particularly those with moderate levels of education and those living outside of urban centers. Even though actual levels of undocumented migration from Mexico - and net migration from that country in general - have decreased in recent years, this in no way diminished the potency of Donald Trump's xenophobic discourse in the 2016 presidential election. Indeed, this was true despite the fact that aggregate favorability toward immigrants has been steadily increasing in the United States over the past decade.

Bonikowski elaborated:

The reason for this is that many Trump supporters have long held strong ethnonationalist sentiments, but these sentiments have only recently become politically salient, as Trump, and other Republicans before him, have actively stoked fears of demographic and cultural change and channeled them into powerful resentments toward minority groups. For many voters, such resentments are not rooted in everyday experience, not least because they tend to live in ethnically homogeneous, predominantly white communities, but rather, they are shaped by powerful nativist narratives perpetuated by right-wing politicians, partisan organizations, and media outlets.

From another vantage point altogether, William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, defended census majority-minority calculations in an email, arguing that it is important for the country to face what he has called the " diversity explosion ":

Given the slow and in fact, last year, negative growth of the white population along with its rapid aging - it is important for older whites to understand that the only way we will have a growing labor force will be to embrace the younger racial minority populations.

Frey described projections that many young people of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds will self-identify as white as "quite speculative." He questioned putting forth such projections

for the sole purpose of potentially appealing to Trump supporters - many of whom do not seem to be interested in other demographic facts such as last decade's decline of undocumented immigration to the U.S., or the greater number of migrants coming from Asia than from Latin America.

Howard Lavine, a professor of political science and psychology at the University of Minnesota, staked out a middle ground, pessimistic in the short term, less so in the long term:

Intermarriage - especially among whites and Hispanics - may produce a substantial percentage of children (and grandchildren) who identify as white, but I doubt that such predictions will go far in currently assuaging the race-based status threat that many working class-whites feel today, and that Donald Trump exploited so successfully.

Over time, however, Lavine argued, as

races and cultures become less distinct (more assimilated), Republican voters who are dispositionally intolerant of difference (e.g., authoritarians) will find the political climate less threatening and the category of race per se less politically relevant.

Could a more multifaceted narrative than the binary white vs. minority projection into the future lessen the anxiety of some whites? Michael Barber, a political scientist at Brigham Young, doubts it:

The actual date at which the U.S. becomes majority-minority is probably irrelevant to the typical Trump voter or Republican in general. My guess is that perceptions matter much more than reality.

In support of his view, Barber cited an intriguing research paper. " The Parties in Our Heads: Misperceptions about Party Composition and Their Consequences," by Douglas J. Ahler, a political scientist at Florida State University, and Gaurav Sood, then a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown.

Their research shows, Barber writes, that partisans have extremely biased perceptions of the "other" party, including survey data showing that people "think that 32 percent of Democrats are LGBT (vs. 6 percent in reality) and 38 percent of Republicans earn over $250,000 per year (vs. 2 percent in reality)." With this in mind, Barber argued, "it isn't a stretch to imagine that people think we're already a majority-minority country when in fact we aren't at all."

Some of those I contacted suggested that only Trump and his fellow Republicans have the power to change the anti-immigrant, anti-minority tone of the political conversation. Nathan Kalmoe, a political scientist at Louisiana State University, argued, for example, that

Politicians and other opinion leaders play an important role in helping citizens make sense of the threats and opportunities they face. I expect the views of many white Americans would shift if President Trump and other leaders who deploy ethnonationalist messages collectively changed their tune, at least in terms of attitude intensity and priority.

In the highly unlikely event that that happened, "prejudices wouldn't vanish, but they would be less politically potent for most people." More realistically, Kalmoe wrote, "as long as prominent leaders continue to mobilize white fear and anger on the issue, citizens who trust them will follow."

From a broader perspective, the current majority-minority controversy is a continuation of the never-ending, never-resolved struggle in this country over how to deal with a rapidly transforming multiracial, multiethnic society.

Robert Jones, the C.E.O. of the Public Religion Research Institute, put the problem this way in an email:

Throughout American history in particular, the question of whiteness has been at the center of these debates, fueled by the fact that social privileges and political rights were tied to whiteness.

Historically, this has played out in the practices of the Census Bureau and the Citizenship and Immigration Services that "recorded race and ethnicity categories over time, e.g., 'Celt' and 'Hebrew' once appeared outside of the 'Caucasian' category."

Jones argues that

at the current moment in U.S. history, we actually need the admittedly fictional concept of "whiteness" to understand recent events that are driven by a motivation to defend a perceived threat to white demographic and cultural dominance: the mass murder of nine worshipers in Charleston by the Confederate flag wielding Dylann Roof, the white supremacists marching in Charlottesville chanting "you/Jews will not replace us," and even the unlikely but unflagging support for Donald Trump among white evangelical Protestants nostalgic to resurrect the cultural world of the 1950s.

Jones captures the strength of the racial and ethnic divisions that have characterized the nation since its founding:

The troubling truth of American history is that it's precisely the binary understanding of white vs. nonwhite that has been at the center of our bloodiest battles, harshest laws, and fiercest debates. The U.S. social and political landscape would be unrecognizable but for the power of the concept of whiteness.

It's certainly a problem we keep coming up against.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter, @Edsall.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Thursday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @edsall

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Opinion | Who's Afraid of a White Minority?

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The battle over how to project the future population of the United States has profound political implications. By Thomas B. Edsall Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality. The question of whether America will become a majority-minority nation - and when that might happen - is intensely disputed, of enormous political import and extraordinarily complex.

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How Professionals of Color Say They Counter Bias at Work

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An African-American man in a suit was handed car keys by someone who thought he was a parking attendant. A black lawyer was patted down by guards at a courthouse, even though his white colleagues entered without a search. An African-American politician was told she did not look like a legislator.

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Legal immigrants with darker skin are paid up to 25 percent less than otherwise comparable lighter-skinned immigrants, a wage penalty that widened significantly four years after these immigrants first received permanent legal status, according to new research by Vanderbilt economist Joni Hersch.

Hersch, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Economics and co-director of the Ph.D. program in Law and Economics at Vanderbilt Law School, specializes in employment discrimination. Her paper, " Colorism Against Legal Immigrants to the United States," was recently published in American Behavioral Scientist.

Color is distinct from race, ethnicity

While skin color is closely related to race, ethnicity and national origin, it can vary dramatically within each of those categories. It also cuts across levels of educational attainment and work experience.

Hersch controlled for these and many other factors that influence earnings, including education, family background, work history and English-language proficiency, which enabled her to isolate the wage penalty attributable solely to skin color.

A widening gap

This study followed up on Hersch's 2008 study published in the Journal of Labor Economics, which provided the first estimates of the wage penalty faced by new legal immigrants to the United States with darker skin. In her new study, she sought to understand whether that penalty diminished with more time in the United States, once immigrants had additional time to assimilate into the economy.

Hersch's studies used data from the New Immigrant Survey, a longitudinal survey that first surveyed immigrants who attained legal permanent status in 2003, and then followed up with them four years later. The NIS collected extremely detailed data on a wide range of subjects to create a comprehensive picture of each person's background, demographics and present circumstances. Crucially, it also recorded the immigrants' skin color, using a standardized 10-point scale.

"The data is so rich that I was able to also take into account whether the disparity would have arisen in the United States or because their country of origin has a bias against darker skin color, and account for that," Hersch said.

In her initial study, Hersch determined that, during their first year in the United States as a legal permanent resident, the darkest-skinned members of an otherwise similar group of immigrants earned 17 percent less than the lightest-skinned members of that cohort.

Now she's found that when these immigrants were re-interviewed four years later, the disparity had actually widened to 25 percent. While immigrants' wages generally catch up to native-born Americans' as they settle in and become better acclimated to their new home, the NIS revealed that this was not the case for those with darker skin.

Hersch said that it is difficult to ascribe this effect to anything other than discrimination, as she was able to control for virtually every other meaningful mitigating factor. "The link to rising anti-immigrant sentiment expressed in some quarters seems clear," she said.

Implications for the future

Because color is so closely related to race and national origin, specific charges of colorism only account for a small percentage of cases filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but those numbers are rising rapidly-and Hersch anticipates that they will continue to do so. "The changing demographics of the U.S. population indicates that there are more color differences without a clear racial distinction," she said. "So I think we're leading to the opportunity for even more people to make use of their rights under Title VII to file a lawsuit based on color discrimination."

Furthermore, she said, because color discrimination is often closely linked to discrimination against national origin, these findings will provide additional support for those claims as well.

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Prejudice against darker skin continues to depress wages for legal immigrants - ScienceBlog.com

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Legal immigrants with darker skin are paid up to 25 percent less than otherwise comparable lighter-skinned immigrants, a wage penalty that widened significantly four years after these immigrants first received permanent legal status, according to new research by Vanderbilt economist Joni Hersch. Hersch, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Economics and co-director of the Ph.D.

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Nayara Justino thought her dreams had come true when she was selected as the Globeleza carnival queen in 2013 after a public vote on one of Brazil’s biggest TV shows. But some regarded her complexion to be too dark to be an acceptable queen.

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Nayara Justino thought her dreams had come true when she was selected as the Globeleza carnival queen in 2013. But some in Brazil regarded her complexion to be too dark to be an acceptable queen

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“People would rather stand than sit next to me.”

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Yalitza Aparicio’s Success After ‘Roma’ Exposes Mexico’s Ugly Truth of Anti-Indigenous Bigotry

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On February 24, 2019, at the Oscars ceremony, Yalitza Aparicio's name will be read along with four others as nominees for Best Actress. As an Oaxacan of Mixtec and Triqui heritage, Aparicio will join Keisha Castle-Hughes as the only indigenous women nominated for a Best Lead Actress Academy Award. Since starring in Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, she has appeared in the glossy pages of Vanity Fair and and on the cover of Vogue México. Her journey has not been perfect, but amid the barrage of offensive commentary that has shadowed her success, Aparicio has remained graceful and focused on the empowering potential of her visibility.

Evaluations of representation often become caught in tactics of counting (how many women and people of color are included) or binaries of positive versus negative representation (is the character sufficiently respectable or breaking enough stereotypes?) To some, Aparicio's personal achievements and ascension to global recognition has already broken barriers. To others, her performance insufficiently challenges stereotypes because she's only a " faithful servant," or she fails to become a full person. Among film critics, the quality of Aparicio's performance has been lauded, but how should we approach the newcomer's burgeoning success and visibility?

On Sunday, many of us will delight at seeing Aparicio on screen just as we shared in her joy at being nominated. Indigenous children may, unlike a young Aparicio, feel buoyed by seeing the actress on a global stage, instead of disillusionment with the worlds they see depicted on screen. Within celebrations of Aparicio's big break and ensuing accolades, we can also take this opening to critique a system that limits the opportunities for indigenous groups and other people of color at all stages of the filmmaking process and that uses exceptionalism as a veil for its rotten foundation.

Since Roma's Oscar buzz began its journey, the discomfort of those who view Aparicio as an interloper, or in other reductive (and offensive) terms, has been almost as central to news coverage as the young Oaxacan actress's rise. Not all have been supportive, and the acclaim surrounding Aparicio has attracted its share of maliciousness. When Aparicio graced the pages of Vanity Fair in November of 2018, racist and classist reactions polluted the celebration.

Then, in February, it was credibly documented that a group chat comprised of Mexican actresses had designs to lobby the Mexican Academy of Arts and Cinematographic Sciences (AMACC) to exclude Aparicio from the Ariel Awards, the country's equivalent of the Oscars. According to documentarian María José Cuevas, the conspiratorial chat was fueled by arguments that Aparicio is not a "real" actress. The incident was shortly followed by denials from those accused of partaking in the messages and clarification from the AMACC that they had not received a request to exclude Aparicio from the competition nor would such a request affect the Ariel selection process.

Less than a month after Oscar nominations were announced, a viral video showed telenovela actor Sergio Goyri disparaging Aparicio in a discussion about whether she deserved a nod from the Academy. Goyri, apparently unaware that he was being recorded, spouted anti-indigenous insults and diminished Aparicio's performance as exclusively servile. In his apology the next day, Goyri claims that he did not mean what he said but that it came out amid a heated argument.

A careless social media stream or cabal of actresses organizing against Aparicio may not have been meant as public attacks, but they reveal something more insidious: the machinations that flourish behind closed doors.

Aparicio, for her part, has been steadfast, expressing her pride in being an " Oaxacan indigenous woman." She knows she's moving against a tide of stereotypes and skewed opportunities, but Aparicio has been fighting the public's expectations for longer than the last few months. Before she was a rising movie star, Aparicio had to fight to be considered more than her gender, her skin tone, her economic class, and more than a servant. Why are so many determined to keep Aparicio in her place?

really gonna miss yalitza aparicio's domination of award szn pic.twitter.com/EaAiQGNMjX

- R O O N E Y (@zenonthesequal) February 22, 2019

When confronted by press, a repentant Goyri claimed that, despite his racist comments, he was not racist. "A proud Mexican cannot be racist," said Goyri. This kind of post-racial thinking is integral to the mestizo national identity I described in a previous piece. Patronizing and folkloric depictions of "the Indian," while central to Mexican national identity as a symbol, became inextricable from views of indigenous people as backward and stuck in the past. This allows mestizos to believe themselves to share in indigenous heritage and yet maintain racist and narrow views about those they perceive as too indigenous.

Mestizaje was really about whitening and "modernizing" indigenous groups, metaphorically and not. In the 20th century, policies of "indigenismo" sought to assimilate and acculturate indigenous people, who were thought incompatible and an impediment to a modern nation. For Mexico, indigeneity was confined into certain boxes of labor and identity: often feminine, rural, and outsider. This informs the bigoted perceptions of Aparicio as not a real actress or undeserving of acclaim for playing a servant.

Because of this history, indigenous women have often perceived as threats or out of place in urban settings and other public spaces, and this extends now to fashion magazine covers and the red carpet, especially if they do not conform to Western and Eurocentric ideas of beauty. It's no wonder Aparicio's presence causes discomfort to those who understand themselves according to ideas about who was allowed in which spaces and in what capacities.

Apparently, Yalitza Aparicio is both pretty and famous enough to be on the cover of one of Mexico's most well read fashion magazines, @holamexico, but she's still too brown for their taste so they mega photoshopped her. pic.twitter.com/YrLLkKVrSy

- (@Andalalucha) February 21, 2019

As we celebrate with and for Aparicio, we should also account for how her acclaim was contingent on vetting from Alfonso Cuarón, a white Mexican director. Her current celebrity means she is desired for magazine covers, but not the way she actually looks, as evidenced by photoshopped portraits where she appears with considerably lightened skin. The praise and recognition Aparicio has received, while well-deserved, does not amount to a change in the very system that makes her nomination a miracle: the distribution of roles and who writes them, the politics of casting, the demographics of gaffers, grips, and producers, and how it all gets funded. It is a victory according to someone else's rules.

Still, at the Oscars, I will be rooting for Yalitza Aparicio. I will be rooting against those like Sergio Goyri, those who seek to exclude Aparicio and people like her, and internet commenters who cannot bare to see an indigenous woman in the spaces they have deemed beyond her reach. And I will be rooting for a critique of Hollywood and media racism that does not end at award shows.

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Yalitza Aparicio's Success After 'Roma' Exposes Mexico's Ugly Truth of Anti-Indigenous Bigotry

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On February 24, 2019, at the Oscars ceremony, Yalitza Aparicio's name will be read along with four others as nominees for Best Actress. As an Oaxacan of Mixtec and Triqui heritage, Aparicio will join Keisha Castle-Hughes as the only indigenous women nominated for a Best Lead Actress Academy Award.

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"Talking white" helps people of color get ahead.

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That Moment You Understand White Privilege

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That Moment You Understand White Privilege

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As the only white person in the audience of a comedy club, Ron was jokingly & relentlessly called out during the show. But, he left the show with an understanding he never expected... Featuring Ron Hart

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Activist Aydin Anwar on Chinese Internment of Muslims

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Activist Aydin Anwar on Chinese Internment of Muslims

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China has detained more than a million Muslims in concentration camps — and no one is doing anything about it

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Students tackle anti-blackness in Asian-American culture

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Students tackle anti-blackness in Asian-American culture

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Editor's Note: The term "N-word" is used in this article, referring to a student's personal experience discussed during an on-campus event. The Chronicle does not condone or promote the use of this term nor the word it refers to; however, the content of the article requires its use for clarity. The Chronicle warns of its use and apologizes for any discomfort the printing of this term may cause.
One Asian student's mother tells her to lock the door when black people are around. Another Asian student isuncomfortable with his father's use of the N-word. A black student's Asian professor once called his sci-fi film idea, which had an all-black cast, "Wakanda in space."

These were just some of the experiences brought to theFeb. 19 discussion aboutanti-blackness in the Asian-American community, hosted by the Asian Student Organization and the Black Student Union in the 618 S. Michigan Ave. Building.

"We've been conditioned to feel like we are being pit against each other," junior graphic design major Jess Ohsaid. "You know you're living in a bubble, but then you leave and actuallysee how much of a bubble it is."

When defining what anti-blackness is, students shouted out terms such as racism, ignorance, stereotypes, misrepresentation and appropriation. Anti-blackness can include micro-aggressions, such as subconsciously not associating withblack people, or macro-aggressions like using the N-word.

"One has to be [intentional] about doing something within the realm of anti-blackness," saidKhalid Long, visiting DEI scholar-in-residence for the Theatre Department. "That doesn' t mean that we all haven'tbeen systemically ingrained to perform anti-blackness ...but there is an intent by continuing to believe [those] notions."

Junior musical theatre major Tori James said it was frustrating to have black culture appropriated and to have black people put down for their own culture.

Another aspect of anti-blackness is stereotyping. For example, the South Side is often considered "unsafe," largely because of its predominantly black population,said International Student and Scholar Coordinator Kevin Obomanu.

Obomanu added he often gets asked by parents which parts of Chicago are safe. He tells them, as a queer black man, his version of safe is different from what theirs might be. For instance, he avoids areas with lots of bars, as drunk people may pose a threat to his safety.

Despite certain divides,ASO and BSU members expressed shared experiences, such as having considered whitening their skin, being the only person of color in one of their classes and, most commonly, not feeling "Asian enough" or " black enough."

"I feel likeI have to be a representative of my culture, but that's a whole country, and I feel so under-qualified," Oh said.

Long encouraged Oh and other members to break out of the mold of a certain culture and embrace themselves.

"It's about resisting those demands and not allowing people to pigeonhole you into this rubric of what it is you have to do in order to claim this identity and what you cannot do so you won't go outside the parameters they've set up," Long said.

When it comes to tackling anti-blackness, attendees of the discussion said people should appreciate cultures rather than appropriate them, have a diverse group of friends, discuss difficult topics, educate oneself and others and recognize what privileges one may have that others do not.

"The greatest activists are those who are willing to lose something," Long said. "Sometimes you've got to be willing to risk something."

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Students tackle anti-blackness in Asian-American culture

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Editor's Note: The term "N-word" is used in this article, referring to a student's personal experience discussed during an on-campus event. The Chronicle does not condone or promote the use of this term nor the word it refers to; however, the content of the article requires its use for clarity.

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Asian Americans may have an educational advantage, but they face a 'bamboo ceiling' at work

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Asian Americans may have an educational advantage, but they face a 'bamboo ceiling' at work

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In a controversial and closely watched federal trial last fall, an anti-affirmative action group, Students for Fair Admissions, argued that Harvard discriminates against Asian American applicants by holding them to higher academic standards and rating them poorly on personal characteristics.

The university does this in order to artificially suppress the rate of admission among Asian Americans, the group claimed. The solution, according to the plaintiffs: Harvard must eliminate altogether the consideration of race and ethnicity in its admissions decisions.

Students for Fair Admissions may want to rethink its stance on affirmative action. Although the group argued that affirmative action harms Asian Americans in university admissions, they failed to consider that it can help Asian Americans where it arguably matters more - in the workplace.

Our new research suggests that there is a significant attainment gap for Asian Americans in the labor market.

Asian American students who oppose affirmative action because they believe it hurts them will face a rude awakening when they leave college.

While Asian Americans graduate from college at far higher rates than white Americans, despite this educational advantage, they are less likely than whites to hold professional or managerial jobs. This is true even for most U.S.-born Asians with immigrant parents, or the so-called second generation.

We analyzed graduation rates among the five largest Asian groups in the U.S.: Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Vietnamese and Koreans. Together, these groups account for 83% of the country's Asian population. We found that all five groups are more likely to have graduated from college than white Americans.

Chinese are six times more likely to have a bachelor's degree than whites, and Indians are eight times more likely, even after we adjusted for age and region of the country. Koreans and Vietnamese are almost three times more likely to have graduated college than whites, while Filipinos are almost twice as likely.

U.S.-born Asians have a distinct educational advantage over whites. But this competitive advantage disappears in the labor market, where we find clear evidence of an attainment gap.

Despite being more likely to graduate from college than whites, Indians and Koreans are no more likely to have a professional or managerial job. Vietnamese and Filipinos are less likely to have a professional job than whites.

Moreover, despite a tremendous educational advantage over African Americans, Vietnamese and Filipinos do not have a better chance of being in a professional or managerial position than African American workers.

The only Asian group that maintains their advantage once they enter the labor market is second-generation Chinese. This group is one and a half times more likely than whites to be in a professional or managerial position, after controlling for age, gender, education and region of the country.

While our study cannot explain why Chinese are exceptional in this regard, it confirms that, apart from them, the second-generation advantage is confined to education. For the majority of Asians, this educational advantage is short-lived.

Asian Americans can have exceptional educational credentials, but this alone won't lead to the kind of professional advancement whites enjoy.

This combination of educational achievement and persistent limits in the workplace have led social scientists to speculate that Asian Americans face a "bamboo ceiling," an invisible barrier akin to the "glass ceiling" that women face.

Affirmative action has helped women, especially white women, begin to break through the glass ceiling. It can do the same for Asian Americans.

In fact, for many Asian American professionals, it already has. This includes both of us. Our appointments were the result, in part, of hiring initiatives designed to diversify faculty at elite universities. Elite universities, including Ivy League schools, still have predominantly white and male faculty, despite student populations that are more than one-half female and one-quarter Asian American.

Asian American students who oppose affirmative action because they believe it hurts them will face a rude awakening when they leave college. Once they enter the workplace, they will find that college degrees - even ones from elite universities - do not open as many doors for them as for their white peers.

Jennifer Lee is a professor of sociology at Columbia University. Van C. Tran is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University.

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Asian Americans may have an educational advantage, but they face a 'bamboo ceiling' at work

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In a controversial and closely watched federal trial last fall, an anti-affirmative action group, Students for Fair Admissions, argued that Harvard discriminates against Asian American applicants by holding them to higher academic standards and rating them poorly on personal characteristics. The university does this in order to artificially suppress the rate of admission among Asian Americans, the group claimed.

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Can Crazy Rich Asians Open the Floodgates for Asian Americans on TV?

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Can Crazy Rich Asians Open the Floodgates for Asian Americans on TV?

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Asian-American TV creators have struggled to get shows made, but there’s new optimism: “I already see dramatic changes in what kinds of stories networks seem willing—and even eager—to tell.”

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After Crazy Rich Asians triumphed at the box office, some entertainment insiders predicted a Crazy Rich Asians effect would ripple through Hollywood. Didn't the film's $238 million in global receipts prove there was a massive audience eager to be entertained by Asian-American talent, after all? Netflix's surprise smash To All the Boys I've Loved Before-a rom-com featuring a Korean-American teen heroine-dropped the same week as Crazy Rich Asians, confirming there was gold to be mined from more inclusive storytelling.

A rush of broadcast-network development announcements last summer and fall suggested that the post- Crazy Rich Asians party was in full, jubilant swing. There was a legal series produced by Hawaii Five-0's Daniel Dae Kim, to be written by Warren Hsu Leonard; a family epic written by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen that would be told from the perspective of Pacific Islanders; Kung Fu, a Chinese-American-focused drama by Albert Kim; and a comedy from Rick and Morty writer Jessica Gao, whimsically nicknamed Lazy Rich Asians.

None of the dramas ultimately made it through the gauntlet of network development season. As Albert Kim tweeted, "One of the hurdles we have to clear is that TV execs like to say they're eager for shows featuring stories from a different culture. But often what they really want are stories they're already comfortable with. They simply want to cast them with diverse actors."

Pinpointing why individual shows don't get green-lighted is nearly impossible, since decisions take into account so many factors: trends, budgets, demographic targets, available talent, and how well a pilot meshes with the network's existing lineup. But somewhere in those considerations are personal taste and blind spots. Sometimes it can feel like gaslighting, to be told that TV is a merit-based system when so few series by people of color are making it to the screen.

"It's difficult for some decision-makers to pick up shows that don't have something in them that directly represents their experience," said Sue Naegle, Annapurna's chief content officer, who is working with Barry producer Jason Kim and Russian Doll co-star Greta Lee to develop , a dark comedy set in L.A.'s Koreatown. If picked up, it would be HBO's first scripted series centered on and created by Asian Americans. "Traditionally, networks have mostly been run by middle-aged, white, straight men, so it's part of the conversation around why television has had a hard time being as diverse as our country, our world," Naegle continued. "An inordinate amount of money has been spent on pilots and shows about good-looking, bumbling 20, 30, and 40-year-old guys who are just trying to find themselves."

Naegle said that KTown got multiple offers not because of Crazy Rich Asians, but because "it was just a really great pitch. But I don't know if Jason Kim and Greta Lee would have had a chance to create a show about Korean families four years ago. In the past, I would have heard, 'Who can we find to be in it? There's not a big star who is Korean that we could put at the center of it.' This is just what we're all up against all the time."

Cullen, a former journalist, was disappointed that ABC did not pick up Ohana. Yet, she said, "Even in my short time in this business, I already see rather dramatic changes in . . . what kinds of stories networks seem willing-and even eager-to tell." In one of her first Hollywood meetings, she was told, "I should never pitch a show with an Asian lead . . . It wasn't ever going to happen." All of her recent development calls, she said, have focused on stories about people of color.

Similarly, Leonard (who has written for How to Get Away with Murder and Marvel's Runaways) said he wouldn't have dared pitch a show like Exhibit A-set in L.A.'s Koreatown, with two Asian-American leads-before Crazy Rich Asians. Although his series didn't get picked up, he was encouraged by the positive feedback about the characters' cultural specificity.

"Where I grew up in rural Maine, no one in my community or on my TV screen looked like me-certainly were never the leads," Leonard said. "So my goal has always been to create a show that some Chinese-American kid in rural Maine can turn on and see themselves reflected in-not as the villain or the sidekick, but as the hero of the story." His next goal is to create a superhero show with a Chinese-American lead, and Leonard is emboldened by the realization that there are a growing number of Asian-American executives at studios and networks, as well as a whole posse of creators out there. "We've kind of created a little community, virtual and otherwise," he said, "so we can rally behind these diverse projects together."

While Asian-driven dramas faltered this development season, a handful of comedy series beyond KTown are still in contention. Jessica Gao's series about a Chinese-American family got a pilot order this month at ABC, the home of Fresh Off the Boat. So did New Girl co-star Hannah Simone's Indian-American father-daughter comedy.

Meanwhile, the writer who kick-started this mini-boom- Crazy Rich Asians author Kevin Kwan himself-is working on The Emperor of Malibu, a Chinese billionaire-meets-American-ingénue scenario. And Awkwafina, Crazy Rich Asians' M.V.P., is creating and starring in a forthcoming Comedy Central series. "[T]his will take place where I was born and raised, off of Queens Blvd. featuring my father and my grandma, in a single family house, with many expired Asian Calendars," Awkwafina recently wrote on Twitter. "This is a show about being raised by my grandma and dad in Queens, living at home and finding purpose. No show tunes, all female writers room, an ode to Queens and the cultural BUFFET of people that helped shape me into the human I am."

Over at Apple, Big Sick screenwriters Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon are working with Forever and Master of None co-creator Alan Yang on Little America, an anthology series that Yang once described as "like Black Mirror, but instead of being super-dark sci-fi stories, it is immigrant stories." At the 2016 Emmys, accepting the prize for outstanding writing for a comedy series for Master of None, Yang said, "There are 17 million Asian Americans in this country, and there are 17 million Italian Americans. They have The Godfather, Goodfellas, Rocky, The Sopranos . . . we got [ Sixteen Candles character] Long Duk Dong. So we've got a long way to go."

Comedy sometimes serves as a Trojan horse in American pop culture, allowing marginalized populations and challenging ideas to slip through. " Mindy Kaling being a successful lead of a show was really a breakthrough," Naegle pointed out. "People forget that getting Will & Grace on the air was a miracle. It seems so smart in retrospect, but I remember someone saying to me that they will never put a show on NBC with two men kissing. You have to push against these barriers all the time," expanding our ideas of what classifies as niche versus mainstream.

Cullen believes that the odds of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders getting a show on the air will improve as more writers are out there pitching. "Audiences aren't given enough credit," she said. "I think Americans will watch those stories, and they will relate to the heart of the story, even if they don't see themselves on-screen . . . When we're able to tell that story to a broad American audience, I think that real social change can happen."
This post has been updated.
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Can Crazy Rich Asians Make Space for Asian Americans on TV?

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Asian-American TV creators have long struggled to get their stories made, but there is new optimism in the wake of Crazy Rich Asians: "I already see dramatic changes in what networks are interested in, and what kinds of stories they seem willing-and even eager-to tell."

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How affirmative action has benefitted Asian-Americans

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How affirmative action has benefitted Asian-Americans

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When I first heard of the square-off between Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard, I instantly sent the CNN article announcing the court case to my high-schooler of a cousin saying that even though I couldn't do it, he at least had a "wayyyy" better chance now. Outwardly, I would flaunt my disapproval at Edward Blum plastering an Asian face on his conservative anti-affirmative action program. Deep down, however, I thought that if Blum's case made it to the Supreme Court, my fellow Asians would likely get better chances at the Ivy League.

It's not hard to comprehend the benefits of affirmative action policies in college admissions, but students like myself are inevitably faced with the selfish question of what the policy means for us. As superficial as it is, in a time where going to college is the norm and the cost of college is increasingly borne by individual families, where you spent your formative four years matters.

Maybe I would have had a shot at Harvard were it not for affirmative action. Would I be more likely to get my dream job without such a policy? Would I have spent fewer nights studying for standardized tests had I known my race wouldn't play a factor in admissions? I typically find myself in a hole of self-interrogation after clicking one article on the Harvard case, often concluding with shame at my greed. Granted my jarringly dramatic account, I'm sure that if you're Asian or Asian American, you've had similar thoughts.

It would be irrational to argue that targeted groups of historical and present discrimination should not be given an equal playing field. At this point, contenders should know that it's not about fixing history or accommodating for a crutch: It's about adjusting present injustices. But what's difficult to grasp here is that Asian Americans ourselves have in fact gained advantages from affirmative action.

Today, you don't hear about how affirmative action programs kickstarted the careers of Asian Americans forty years ago, when they were the underrepresented minority. You also don't hear of the studies that attest to affirmative action's abilities to lessen the harsh income gap between Asian-American ethnic communities. At the end of the day, contrary to my initial instincts, eliminating affirmative action won't give a leg-up to Asian-American applicants. We stand to lose more from Edward Blum's win.

I don't pay a pretty penny just for professors, facilities, or even job security. I want to leave my undergraduate years with my worldview shaped and picked apart. When I sit in a seminar, I want to hear diverse perspectives while defending my own. This to me, is a tangible benefit - an upgrade to my quality of education. When discussing everything from culture and politics to science and religion, I want to be exposed to a broad range of views founded on varying racial, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. I want my character to be constructed and reconstructed through every encounter with friends from other backgrounds. A ruling against Harvard has the potential to take this part of my education away from me and generations to come.

Many point to University of California, Berkeley as the shining example of how in a perfect world, Asians would take up more spots on elite college campuses. But they often shy away from the number of Berkeley's African-Americans students - a sheer three percent. So if you're Asian and would like a complete meritocracy in lieu of race-conscious admissions, consider the fact that you probably had access to that math tutor when you badly wanted that A or a college coach to guide you step-by-step through the Common App, because it's more likely that your black and Latino peers haven't.

Is improving your chances at an Ivy League worth it if it means more racially and socioeconomically homogenous campuses throughout the nation? Harvard's admissions policies are not perfect in the slightest. But solving the problem of implicit bias doesn't mean you have to sell out other people of color. Putting an end to race-conscious admissions won't stop discrimination against Asian applicants, and it won't stop colleges from privileging wealthy white applicants.

It's easier to feel wronged that your SAT score may have been deemed less impressive because of your race than to depict a country without affirmative action. But Asian Americans should not be portrayed as self-sacrificing heroes for siding with Harvard, for proudly holding signs in solidarity that say "Yellow Peril Supports Black Power," because the majority of Asian Americans actually avow support for affirmative action. The attitude of "as an Asian, I'll take the penalty if it means fairness for my black or Latino peers" or "I'll take the low personality score in the name of diversity" is not enough. We need to also acknowledge that we are among the communities that reap benefits from affirmative action. Uprooting affirmative action harms all people of color and that includes Asian Americans themselves.
Cindy Cho is a sophomore double-majoring in International Studies and Economics from Seattle, Wash.

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How affirmative action has benefitted Asian-Americans

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When I first heard of the square-off between Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard, I instantly sent the CNN article announcing the court case to my high-schooler of a cousin saying that even though I couldn't do it, he at least had a "wayyyy" better chance now.

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The Racial Divide Is the Political Divide

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The Racial Divide Is the Political Divide

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White, black, and Hispanic people hold distinctly different views of American identity and values.

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When it comes to the basic philosophical underpinnings of what an American nation means, the poll also finds sharp distinctions among races. Seventy-six percent of white people and 74 percent of Hispanics think that civil liberties such as freedom of speech are very important pieces of American identity, while only 61 percent of black respondents feel so. More than half of black respondents think that a belief in capitalism isn't a very important part of that identity, while good majorities of both white and Hispanic people think that it's either somewhat important or very important. Forty-five percent of Hispanic respondents said that racial, ethnic, and religious diversity make the country much stronger, compared with 32 percent of whites. And white respondents are most likely to say that diversity makes the country weaker, or to be ambivalent about the idea of diversity altogether.
Adam Serwer: America's problem isn't tribalism-it's racism
These differences equate to real political differences. Black people overwhelmingly identify as Democrats, and the small but influential sliver of black conservatives who identify as Republican appears to be diminishing, as the increasing influence of Trumpism and the alt-right of the modern GOP have made the Republican Party more and more openly hostile to black voters. Other polls also show black voters increasingly concerned about racism. White voters might be moving in the other direction, and philosophically seem to be deprioritizing the importance of diversity in favor of an embrace of capitalism, nationalism, and individual liberty. And according to the researcher Adrian Pantoja, an analyst with the Latino Decisions political-opinion research firm, Latino voters have increasingly made opposing the GOP agenda a top political priority in the age of President Donald Trump.

The profiles of the Republican and Democratic parties have shifted accordingly. In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats elected one of the most racially diverse incoming classes of legislators since Reconstruction, and a diverse field of potential presidential contenders revolves around a multifaceted policy debate that's heavily influenced by progressive ideas. Republicans have had to shape their party around explicit appeals to white voters and their anxieties, and have had to build an electoral strategy that can promote low overall turnout and stoke white grievances. In short, Democrats have cultivated an image as the party of racial and cultural pluralism, while Republicans have rejected pluralism as a viable strategy.

The emerging policy strategies within the parties also reflect these racial differences. As the Fight for $15, a global political movement advocating higher minimum wages, has significantly affected liberal organizing, and as $15-minimum-wage promises have become a potential litmus test in the 2020 Democratic primary, the PRRI poll indicates that 81 percent of black people favor raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, with 60 percent of them strongly favoring the law. Majorities of both white and Hispanic respondents also favor the minimum-wage increase, but not at the numbers or with the fervor of black people. With gun control a major partisan wedge issue, black and Hispanic respondents are also much more likely to strongly favor stricter gun-control laws than whites. Interestingly, black respondents are the most likely racial group to support providing pathways to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants currently living in the United States.

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influential sliver of black conservatives

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diverse field of potential presidential contenders

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The Racial Divide Is the Political Divide

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When it comes to the basic philosophical underpinnings of what an American nation means, the poll also finds sharp distinctions among races. Seventy-six percent of white people and 74 percent of Hispanics think that civil liberties such as freedom of speech are very important pieces of American identity, while only 61 percent of black respondents feel so.

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Interracial dating increased 40 percent in the U.S. What about Mississippi?

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Interracial dating increased 40 percent in the U.S. What about Mississippi?

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CLOSE

​​​​​Interracial dating may draw criticism - like that of a young Mississippi couple that led to a mother to defend her daughter on Facebook. But over the last 16 years, the number of interracial couples in the United States has increased by nearly 40 percent, according to a report by Census.gov.

According to census.gov, the percentage of U.S. married-couple households that are interracial or interethnic grew from 7.4 percent in 2000 to 10.2 percent - 2.8 percentage points - in 2016.

Interracial couples in Mississippi increased below the national average at less than 2.4 percentage points.

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According to 2018 data:

Two states, Hawaii and Oklahoma, and the District of Columbia increased by 4.34 percentage points or more.

Nine states, located mostly in the West and the Mid-Atlantic region, increased by 3.34 to 4.33 percentage points.

Seventeen states increased by 2.40 to 3.33 percentage points.

The remaining 22 states increased by less than 2.40 percentage points.

Interracial relationships vary by county

According to the report, "While the percentage of married-couple households that are interracial/interethnic increased overall, this varied by county."

In Mississippi, most counties did not see a significant change in the percentage of interracial marriages.

The highest increase came in Montgomery and Stone counties, where the number of interracial couples grew by 4 percentage point or more from 2000 to 2016. Across the country, 13.5 percent of counties saw the same increase.

The counties with the second highest increases - between 2.7 and 3.99 percentage points - were Alcorn, Desoto, Pearl River and Forrest counties.

However, four counties had "less than zero" change - meaning they declined in the number of interracial couples, though by how much was not defined. Those counties were Lexington, Leflore, Tallahatchie and Grenada counties.

What do interracial couples look like?

The seven relationships identified as interracial in the report were:

Non-Hispanic White Alone and Hispanic

Non-Hispanic White Alone and Non-Hispanic Black Alone

Non-Hispanic White Alone and American Indian and Alaska Native Alone

Non-Hispanic White Alone and Non-Hispanic Asian Alone

One spouse reported multiple races (both Hispanic or both Non-Hispanic)

Both spouses reported multiple races (both Hispanic or both Non-Hispanic)

Hispanic (any race alone) /Non-Hispanic (any race alone excluding Hispanic White Alone)

According to a report by the Pew Research Center, "about 24 percent of all black male newlyweds in 2010 married outside their race, compared with just 9 percent of black female newlyweds."

"About 36 percent of Asian female newlyweds married outside their race in 2010, compared with just 17 percent of Asian male newlyweds," the report stated. Intermarriage rates among white and Hispanic newlyweds do not vary by gender, according to the report.

Read or Share this story: https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2019/02/22/interracial-dating-couples-increase-census-mississippi-mother-facebook-post/2950822002/

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Interracial dating increased 40 percent in the U.S. What about Mississippi?

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CLOSE ​​​​​Interracial dating may draw criticism - like that of a young Mississippi couple that led to a mother to defend her daughter on Facebook. But over the last 16 years, the number of interracial couples in the United States has increased by nearly 40 percent, according to a report by Census.gov.

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Stop bragging about black and Hispanic unemployment rates

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Stop bragging about black and Hispanic unemployment rates

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GEORGETOWN, Texas (Tribune News Service) - At every rally, during every speech, during many cabinet meetings and often on Twitter, President Donald Trump asserts a fact as evidence of the nation's strong economy: Unemployment rates for black and Hispanic Americans are at record lows. This is largely correct.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in Jan. 2019 the unemployment rate for Hispanics was 4.9 percent; for blacks, 6.8 percent; and for whites, 3.5 percent. All are close to all-time lows.

This sounds like good news for blacks and Hispanics, but these figures call for context:

For at least 50 years, the BLS has monitored unemployment rates for whites, blacks and Hispanics, which track together in predictable ways. But for nearly all of that period, the unemployment rate for blacks was approximately double the rate for whites.

For example, in February 2009, President Obama's first full month in office, the white unemployment rate was 7.6 percent; for blacks it was 13.7 percent, a ratio almost identical to the current one.

And while the unemployment rate for all groups is healthy, the current decline in the rate began in 2010, which calls into question the impact of Trump's policies on the overall rate, as well as on the rates for blacks and Hispanics.

So Trump is probably taking more credit than he deserves for the impact of his policies on the overall employment rate, and there's nothing in his program that is particularly conducive to more employment for blacks and Hispanics.

In fact, I always cringe a little when I hear Trump make that particular claim. Why do we crow about a labor structure that always has a higher unemployment rate for minorities, and in the case of blacks, typically double?

Of course, the unemployment rate describes only who has a job and says nothing about how much money they make. Here, again, there's not much to brag about: According to Census Bureau data, in 2017 the median income for whites was $68,145; for Hispanics, $50,486; and for blacks, $40,258.

But the most staggering differences among these demographic groups are exemplified by wealth accumulation, the most revealing index on economic well-being.

Last month the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington, D.C., think tank, published "Dream Deferred," a report on wealth accumulation based on data from the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances.

"Dream Deferred" describes in considerable detail the comparative wealth of Americans according to ethnicity, as well as the striking increase in recent decades in the wealth of the richest .1 percent. It discusses the sources of this disparity and suggests methods of reducing the wealth gap.

The report depicts the racial wealth divide in various ways, but the starkest version is embodied in these staggering numbers: In 2016, the median household wealth of all American families - that is, what they own minus what they owe - is $81,704. The median household wealth for white families is $146,984; for Hispanic families, $6,591; for black families, $3,557.

How do we account for this stunning disparity? It's tempting to blame individuals or even imagined differences among the races. But the accumulation of wealth depends largely on public policies that support fair wages, access to education, access to dependable financial markets for savings and investment and fair housing - home equity represents two-thirds of household wealth. Unfortunately, very little attention is currently paid to public policies that could reduce the racial wealth divide, or, for that matter, the widening divide between our richest citizens and our poorest, of whatever race.

"Post-racial" is a term that is as elusive as it is aspirational. After the election of President Obama some fantasized about a post-racial era, but the arrival of that happy dispensation has been delayed; we still await the day when the unemployment rate no longer needs to be described according to racial demographics.

In the meantime, President Trump should stop bragging about an unemployment rate for black Americans that is twice the rate of whites. It rings hollow against the backdrop of our enormous wealth disparities.

More than anything, those disparities reflect the persistent vile legacy of our nation's original sin: racism.
John M. Crisp, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, lives in Georgetown, Texas. Readers can send emails to jcrispcolumns@gmail.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. © 2019 Tribune Content Agency.

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John M. Crisp: Stop bragging about black and Hispanic unemployment rates

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GEORGETOWN, Texas (Tribune News Service) - At every rally, during every speech, during many cabinet meetings and often on Twitter, President Donald Trump asserts a fact as evidence of the nation's strong economy: Unemployment rates for black and Hispanic Americans are at record lows. This is largely correct.

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Why are Latino businesses so often denied funding?

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Why are Latino businesses so often denied funding?

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A Stanford study found that Latino-owned businesses are far less likely to secure funding than white-owned firms

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Many fledgling Latino businesses are strapped for cash, a report released Friday by researchers at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business found, and credit scores could be to blame.

There are an estimated 5 million Latino-owned businesses in the U.S., according to the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI). Though the total number of businesses in the U.S. declined from 2007 to 2012, the number of Latino-owned businesses grew by 46%, the report found.

Although they apply for funding at comparable rates to white business owners, Latino-owned businesses are far less likely to secure it, the report found. Only 28% of Latino business owners receive the full funding amount they apply for, compared to 49% of white business owners, according to the Stanford researchers.

"In other words, Latino business owners are denied more often than white business owners," the report said.

The downside of personal credit scores

One potential solution, the SLEI report said, could be more education about different means of applying for funding. Providing a business credit score rather than a personal credit score makes business owners more likely to access capital, but Latino business owners are more likely to use their personal credit score, the report found. A business credit score, like a personal credit score, indicates the credit risk of a business when applying for a mortgage or other personal loan.

Business owners who understand and use their business credit score are 41% more likely to be approved for a loan, but the majority of all small business owners (72%) surveyed for the Stanford report did not know their business credit score and 60% did not know how to find it.

"Our study found that only one-third of Latino-owned employer and scaled firms use a business score to access capital," the study said. "This means that many firms with proven track records continue to rely on the owner's personal credit scores when seeking funding for the business." The Stanford report defined a scaled business as one that had $1 million in gross revenue in a year.

Latino communities see improvements

As the Latino small business world continues to grow, so does the quality of life for all Latino people in the U.S., according to the American Human Development Index, a yearly report from Brooklyn, N.Y.-based nonprofit Social Science Research Council's Measure of America project.

The index is a composite rating based on health, education and income and was introduced in 2008 as an alternative to GDP (gross domestic product, or the value of goods and services produced by a country) as a measure of society's progress.

It found the Latino community has seen its quality of life improve more than any other group in the U.S. in the past decade, with index scores increasing 22% over the past 10 years compared to a just 6.4% increase overall in the U.S.

White men experienced the smallest improvement in well-being since 2008, aside from Native American men, who were the only group to experience a decline in their well-being.
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Why are Latino businesses so often denied funding?

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By Many fledgling Latino businesses are strapped for cash, a report released Friday by researchers at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business found, and credit scores could be to blame. There are an estimated 5 million Latino-owned businesses in the U.S., according to the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI).

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Veteran newscaster Tom Brokaw caused a bit of outrage recently with his admonition to Latinos to assimilate quicker - big news to those of us who are simultaneously blasted for not being Latino enough because we are not fluent Spanish speakers.

So, which is it: Are we assimilating too fast or not fast enough? This is asked by a guy who savors his menudo as much as his burgers and has been known to say to Spanish speakers before a conversation, "Lo siento, mi español sufre un poco" (Sorry, my Spanish is lacking a bit). And I've been known to have my Spanish complimented - by, of course, non-Spanish speakers.

This comes to mind not just because of the Brokaw controversy but because there has been some discussion of Democratic presidential hopeful Julián Castro not being a real Latino candidate. This, because he isn't fluent in Spanish.

This is just plain silly. Whatever his facility with Spanish, Castro is indisputably Mexican-American, to be precise. By heritage. By identity. So, of course, he is a real Latino candidate. To say otherwise is to apply a litmus test on Latinoness that no one should have any business imposing - particularly Latinos who have been subject over generations to other litmus tests. For instance, on whether we are American enough.

This question seems to happen no matter how many generations our families have been here, whether we've served in the military, how much taxes we pay and where we and our children were born.

Being Latino - being Mexican-American - is more than about language. It's about culture. And even if you don't speak Spanish fluently, it's about roots and identity. Where were your people from, and how has that shaped your culture, and what have you drawn from that to form your identity?

So, Castro is Latino and that means, yes, he is a real Latino candidate.

Which takes us to the next illogical step in this debate. Is he a Latino candidate? Or is he a candidate who happens to be Latino? This argument is assuredly coming, particularly if Castro advances in the Democratic primaries.

The ascendancy of white-identity politics notwithstanding, this is a bit like asking whether Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren are white candidates or candidates who happen to be white. They are both, but hardly anyone imposes a litmus test for whiteness on them. They are white and they are real candidates, each with views on issues that need to be evaluated - as with Castro. And virtually no one asks if they can represent non-whites. It will, however, be asked of Castro about non-Latinos.

Which is not to say race, ethnicity and culture mean nothing in political races. Castro will be able to bring some definite life experiences that others will not - on, say, immigration. He is the grandson of an immigrant and native of a city with a long history of undocumented immigrants among us. He has also likely seen and felt the dynamics of income inequality and inequities in education - as the son of a single mother and a graduate of a West Side high school in the San Antonio Independent School District, a district viewed then and now as having a lot of challenges, though both Castro brothers advanced to Stanford and Harvard universities. But it's not as if education and income aren't important to everyone. You know, just as energy, climate change, national defense, taxes and affordable housing are also issues on which Castro surely has views.

No, I'm not all in for Castro. It's way too early for that even if I could or wanted to endorse. I just fear a raw deal aborning.

I'm guessing Brokaw - who later apologized for his comments - would view Castro as assimilated. But why listen to him at all about Latinos? Though his 1998 book, "The Greatest Generation," was mentioned when describing him in the flap that followed his comments, not mentioned was how many Latinos - who served valiantly and in abundance in World War II - he counted as among the greatest in that book. Virtually none.

Assimilation and inclusion are symbiotic. When you're included - accepted, not merely tolerated - it's easier to assimilate, it's incentive to want to. Latinos - immigrants or not - are getting a lot of mixed messages these days.

But here's the thing: Because much of the migration to the U.S. has been from Spanish-speaking countries, it has been easy to immerse oneself in the native language here. But studies reveal children of those immigrants will speak English and their children will likely lose their Spanish altogether. And those immigrant parents know their children must speak English.

This is called what it has always been called for all previous immigrant waves. Yes, assimilation.

o.ricardo.pimentel@express-news.net.

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Veteran newscaster Tom Brokaw caused a bit of outrage recently with his admonition to Latinos to assimilate quicker - big news to those of us who are simultaneously blasted for not being Latino enough because we are not fluent Spanish speakers. So, which is it: Are we assimilating too fast or not fast enough?

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 Reject hostility towards Hispanic Americans

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 Reject hostility towards Hispanic Americans

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History is repeating itself—and we have clearly not learned our lesson from it.

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Opening Arguments | History is repeating itself-and we have clearly not learned our lesson from it.

Credit: Catherine Liang

With the presidential election season gearing up, it is abundantly clear that immigration will continue to dominate the campaign trails. President Trump will continue to use immigration to stoke fears of criminals coming to the United States en masse, whereas Democrats will invoke America's history as a nation of immigrants to tout the benefits of diversity.

This debate about immigration isn't really about immigration, but about a rapidly changing America. It is about fears of a browning country, in which the United States will by 2045 shift into majority-minority status - when non-Hispanic whites will, for the first time, no longer make up the majority of the U.S. population.

This has led to brewing anxiety among many white Americans who fear that this will lead to the demise of America as they know it.

We need to remember the lessons of history lest we repeat the same mistakes. My fellow Quakers, ask yourself this: Are your American friends of Hispanic descent at Penn any less American than your non-Hispanic friends? I think we all know the answer to that.

In my Race & Ethnic Politics class, we have been discussing attitudes towards immigration from a historical perspective to help us think critically about today's immigration debates. In light of today's political climate, these debates made me think further about the underlying causes that shape attitudes toward immigration.

In 2016, when this cultural anxiety reached new heights with the ascendance of Donald Trump's candidacy, Asians made up a majority of new immigrants arriving in the United States. Yet the nasty rhetoric about immigrants tended to target Hispanics in general and Mexicans in particular. Even more shocking, Americans of Hispanic descent have seen an uptick in verbal and physical abuse against them with, among other things, calls for them to "return to Mexico."

These attacks are based on the offensive misconception that Americans of Hispanic descent are somehow less American than its white majority.

The rise of Donald Trump's candidacy saw an unprecedented uptick in racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric. This trend has remained ubiquitous in not just politics but in everyday life all across the nation.

One depressing fact about this is that history is repeating itself - and we have clearly not learned our lesson from it.

In the 19th century, Americans feared that the great influx of mostly Catholic immigrants from Ireland would alter American society and identity for the worse. It didn't. Similarly, the influx of Chinese immigrants prompted fears about "yellow peril" and whether they would alter American identity for the worse. It didn't. These are but two examples of many. There has always been a scapegoat in American identity politics - one group that has been branded the "other" and declared a threat to America's sense of self.

Today, far too many Americans harbor similar fears about Hispanics. Americans of Hispanic descent are often believed to be poorly assimilated - an insinuation that they are less American than other citizens - which has gained increased attention in the past few weeks following Tom Brokaw's comments.

Somehow, proclaiming pride in your Irish, Italian, or Swedish heritage is seen as a positive mark on a nation of immigrants, while Americans who proclaim pride in their Latin heritage are often seen as insufficiently American.

The original mass influx of the Irish was met with bitter hostility out of fear that their dissimilarities from the majority of largely Protestant citizens would erode American identity. Today, America's celebration of Irish culture and its impact on this country is a great part of its tradition.

As the election season continues, we will continue hearing about how being "tough on immigration" is vital to protect America. Don't forget what the proponents of such rhetoric really mean when they talk about immigration.

Stand together in opposition to those who claim that our American friends of Hispanic descent are somehow insufficiently patriotic and do not belong here.

The idea of America should not be tied to its people's skin color, but to their belief in, and devotion to, the values that birthed this nation.

MICHAEL A. KESHMIRI is a College senior from Stockholm, Sweden studying political science. His email address is mkesh@sas.upenn.edu.

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Michael A. Keshmiri | Reject hostility towards Hispanic Americans

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With the presidential election season gearing up, it is abundantly clear that immigration will continue to dominate the campaign trails. President Trump will continue to use immigration to stoke fears of criminals coming to the United States en masse, whereas Democrats will invoke America's history as a nation of immigrants to tout the benefits of diversity.

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How the Chican@ Discourse Silences Indigenous Peoples from Mexico + Central Americans

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How the Chican@ Discourse Silences Indigenous Peoples from Mexico + Central Americans

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This is the first time I teach Chican@ studies as a graduate assistant. I had only taken one Chican@ studies course in my undergrad at UC Berkeley and it was related to art in the LGBTQ community, not the common themes and topics embedded in the Chican@ discourse. I always avoided Chican@ studies because it is a pedagogy that teaches Mexicans that they are indigenous, while ignoring to mention that there is a difference between being indigenous and indigenous descendants. It also ignores to mention that there are tribes and indigenous communities still fighting for their equity, lives, and inclusion in Mexico. In the first week of class, students were introduced to the statement that Mexican genealogy claims that all Mexicans are indigenous. This ignores that mestiz@s also have colonial genealogy - rooted in Spain and other European countries. Yes, I understand that Mexico has a long history of colonization and as a result of the violent assimilation practices enacted on people, there are some who lost their indigenous roots. However, what makes an individual indigenous is more complex than a simple genetic test or ancestry. Many Native American and Indigenous scholars + activists advocate that being indigenous is more than a genetic test, as it is also related to cultural customs, traditions, language, etc. There is a different between claiming to be indigenous and actually having an indigenous community or tribe that claims you.

I have witnessed how the Chican@ discourse has silenced and oppressed indigenous peoples of Mexico (my family & myself). Therefore, I will not serve to further this oppressive narrative. Since Chican@s advocate that there are also indigenous, they feel as though they can take up spaces catered and meant for indigenous peoples and speak as though they are. There is a difference between first-hand & lived experiences. We continue to be oppressed, murdered, harassed, and raped in Mexico as indigenous peoples so there is definitely no longing to reclaim indigeneity in Mexico, but across the Mexican border and in the United States, the Chican@ movement wants to reclaim their indigeneity to benefit their advances in scholarship, research, activism, etc.

I have lost family because they were indigenous, so while I understand the longing for those who are Chican@ and are trying to reconnect to their ancestral roots, this will not bring my family back. Therefore, I do not let this longing move me at all. This longing does not erase what we continue to live through in Mexico. A current and prime example of the oppression we continue to face is the treatment and hatred Yalitza Aparicio has faced for becoming the first indigenous woman to be nominated for an Oscar and portraying a role in an award-worthy movie, Roma. Her success has brought to light the continued racism indigenous peoples face in Mexico. From being called a pinche india to being out casted by Mexican actors and actresses to prevent her from becoming an award winner, this is the continued discrimination indigenous peoples face.

Recently, I have lost an uncle who was an advocate and activist in my community. It shocks how quickly Chican@ professors utilize indigenous activists' death and work to discuss in class and advance the Chican@ narrative. However, by doing so they are failing to bring to light how Chican@s are part of the problem as they don't use the discourse or their privilege to dismantle the discrimination, harm, violence, murders, etc. that indigenous peoples continue to face in Mexico. She is not the first example on how Chican@ professors, scholars, etc. have co-opted an indigenous activist's work to advance their narrative. Like Yalitza, a lot of Mexicans are going to take pride if she wins an Oscar, while ignoring the racism she has encountered as an indigenous woman.

When it is time for indigenous peoples to talk or speak, remove yourself from that discourse or conversation. Acknowledge the tribes and indigenous communities that still exist. I continue to be silenced by Chican@s who claim they are indigenous so they think they can take up that space designed for indigenous peoples. They get insulted when I tell them that there is a difference between being indigenous and indigenous descendants. It is as though everyone wants some indigeneity to claim, without having to face the threats and violence that comes from it.

I have been told that I need to continue having these conversations with Chican@s as though I am here to be an indigenous woman and teach them for free. As a result, I have told them that I am not using my energy or efforts to try to teach them of the difference between being indigenous and indigenous descendants, as my time and effort is more important for my community. If they are also not willing to understand where I come from, there is no point in working with them neither.

​ Teaching this course has allowed me to realize that Chican@ studies is not for an indigenous woman like me. I also have indigenous roots to Central America as my father is Ch'orti'. He was forced as a child soldier and when I brought up the issues, harms, rape, murder, violence, etc. that Central Americans face in Mexico, Chican@ students had a hard time understanding this or acknowledging the privilege they have for being Mexican of indigenous and Spanish descendancy - mestiz@s. Chican@s don't like to acknowledge how Central Americans are mistreated in Mexico - sometimes far worse than the treatment they receive in the US as they are raped, murdered, etc. Chican@s need to acknowledge this in order to stop silencing indigenous peoples from Central America. When I had the discussion in my class and I asked students if Central American children being placed in cages was a Chican@ issue, one of the student said yes. Their belief was that because Chican@s are also indigenous, that because the Central Americans placed in cages are also indigenous, that this indigeneity in common is what makes it a Chican@ issue. I DISAGREE completely, and it is hard to convey this to students without making them feel as though they have been silenced. Central Americans face harm in Mexico because most of them are indigenous and Mexico already has this anti-indigenous narrative. Yes some of it is due and as a result of internal colonialism but this does not justify making this a Chican@ issue. The Chican@ issue is not addressing that Central Americans are mistreated in Mexico. Until Chican@s can begin to decolonize this narrative, it is a field or discourse I will not associate myself with any more.

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How the Chican@ Discourse Silences Indigenous Peoples from Mexico + Central Americans

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This is the first time I teach Chican@ studies as a graduate assistant. I had only taken one Chican@ studies course in my undergrad at UC Berkeley and it was related to art in the LGBTQ community, not the common themes and topics embedded in the Chican@ discourse.

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White teachers three times more negative with Black students, Rutgers study finds

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White teachers three times more negative with Black students, Rutgers study finds

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A Rutgers professor's research on education systems found that that white teachers were three times more negative with Black students than with white students, showing that critical phases of development for Black children could be hindered through daily interactions with their teachers.

Dan Battey, an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education, analyzed a data study of the interactions between teachers and students across racial lines. He said most of the research literature was about discipline within schools leading to suspension, and also the school-to-prison pipeline.

What researchers have not looked at is classrooms, so Battey's data shows how small behaviors end up escalating to become more intense issues, particularly with white teachers.

His study, titled "Racial Mis(Match) in Middle School Mathematics Classrooms: Relational Interactions as a Racialized Mechanism," focuses on how white and Black students and white and Black teachers interact in both urban and suburban settings, specifically in mathematics classes.

"We were interested in how the suburban-urban split kind of functions as well as the teacher-race (split) within the urban space. There weren't many rural schools," Battey said.

Measuring the dimensions of the behavior, contributions and emotions of students, the data for his study found that white teachers were three times more negative with Black students, which played out in terms of how they dealt with student contributions in math classes.

"They were more negative in handling student emotions. They are more negative in interacting with student ability and how they framed student ability than Black teachers on basically every dimension," he said.

On the other hand, Black teachers were found to be less negative toward Black students. They were equally as positive as white teachers though. Battey said these teachers were in the same schools and teaching kids from the same neighborhoods, yet they were acting differently, indicating that there were possibly internalized stereotypes about who the students were.

To remedy negative interactions within classrooms, Battey said viewing students across racial lines as more capable is a possible solution. Another remedy is hiring more Black teachers.

"I think the best way to think about that is through training teachers from the community and bringing them back. You can still have some cultural dissonance there, but it's really, to me, about bringing in teachers who are going to view these kids as having resources," he said. "So that the students can draw on resources the kind of succeed in believing in them."

To obtain the information, Battey and his colleagues coded videos for each student-teacher interaction. The data he collected was from eight different schools, and within these schools there were only small amounts of Black teachers.

Though the data set also included video data from English language arts classes, Battey's study opted to focus on mathematics.

"I think oftentimes one of the reasons to do this work in math is because we think of it as cultureless. Yet, there's all sorts of ways that culture comes in that classroom," he said. "We see the patterns of race playing out in mathematics and yet still continue to frame it as cultural and neutral. Yet, the teaching of math and the encouragement or discouragement for math is entirely a social phenomenon."

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White teachers three times more negative with Black students, Rutgers study finds | The Daily Targum

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A Rutgers professor's research on education systems found that that white teachers were three times more negative with Black students than with white students, showing that critical phases of development for Black children could be hindered through daily interactions with their teachers.

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Japan to recognise Indigenous Ainu people for first time

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Japan to recognise Indigenous Ainu people for first time

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Japan's government introduced a bill Friday to recognise the country's ethnic Ainu minority as Indigenous people for the first time, after decades of discrimination against the group.

The Ainu people - many of whom live in northern Hokkaido - have long suffered the effects of a policy of forced assimilation, and while discrimination has receded gradually, income and education gaps with the rest of Japan persist.

"It is important to protect the honour and dignity of the Ainu people and to hand those down to the next generation to realise a vibrant society with diverse values," top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga told reporters.

"Today we made a cabinet decision on a bill to proceed with policies to preserve the Ainu people's pride."

The bill is the first to recognise the Ainu as Indigenous people and calls for the government to make "forward-looking policies", including measures to support communities and boost local economies and tourism.

The Ainu have long suffered oppression and exploitation, and the modern Japanese government in the late 19th century banned them from practising their customs and using their language.

The Ainu traditionally observed an animist faith, with men wearing full beards and women adorning themselves with facial tattoos before marriage.

Hidden cultural roots

But like many Indigenous people around the world, most of Japan's Ainu have lost touch with their traditional lifestyle after decades of forced assimilation policies.

The Ainu population is estimated to be at least 12,300, according to a 2017 survey, but the real figure is unknown as many have integrated into mainstream society and some have hidden their cultural roots.

"It is the first step for ensuring equality under the law," Mikiko Maruko, who represents a group of Ainu people in eastern Japan near Tokyo, told AFP.

"There are lots of things to be done, for example, creating a scholarship for families who struggle to send their children to high schools," she added, a system currently only available to Ainu in Hokkaido

Major step forward

Under the new plan, the government will also allow the Ainu to cut down trees in nationally-owned forests for use in traditional rituals.

"It is a major step forward on policies towards the Ainu people," said Masashi Nagaura, chief of the Ainu policy bureau of the Hokkaido prefectural government that has spearheaded policies for the ethnic minority.

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Japan to recognise Indigenous Ainu people for first time

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Japan's government introduced a bill Friday to recognise the country's ethnic Ainu minority as Indigenous people for the first time, after decades of discrimination against the group. The Ainu people - many of whom live in northern Hokkaido - have long suffered the effects of a policy of forced assimilation, and while discrimination has receded gradually, income and education gaps with the rest of Japan persist.

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The Chinese were white – until white men called them yellow

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The Chinese were white – until white men called them yellow

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The Chinese were white, until white men called them yellow

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Europeans referred to East Asians as white until the end of the 18th century. But as the Chinese and Japanese resisted cultural assimilation they darkened - both in Western eyes and their own

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'It's a very emotional experience': Indigenous millennials share their journey of language reclamation

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'It's a very emotional experience': Indigenous millennials share their journey of language reclamation

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'I never imagined how much of an emotional process it is,' says Sandra Warriors

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Sandra Warriors, 28, knows time is running out to finish learning the dialect of her father's family line.

One of the last living fluent speakers of nxa'amčin (Moses-Columbia), Pauline Stensgar, is 91.

"It's a very emotional experience," said Warriors.

"It's kind of like a looming fear that's overlooking me. [Pauline] provides a lot of insight that's so valuable. She's done a lot of work to preserve the language through recordings, teachings ... She's pretty tired now."

Nxa'amčin is a southern Interior Salish language that UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger lists as critically endangered. Warriors' father attended boarding school in Washington state and was punished for speaking his Indigenous language, losing most of his ability to speak it as a child.

Warriors grew up on the Colville Confederated Tribes reservation in northeastern Washington state. It's comprised of 12 bands, including the Okanagan tribe her mother is from. The Okanagan tribes in British Columbia are related to the Colville Confederated Tribes; the communities were split apart when the U.S.-Canada boundary was drawn west of the Rockies in 1846.

Emotional journey

Now Warriors is on a mission to learn the nxa'amčin language of her father and the nselxcin (Okanagan) - another Interior Salish language - of her mother's family.

"I never imagined how much of an emotional process it is," she said.

"I have moments I feel overwhelmingly happy. Other times I break down crying, doubting myself, getting angry. It still is a struggle."

She first started learning her language after experiencing homelessness and leaving an abusive relationship. She then enrolled in classes being taught out of what she describes as a dilapidated building on her reservation. Despite the crumbling setting, she says it was a holistic learning environment and her teacher taught in a way that she could understand.

I felt lost in the class - Sandra Warriors

"I felt lost in the class, but then I learned about the meaning of my traditional name, ' tr'qmuł' which means, 'always winter dancing.' It was really powerful," she said.

Four years into language learning, and not having any close family members who speak fluently, Warriors is grateful to learn from tribal language teachers and the last remaining elder speakers. But it scares her to know that Pauline is growing older and when she dies one day, she'll take many of the stories, knowledge and cultural background of the nxa'amčin language with her.

"Each elder speaker has their own body of knowledge," she said.

"I learn about so much from them. More than just language: the plants, ecology, history, intimate family history that you can't get inside a textbook."

Just last week an elder who Warriors was close with died. He was her main teacher of the Okanagan language. The loss is a grieving process that she's struggling to work through.

"Language learning should be restorative and healing, but it's always in the back of your mind...you're trying to gain so much knowledge from this person before they pass. It's really hard to learn when you're feeling stressed out."

Nevertheless, she is determined to see things through and she's hopeful that this generation will succeed in revitalizing lost languages.

Reclaiming Ojibway

Serena Graves, 24, grew up on the Red Lake Nation in northwestern Minnesota, about an hour south of the Canadian border.

She had no exposure to her father's southern dialect Ojibway language growing up because it was almost wiped out in their community. Graves's father also attended boarding school where speaking Indigenous languages was banned.

In 2015 while attending her young nephew's funeral, Graves was inspired to begin a journey of language revitalization. The traditional funeral ceremony was spoken in Ojibway and Grave said she felt embarrassed and heartbroken that she couldn't understand what was being said.

"I was just kind of sitting there and realized that I couldn't understand anything that they were saying," said Graves.

"It made me feel really shameful and bad. I didn't have an identity without my language. So, I took it upon myself to enrol into college where I knew I could learn it in an academic setting."

I didn't have an identity without my language - Serena Graves

Ojibway is a Central Algonquian language spoken by the Anishinaabe, living mostly between Ontario and Manitoba and between Michigan and Montana in the United States. According to UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, Ojibway is classified as a "severely endangered" language in Minnesota where Graves attends university. But Ojibway on a whole is considered a relatively "safe" or "healthy" language.

Graves's ultimate goal is to become an Ojibway teacher. But she acknowledges she's got a lot of work ahead of her.

"It's going to be years before I'm at a level [where] I feel comfortable. There's no one in my family that speaks. It becomes a roadblock in language learning. It's not like I can just go home and speak the language or hear it. So I feel like it's going to be a lifelong journey," she said.

Language learning is must be incorporated into everyday life, she said.

"You cannot learn an Indigenous language by doing it every so often. You have to keep at it, you have to want to keep going. Find the motivation. Ask, engage with community members, elders, teachers."

Searching for Cree immersion

The Cree language is one of the most widely-spoken Indigenous languages in Canada, with 96,575 speakers counted by Statistics Canada in 2016. However, like all Indigenous languages it is still considered vulnerable.

Les Skinner, 29, is Métis and grew up in Edmonton. He had exposure to Cree speakers growing up, but it wasn't until he was 16 that he took a real interest in learning the language.

Now he is fluent in spoken Cree, reads and writes in Cree and teaches it at local schools, community classes, culture camps and currently, in a women's halfway house in Edmonton. He agrees that language learning takes commitment.

"The hardest thing about learning Cree is finding immersion environments," said Skinner.

"Actually, Cree is the easiest language to learn, out of the ones I speak anyways [Cree, French, English and Michif] but it's hard to get the right exposure. There aren't many movies in Cree, places you can work or go to school in Cree, etc. If it's not your main language spoken at home, you really have to go out of your way to find it. It is there though, it can just be hard to find."

You have to look at children and see how they learn, and learn how to learn from them. - Les Skinner

His advice to new language learners is to let their guard down, and become like children again.

"You have to look at children and see how they learn, and learn how to learn from them. You have to be comfortable that you don't know everything or something about your identity, and that's what makes the space for learning. Sometimes people are going to laugh when you say something wrong - it's OK."

Meanwhile, Warriors is encouraged by the growing numbers of people reclaiming their languages.

"I see a lot of strong efforts towards language revitalization back home," she said.

"And on social media, I'm encouraged to see other people doing the same work. There's others going through the same learning journey after experiencing language loss and culture loss. It's not as lonely."

For now, Warriors is cherishing the time she has with Pauline to learn all she can.

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'It's a very emotional experience': Indigenous millennials share their journey of language reclamation | CBC News

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Sandra Warriors, 28, knows time is running out to finish learning the dialect of her father's family line. One of the last living fluent speakers of nxa'amčin (Moses-Columbia), Pauline Stensgar, is 91. "It's a very emotional experience," said Warriors. "It's kind of like a looming fear that's overlooking me.

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Speaking Black Dialect in Courtrooms Can Have Striking Consequences

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Speaking Black Dialect in Courtrooms Can Have Striking Consequences

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A person walks past the federal courthouse in Philadelphia. A study found court reporters in the city regularly made errors in transcribing sentences that were spoken in black dialect. Credit Credit Matt Rourke/Associated Press

"He don't be in that neighborhood."

When one court reporter in Philadelphia transcribed that phrase, it turned into this: "We going to be in this neighborhood." In other words, the opposite of what the phrase actually meant - that someone is not usually in a neighborhood.

That was just one transcription error captured in a soon-to-be published study that found court reporters in Philadelphia regularly made errors in transcribing sentences that were spoken in a dialect that linguists term African-American English.

Researchers played audio recordings of a series of sentences spoken in African-American English and asked 27 stenographers who work in courthouses in Philadelphia to transcribe them. On average, the reporters made errors in two out of every five sentences, according to the study.

The findings could have far-reaching consequences, as errors or misinterpretations in courtroom transcripts can influence the official court record in ways that are harmful to defendants, researchers and lawyers said.

"The larger implication is that people are not being afforded a sense of fairness and justice because the system is not responding to their language," said Anthony L. Ricco, a New York-based criminal defense lawyer, when told of the study's findings.

Decades of research has shown that the way some black people talk could play a role in their ability to secure things like employment or housing. The new study, scheduled for publication in June in the linguistic journal Language, provides insight on how using black dialect could also impact African-Americans in courtrooms.

"People who speak African-American English are stigmatized for so doing," said Taylor Jones, a doctoral student in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study's authors.

Mr. Jones added that there was nothing improper or broken about the dialect that some African-Americans inherited over generations, but negative stereotypes have influenced the way people hear or perceive it.

"If you're taught that these people speak incorrectly, then it's very easy to say, 'Well, they don't make any sense; what they're saying is wrong,'" Mr. Jones said.

The researchers found that the court reporters were not transcribing with any malicious intent. But some of them did have a very limited understanding of black dialect.

After going through the exercise, the researchers said that one of the court reporters told them that when they hear African-American English in the courtroom, "I have to be like, 'Ok, don't roll your eyes,'" according to a draft copy of the study.

Beyond negative stereotypes or lack of familiarity, a court reporter's own discomfort with some of the terminology used in black dialect could also lead to incorrect transcriptions, the study found.

While Pennsylvania court reporters must score 95 percent accurate on tests in order to be certified, the reporters in this study were fully accurate, on average, on just 59.5 percent of the sentences.

Black court reporters who participated in the study made errors in transcribing at roughly the same rate as their white peers.

All of the reporters, in addition to transcribing, were asked to paraphrase what was being said in each sentence. Here, the results were even worse than the transcriptions, with reporters correctly paraphrasing the sentences about 33 percent of the time.

The authors faulted the training that court reporters received, saying that it mostly used "classroom" English. African-Americans are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system, and so training should take that into consideration, researchers said.

"The training isn't taking into account what they're actually going to hear," said Jessica Rose Kalbfeld, a co-author who is pursuing her Ph.D. at New York University.

The transcription errors also speak to an impact of segregation, Mr. Jones said. When black and white people live in separate parts of a city, they develop their own ways of speaking that people outside of their cultural communities are not exposed to.

"Because of segregation, black Philadelphians and white Philadelphians pronounce the same words differently," he said. "This is common across the United States."

Riley H. Ross III, a lawyer in Philadelphia, said that it was not just black dialect that was often misunderstood in a courtroom. It happens with other races, too, he said, and it was up to him as a lawyer to intervene in real time.

"Over all, if there's something that's said that the jury won't understand, I'll bring it up," he said.

While this study was based on recordings made outside of a formal court setting, transcription errors have seeped into real cases.

In a 2015 transcript of a recorded phone call from a jail in the San Francisco Bay Area, a suspect who said, "He come tell 'bout I'm gonna take the TV" was incorrectly transcribed as "I'm gonna take the TV," according to a 2016 research paper by a pair of Stanford University linguists.

In one recent case out of Louisiana, the transcription seemed to be correct, but it highlighted how African-American English can be subject to over-the-top scrutiny.

A lawyer for a defendant who had admitted to sexual assault sought to have that admission suppressed because his client had initially asked for a lawyer, saying, "I know that I didn't do it so why don't you just give me a lawyer dog 'cause this is not what's up."

The state's Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the police did not have to cease questioning him because "lawyer dog" was ambiguous and did not necessarily mean that he was invoking his right to counsel.

Mr. Ricco, the defense lawyer, said the most troubling thing about court reporters incorrectly transcribing African-American English was that it was indicative of larger difficulties of black witnesses trying to get their points across.

"If the court reporters are missing the story," he said, "the jurors are missing the story."

Follow John Eligon on Twitter: @jeligon.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: When Justice Is Deaf to How Some Black People Talk. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Speaking Black Dialect in Courtrooms Can Have Striking Consequences

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"He don't be in that neighborhood." When one court reporter in Philadelphia transcribed that phrase, it turned into this: "We going to be in this neighborhood." In other words, the opposite of what the phrase actually meant - that someone is not usually in a neighborhood.

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Downplaying Deportations: How Textbooks Hide the Mass Expulsion of Mexican Americans During the Great Depression

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Downplaying Deportations: How Textbooks Hide the Mass Expulsion of Mexican Americans During the Great Depression

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The Trump Administration's horrifying record on immigration, exemplified by the heartbreaking scenes of family separation during the summer of 2018, sparked a new round of discussion and debate about U.S. deportation policy. Of course, deportations are nothing new; Obama was rightly criticized as the Deporter-in-Chief. But with enthusiastic cruelty and vigor, the Trump administration has embraced deportation, including the targeting of long-term residents with no criminal record. As acting Director of ICE, Thomas Homan explained, "The president made it clear in his executive orders: There's no population off the table. If you're in this country illegally, we're looking for you and we're going to look to apprehend you." The massive reach of this effort, the uncertainty and terror it elicits, and the opacity of the controlling laws, make this a dangerous moment, not just for immigrants and their families, but for everyone who cares about due process and human rights. It also recalls an earlier time in U.S. history, nearly 90 years ago, when Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants were ousted from the country in enormous numbers.

For me, teaching in the time of Trump meant I wanted to design an immigration unit for my high school U.S. history class to help students both make sense of this dangerous moment and, hopefully, think about how to fight back. I wrote a trial role play on the deportations of the 1930s to act as both a warning and a guide.

In this, I was heeding the call of a group of 5th graders in California who, in 2015, successfully lobbied their legislators to require that the story of the deportations be told in classrooms. Such legislative action was needed because this mass deportation of as many as 1.8 million people rarely makes it into the standard curriculum or textbooks. This omission is symptomatic of the diseases plaguing textbooks in general: their whitewashing of history, amplification of presidents over people, unswerving commitment to a narrative of progress, and marginalization of people of color to sidebars and extension activities.

Take my textbook, Pearson's American Journey. It has one paragraph on "Hispanic Americans" during the Great Depression. Of the six-sentence paragraph, only two sentences address the deportations. They read:

Economic woes and racism drove nearly half a million Mexican immigrants and their American-born children from the United States in the 1930s. Local authorities in the Southwest encouraged the federal government to deport Mexicans and offered free transportation to Mexico.

Notice the disembodied "economic woes" and "racism" that did the dirty work of driving people from their homes. Notice the "Mexican immigrants and their American-born children," obscuring the fact that 60 percent of those deported were citizens, children and adults. And finally, most perplexing, notice the textbook's cliffhanger, never telling readers what actually happened. Local folks "encouraged" the federal government to act, but did it? What happened?

What happened is that men, women, and children - immigrant and U.S.-born, citizen and noncitizen, long-time residents and temporary workers - all became the targets of a massive campaign of forced relocation, based solely on their perceived status as "Mexican." They were rounded up in parks, at work sites, and in hospitals, betrayed by local relief agencies who reported anyone with a "Mexican sounding" name to the Immigration Service, pressured (and often tricked) into "voluntary" deportation - sometimes called repatriation - by municipal and state officials, and forcibly deported in trains and buses, to a country some hadn't lived in for decades and others never at all.

American Journey and other textbooks ignore the stories of loss and forced relocation behind the numbers, stories like the terrifying raid that took place at La Placita park in Los Angeles in 1931. The park was a vibrant cultural hub in an immigrant neighborhood, a place to listen to music, talk politics, socialize. According to historian Doug Monroy, "In the days before television and radio, if you wanted stimulation and excitement, you went to La Placita." On a sunny afternoon in late February, the park was full of close to 400 people when suddenly, immigration agents sealed off the exits. Some were in military olive uniforms, others in plain clothes, wielding guns and batons. The agents demanded everyone in the park line up and show their papers. They arrested dozens and deported many. But the greatest impact was psychological, instilling terror into the Mexican American community.

The United States' own investigation of the deportations declared them unconstitutional. The federally appointed Wickersham Commission stated in its 1932 report: "The apprehension and examination of supposed aliens are often characterized by methods [that are] unconstitutional, tyrannic, and oppressive." The Wickersham Commission may have been thinking about cases like that of Angela Hernández de Sánchez. As recounted in the book, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, by Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Sánchez was returning from a short trip visiting relatives in Mexico, something she had done dozens of times before, when she was arrested and subjected to intrusive venereal disease tests. Since Sánchez had been a continuous resident of the United States since 1916, she was not eligible for deportation under current law. But even with her proof of residence and her negative blood test for sexually transmitted diseases she and her U.S.-born children were deported.

Another textbook used in my school's Advanced Placement classes, America: A Concise History (Bedford/St. Martins), attributes many of the departures of Mexican Americans to voluntary action, telling students that "many Mexican farm laborers left voluntarily as the depression deepened." But surely families fleeing persecution cannot be accurately described as volunteers. Perhaps if America devoted more than a single paragraph to this history, there might be space to tell the story of the family of one of the authors of Decade of Betrayal, Raymond Rodríguez. Rodríguez says his father - a legal resident - decided to leave following the La Placita raid, concluding the United States was too dangerous for him and his family. But his wife refused to leave with their five U.S.-born children. Rodríguez recalls his father's last words to her were, "If you don't go [too] . . . you'll starve to death and maybe worse." The family never saw him again.

As is clear from the story of the Rodríguez family, those targeted by nativism and deportations did not simply acquiesce to their treatment. Community organizations like Cruz Azul Mexicana and La Sociedad de Madres Mexicanas in Texas helped finance relief and legal services. El Confederacion de Sociedades Mexicanas in Los Angeles called "repatriation" a racist plot to remove all Mexican Americans, a sentiment reinforced by the Mexican press and radio, working on both sides of the border. Newspapers like La Opinión and La Prensa provided an important counternarrative of the deportations to the racist framing of The New York Times and The Saturday Evening Post. And leaving itself was sometimes an act of resistance. As one girl from Indiana explained, "This is my country but after the way we have been treated I hope never to see it again. . . As long as my father was working and spending his money in Gary stores, paying taxes and supporting us, it was all right, but now we have found we can't get justice here."

The sheer complexity of this history may partially explain why textbooks get it so wrong. Unlike other nativist efforts of the early 19th century, these deportations were not driven by any signature piece of legislation like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or the Immigration Act of 1924. Rather they were orchestrated using a patchwork of federal and local authority, existing but seldom used deportation rules, and simple mob action against a vulnerable population. But it is precisely this messiness that is fruitful to surface with students. If no single law or leader ordered these deportations, then why and how did they happen and who is responsible for the damage they wrought? This is the question I raise in the Deportations on Trial lesson.

This is not just an academic exercise. Understanding the complex causes of illegal deportations in the 1930s can alert students to similar dynamics today. Just as students see that no single actor was responsible for the deportations of the 1930s, they can recognize that President Trump alone does not have the power to terrorize immigrants and their families. For that it takes the collaboration of the corporate media, ICE agents, for-profit detention centers, wall-builders and contractors, and an electorate primed by racism and capitalism to misplace blame for their own low wages or precarious social position. If that is true, then it matters how every single one of us responds.

I want my students to take what they have learned about deportations of the 1930s and be like Jordon Dyrdahl-Roberts, the Montana Department of Labor worker who quit his job, explaining on Twitter, "There were going to be ICE subpoenas for information that would end up being used to hunt down & deport undocumented workers. I refuse to aid in the breaking up of families. I refuse to just 'follow orders.'" I want my students to be like the more than 100 public defenders who walked off the job in New York City to protest ICE arrests in courthouses or like members of the Sanctuary Movement who are devising novel and brave ways to put themselves between ICE agents and their targets. And I want my students to be like those 5th graders in California who demanded they be taught about the deportations of the 1930s, who insisted that history matters, and that it might be the history that is not in the textbooks that matters the most.

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Downplaying Deportations: How Textbooks Hide the Mass Expulsion of Mexican Americans During the Great Depression - Zinn Education Project

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The Trump Administration's horrifying record on immigration, exemplified by the heartbreaking scenes of family separation during the summer of 2018, sparked a new round of discussion and debate about U.S. deportation policy. Of course, deportations are nothing new; Obama was rightly criticized as the Deporter-in-Chief.

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Black Patients Less Likely To Receive Pain Medication From EMTs Than White Patients, New Study Says

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Black Patients Less Likely To Receive Pain Medication From EMTs Than White Patients, New Study Says

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Another study demonstrates why Black people are often skeptical about seeking the help of medical professionals.

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A new study found unconscious racial bias among Oregon's first responders.

The study found Black patients are 40 percent less likely to receive pain medication compared to white patients. The findings remained constant across socioeconomic lines and insurance type.

The data were sourced from 104,000 medical charts logged between 2015 and 2017. Despite the alarming figures, the study's authors blame the treatment on unconscious bias rather than outright bigotry.

Physician and former EMT Leslie Gregory said she saw the biases discussed in the study for herself while working in Lenawee County, Michigan. She told NPR about a former colleague who seemed to believe a Black patient was overdramatic to gain access to painkillers.

"I think it was something like: 'Oh, my God. Here we go again,'" she recalled. Gregory feared she would have to go from medic to race advocate.

"I am absolutely sure this was unconscious," she continued. "At the time, I remember, it increased my stress as we rode up on this person. Because I thought, 'Now am I going to have to fight my colleague for more pain medication, should that arise?'"

The medical industry's treatment of Black people is well-documented. In 2016, a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found medical students believed biological myths about Black people and white people, according to Stat.

The study surveyed 222 medical students and residents, and about half of them held erroneous beliefs about Black bodies. For instance, many believed Black people do not feel pain as intensely as white people. Dangerously, the study found those holding the false beliefs were 15 percent more likely to give bad medical advice.
Blavitize your inbox! Join our daily newsletter for fresh stories and breaking news. Liking this content? Check these out: How My Battle With Cancer Led Me To Discover My Passion For Music And Art Chance The Rapper Pushes Back On Claims He Dismissed R.Kelly's Victims Because They're Black Women White Alpha Chi Omega Sorority Member Suspended After Racist Video Surfaces

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Black Patients Less Likely To Receive Pain Medication From EMTs Than White Patients, New Study Says

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A new study found unconscious racial bias among Oregon's first responders. The study found Black patients are 40 percent less likely to receive pain medication compared to white patients. The findings remained constant across socioeconomic lines and insurance type. The data were sourced from 104,000 medical charts logged between 2015 and 2017.

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Interview: Black Man Convinces 200+ Members to Leave the KKK by Befriending Them

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Interview: Black Man Convinces 200+ Members to Leave the KKK by Befriending Them

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In a time when it seems like our differences are dividing us rather than uniting us, jazz musician Daryl Davis is taking a different stance. The accomplished musician has traveled the globe leading his group, The Daryl Davis Band, as well as performing with Chuck Berry, Sam Moore, Percy Sledge, Elvis Presley's Jordanaires, and more. And while he's performed alongside Jerry Lee Lewis and former President Bill Clinton, it's his work in race relations that has left his most inspiring mark.

Since the 1980s, Davis has been seeking out and befriending openly racist members of the KKK and neo-Nazi groups. Through the strength of his convictions and character, putting himself in a position few would dare, his friendship has caused more than 200 Klan members to leave the racist organization.

In 1998 Davis published his book, Klan-Destine Relationships, which documents his experiences as a Black man tackling racism one step at a time. An updated version of the book is in the works, and will be released in 2017. Davis' work reminds us that every individual can make a difference and impact their neighbors. Instead of running from hate, he has embraced it, and combatted it with informed, peaceful engagement to great success. We had the privilege of speaking with Davis about his incredible work and how he feels others can carry on this legacy.
Can you tell us a bit about your background as an activist?
Music is indeed the universal language and unites people. As a Black man, of course I have experienced racism. But I have seen how even racists enjoy music. Even those in my audience, including members of the Ku Klux Klan. So, I took it upon myself to get to know them and as a result, I stumbled upon a method of engagement that influenced many of these people to rethink their beliefs.

Ultimately, many of the ones I would encounter ended up leaving those movements after coming to know me. I would not say that I set out to convert them. I set out to learn about them and they ended up converting themselves. As I saw this happening more and more, I decided I owed it to my society and those who worked hard before me, to do what I could to help improve race relations. I then began seeking out more and more people with a racist mindset. Many of these people included KKK and neo-Nazi members.
What started you on this path?
There were several racist incidents in my life as a child that pushed me in this direction. Not one specific one, but several specific ones, from having rocks thrown at me while marching in a Scout parade, being told by the head of the American Nazi Party that he was going to ship me back to Africa, to racist encounters with police officers and the list goes on and on.
What role do you think music has in bridging racial gaps?
No doubt, you've heard the cliché, "Music soothes the savage beast." It is very true. As I stated, most people enjoy music. I have had KKK members approach me and compliment me on my musical performances. Later, they reveal they are Klan members and I engage with them.
Can you share a bit about the first time you ever spoke with a member and convinced him to leave?
In most of my encounters with Klan members, we would discuss reasons for why they were members in the first place. Then I would cite various facts about how the role of the organization throughout history has been a negative one, initially for others, but even for them.

As our relationship would grow, they would begin questioning their own belief system and eventually decide they were wrong to remain in the organization. I always treated them with respect. That is not to be confused that I respected what they stood for, but I respected them as human beings. I also proved that I knew a lot about their organization, on many occasions, I knew more than they did. That upped their respect for me.
Have you ever been physically harmed during your encounters?
While I have had some violent encounters, I have not personally been physically harmed. However, in some cases, to prevail, I have had to harm my attackers and have them arrested. I would prevail again in court when I would then bring charges against them.
How do you come across the members you engage with?
I pretty much know who they are or other people will tell me. In some cases, they have received publicity for something they have done, usually negative, and I seek them out.
What strategies have you developed through the years for dealing with people who may be openly hostile with you?
By treating them with respect as human beings despite the fact I may not respect their beliefs, but I am willing to listen. I have a vast knowledge of the subject and know it as well if not better than those with whom I engage. This causes them to also respect me for my knowledge regardless of the fact they disrespect me for the color of my skin. Over time, many began shedding their racial animus toward me and others who look like me.
Is there a particularly memorable incident you've had when convincing a member to abandon the group that you'd like to share?
There have been many memorable incidents when someone has decided to leave and I see the light bulb come on in their heads. As stated before, I don't try to convince them. I simply engage them and present an open honest environment. As they let down their defenses, they come to their own conclusion to renounce their beliefs. It is a pretty amazing thing to witness.
Have you found a common denominator in the members, in terms of where their beliefs come from?
A Klan member is not stamped from a standard cookie cutter. They come from all walks of life and various education levels and environmental situations which have led to their decision to join the Klan. The one common denominator that all share is lack of exposure to others who may not look like them or believe as they do. Those who will say they know Blacks or Jews, usually will cite a bad experience and stereotype the entire people. I break the stereotype and they are forced to confront that and question their beliefs.
Have you maintained contact with former members over the years? If so, what is your relationship?
Absolutely. When you make friends with me, you have a friend for life.
You've been doing this work since the 1980s. With the Black Lives Matter movement and continued violence against minorities, do you have any words of encouragement for the younger generation?
Yes, stop being hostile if that is the method you are using. Lead by example. Rather than talk "about" people and talk "at" people, try talking "with" people. If you spend 5 minutes with your worst enemy, you will find that you have something in common. If you spend 10 minutes, you will find even more in common. Start building on those commonalities and you will begin to see the things they have in contrast with you, will begin to no longer matter.

When two enemies are talking, they are not fighting. They may be disagreeing by yelling and screaming and pounding their fists on the table to make their point, but at least they are talking. It's when the talking ceases, that the ground becomes fertile for violence. So, keep the conversation going. As a younger generation, you have access to many more tools, information and knowledge than your predecessors. Use it rather than resort to violence and destruction.
Anything else you'd like to share with our readers?
I enjoy making friends and hope the readers of this article will be inspired to also take steps to better the society in which they reside and their personal relationships with those around them by trying some of my methods. Your readers are welcome to visit my website and feel free to contact me at [email protected] . Thank you for engaging and inspiring your readers.
Daryl Davis: Website
My Modern Met granted permission to use photos by Daryl Davis.

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Interview: Black Man Convinces 200+ Members to Leave the KKK by Befriending Them

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In a time when it seems like our differences are dividing us rather than uniting us, jazz musician Daryl Davis is taking a different stance. The accomplished musician has traveled the globe leading his group, The Daryl Davis Band, as well as performing with Chuck Berry, Sam Moore, Percy Sledge, Elvis Presley's Jordanaires, and more.

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My White Friend Asked Me on Facebook to Explain White Privilege. I Decided to Be Honest

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My White Friend Asked Me on Facebook to Explain White Privilege. I Decided to Be Honest

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He wanted to know how institutional racism has made an impact on my life. I’m glad he asked, because I was ready to answer.

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Yesterday I was tagged in a post by an old high school friend asking me and a few others a very public, direct question about white privilege and racism. I feel compelled not only to publish his query, but also my response to it, as it may be a helpful discourse for more than just a few folks on Facebook.

Here's his post:

To all of my Black or mixed race FB friends, I must profess a blissful ignorance of this "White Privilege" of which I'm apparently guilty of possessing. By not being able to fully put myself in the shoes of someone from a background/race/religion/gender/nationality/body type that differs from my own makes me part of the problem, according to what I'm now hearing. Despite my treating everyone with respect and humor my entire life (as far as I know), I'm somehow complicit in the misfortune of others. I'm not saying I'm colorblind, but whatever racism/sexism/other -ism my life experience has instilled in me stays within me, and is not manifested in the way I treat others (which is not the case with far too many, I know).

So that I may be enlightened, can you please share with me some examples of institutional racism that have made an indelible mark upon you? If I am to understand this, I need people I know personally to show me how I'm missing what's going on. Personal examples only. I'm not trying to be insensitive, I only want to understand (but not from the media). I apologize if this comes off as crass or offends anyone.

Here's my response:

Hi, Jason. First off, I hope you don't mind that I've quoted your post and made it part of mine. I think the heart of what you've asked of your friends of color is extremely important and I think my response needs much more space than as a reply on your feed. I truly thank you for wanting to understand what you are having a hard time understanding. Coincidentally, over the last few days I have been thinking about sharing some of the incidents of prejudice/racism I've experienced in my lifetime-in fact I just spoke with my sister Lesa about how to best do this yesterday-because I realized many of my friends-especially the white ones-have no idea what I've experienced/dealt with unless they were present (and aware) when it happened. There are two reasons for this: 1) because not only as a human being do I suppress the painful and uncomfortable in an effort to make it go away, I was also taught within my community (I was raised in the '70s and '80s-it's shifted somewhat now) and by society at large NOT to make a fuss, speak out, or rock the boat. To just "deal with it," lest more trouble follow (which, sadly, it often does); 2) fear of being questioned or dismissed with "Are you sure that's what you heard?" or "Are you sure that's what they meant?" and being angered and upset all over again by well-meaning-but-hurtful and essentially unsupportive responses.

White privilege in this situation is being able to move into a "nice" neighborhood and be accepted not harassed.

So, again, I'm glad you asked, because I really want to answer. But as I do, please know a few things first: 1) This is not even close to the whole list. I'm cherry-picking because none of us have all day; 2) I've been really lucky. Most of what I share below is mild compared to what others in my family and community have endured; 3) I'm going to go in chronological order so you might begin to glimpse the tonnage and why what many white folks might feel is a "where did all of this come from?" moment in society has been festering individually and collectively for the LIFETIME of pretty much every black or brown person living in America today, regardless of wealth or opportunity; 4) Some of what I share covers sexism, too-intersectionality is another term I'm sure you've heard and want to put quotes around, but it's a real thing too, just like white privilege. But you've requested a focus on personal experiences with racism, so here it goes:

1. When I was 3, my family moved into an upper-middle-class, all-white neighborhood. We had a big backyard, so my parents built a pool. Not the only pool on the block, but the only one neighborhood boys started throwing rocks into. White boys. One day my mom ID'd one as the boy from across the street, went to his house, told his mother, and, fortunately, his mother believed mine. My mom not only got an apology, but also had that boy jump in our pool and retrieve every single rock. No more rocks after that. Then mom even invited him to come over to swim sometime if he asked permission. Everyone became friends. This one has a happy ending because my mom was and is badass about matters like these, but I hope you can see that the white privilege in this situation is being able to move into a "nice" neighborhood and be accepted not harassed, made to feel unwelcome, or prone to acts of vandalism and hostility.

2. When my older sister was 5, a white boy named Mark called her a "nigger" after she beat him in a race at school. She didn't know what it meant, but in her gut she knew it was bad. This was the first time I'd seen my father the kind of angry that has nowhere to go. I somehow understood it was because not only had some boy verbally assaulted his daughter and had gotten away with it, it had way too early introduced her (and me) to that term and the reality of what it meant-that some white people would be cruel and careless with black people's feelings just because of our skin color. Or our achievement. If it's unclear in any way, the point here is if you've never had a defining moment in your childhood or your life where you realize your skin color alone makes other people hate you, you have white privilege.

I remember some white male classmates were pissed that a black classmate had gotten into UCLA while they didn't.

3. Sophomore year of high school. I had Mr. Melrose for Algebra 2. Some time within the first few weeks of class, he points out that I'm "the only spook" in the class. This was meant to be funny. It wasn't. So, I doubt it will surprise you I was relieved when he took medical leave after suffering a heart attack and was replaced by a sub for the rest of the semester. The point here is, if you've never been 'the only one' of your race in a class, at a party, on a job, etc. and/or it's been pointed out in a "playful" fashion by the authority figure in said situation, you have white privilege.

4. When we started getting our college acceptances senior year, I remember some white male classmates were pissed that a black classmate had gotten into UCLA while they didn't. They said that affirmative action had given him "their spot" and it wasn't fair. An actual friend of theirs. Who'd worked his ass off. The point here is, if you've never been on the receiving end of the assumption that when you've achieved something it's only because it was taken away from a white person who "deserved it," you have white privilege.

5. When I got accepted to Harvard (as a fellow AP student, you were witness to what an academic beast I was in high school, yes?), three separate times I encountered white strangers as I prepped for my maiden trip to Cambridge that rankle to this day. The first was the white doctor giving me a physical at Kaiser:

Me: "I need to send an immunization report to my college so I can matriculate."

Doctor: "Where are you going?"

Me: "Harvard."

Doctor: "You mean the one in Massachusetts?"

The second was in a store, looking for supplies I needed from Harvard's suggested "what to bring with you" list.

Store employee: "Where are you going?"

Me: "Harvard."

Store employee: "You mean the one in Massachusetts?"

The third was at UPS, shipping off boxes of said "what to bring" to Harvard. I was in line behind a white boy mailing boxes to Princeton and in front of a white woman sending her child's boxes to wherever.

Woman to the boy: "What college are you going to?" Boy: "Princeton."

Woman: "Congratulations!"

Woman to me: "Where are you sending your boxes?" Me: "Harvard."

Woman: "You mean the one in Massachusetts?"

I think: "No, bitch, the one downtown next to the liquor store." But I say, gesturing to my LABELED boxes: "Yes, the one in Massachusetts."

Then she says congratulations, but it's too fucking late. The point here is, if no one has ever questioned your intellectual capabilities or attendance at an elite institution based solely on your skin color, you have white privilege.

6. In my freshman college tutorial, our small group of 4-5 was assigned to read Thoreau, Emerson, Malcolm X, Joseph Conrad, Dreiser, etc. When it was the week to discuss The Autobiography of Malcolm X, one white boy boldly claimed he couldn't even get through it because he couldn't relate and didn't think he should be forced to read it. I don't remember the words I said, but I still remember the feeling-I think it's what doctors refer to as chandelier pain-as soon as a sensitive area on a patient is touched, they shoot through the roof-that's what I felt. I know I said something like my whole life I've had to read "things that don't have anything to do with me or that I relate to" but I find a way anyway because that's what learning is about-trying to understand other people's perspectives. The point here is-the canon of literature studied in the United States, as well as the majority of television and movies, have focused primarily on the works or achievements of white men. So, if you have never experienced or considered how damaging it is/was/could be to grow up without myriad role models and images in school that reflect you in your required reading material or in the mainstream media, you have white privilege.

7. All seniors at Harvard are invited to a fancy, seated group lunch with our respective dorm masters. (Yes, they were called "masters" up until this February, when they changed it to "faculty deans," but that's just a tasty little side dish to the main course of this remembrance). While we were being served by the Dunster House cafeteria staff-the black ladies from Haiti and Boston who ran the line daily (I still remember Jackie's kindness and warmth to this day)-Master Sally mused out loud how proud they must be to be serving the nation's best and brightest. I don't know if they heard her, but I did, and it made me uncomfortable and sick. The point here is, if you've never been blindsided when you are just trying to enjoy a meal by a well-paid faculty member's patronizing and racist assumptions about how grateful black people must feel to be in their presence, you have white privilege.

He was getting stopped by cops constantly because he was a black man in a luxury car.

8. While I was writing on a television show in my 30s, my new white male boss-who had only known me for a few days-had unbeknownst to me told another writer on staff he thought I was conceited, didn't know as much I thought I did, and didn't have the talent I thought I had. And what exactly had happened in those few days? I disagreed with a pitch where he suggested our lead female character carelessly leave a potholder on the stove, burning down her apartment. This character being a professional caterer. When what he said about me was revealed months later (by then he'd come to respect and rely on me), he apologized for prejudging me because I was a black woman. I told him he was ignorant and clearly had a lot to learn. It was a good talk because he was remorseful and open. But the point here is, if you've never been on the receiving end of a boss's prejudiced, uninformed "how dare she question my ideas" badmouthing based on solely on his ego and your race, you have white privilege.

9. On my very first date with my now husband, I climbed into his car and saw baby wipes on the passenger-side floor. He said he didn't have kids, they were just there to clean up messes in the car. I twisted to secure my seatbelt and saw a stuffed animal in the rear window. I gave him a look. He said, "I promise, I don't have kids. That's only there so I don't get stopped by the police." He then told me that when he drove home from work late at night, he was getting stopped by cops constantly because he was a black man in a luxury car and they assumed that either it was stolen or he was a drug dealer. When he told a cop friend about this, Warren was told to put a stuffed animal in the rear window because it would change "his profile" to that of a family man and he was much less likely to be stopped. The point here is, if you've never had to mask the fruits of your success with a floppy-eared, stuffed bunny rabbit so you won't get harassed by the cops on the way home from your gainful employment (or never had a first date start this way), you have white privilege.

10. Six years ago, I started a Facebook page that has grown into a website called Good Black News because I was shocked to find there were no sites dedicated solely to publishing the positive things black people do. (And let me explain here how biased the coverage of mainstream media is in case you don't already have a clue-as I curate, I can't tell you how often I have to swap out a story's photo to make it as positive as the content. Photos published of black folks in mainstream media are very often sullen- or angry-looking. Even when it's a positive story! I also have to alter headlines constantly to 1) include a person's name and not have it just be "Black Man Wins Settlement" or "Carnegie Hall Gets 1st Black Board Member," or 2) rephrase it from a subtle subjugator like "ABC taps Viola Davis as Series Lead" to "Viola Davis Lands Lead on ABC Show" as is done for, say, Jennifer Aniston or Steven Spielberg. I also receive a fair amount of highly offensive racist trolling. I don't even respond. I block and delete ASAP. The point here is, if you've never had to rewrite stories and headlines or swap photos while being trolled by racists when all you're trying to do on a daily basis is promote positivity and share stories of hope and achievement and justice, you have white privilege.

Trust me, nobody is mad at you for being white. Nobody.

OK, Jason, there's more, but I'm exhausted. And my kids need dinner. Remembering and reliving many of these moments has been a strain and a drain (and, again, this ain't even the half or the worst of it). But I hope my experiences shed some light for you on how institutional and personal racism have affected the entire life of a friend of yours to whom you've only been respectful and kind. I hope what I've shared makes you realize it's not just strangers, but people you know and care for who have suffered and are suffering because we are excluded from the privilege you have not to be judged, questioned, or assaulted in any way because of your race.

As to you "being part of the problem," trust me, nobody is mad at you for being white. Nobody. Just like nobody should be mad at me for being black. Or female. Or whatever. But what IS being asked of you is to acknowledge that white privilege DOES exist and not only to treat people of races that differ from yours "with respect and humor," but also to stand up for fair treatment and justice, not to let "jokes" or "off-color" comments by friends, co-workers, or family slide by without challenge, and to continually make an effort to put yourself in someone else's shoes, so we may all cherish and respect our unique and special contributions to society as much as we do our common ground.

With much love and respect,

Lori

This article was originally published by Good Black News. It has been edited for YES! Magazine.

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My White Friend Asked Me on Facebook to Explain White Privilege. I Decided to Be Honest

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Yesterday I was tagged in a post by an old high school friend asking me and a few others a very public, direct question about white privilege and racism. I feel compelled not only to publish his query, but also my response to it, as it may be a helpful discourse for more than just a few folks on Facebook.

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In the Trump era, a lighter shade of Latino can make life easier

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In the Trump era, a lighter shade of Latino can make life easier

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Over her 42 years, Lisette Flores' brown skin has at times struck at a rich vein of insecurity.

In the more mundane moments, she's been quizzed about her background, whether she's Mexican or Native American. In college, the young woman taking her ID photo offered to lighten the shade in the background to make her look less dark.

In Mexico, a bouncer at a nightclub looked down at her and asked if the others in her group looked like her - far from the blond, light-skinned women often featured in the country's popular telenovelas.

In January, her darker skin made her a target of a more politically fashionable attack.

As Flores walked back from lunch, she encountered a group of Trump supporters protesting outside the Arizona state Capitol building in Phoenix.

"Go back to Mexico!" a woman shouted, singling Flores out of a group of six. Two light-skinned Latinas escaped the stinging words.

Colorism - a subset of racism that rewards light skin and more Anglo features and penalizes dark skin and more indigenous features - long has affected how people are perceived in this country. But it has contributed an extra layer of angst in the Trump era, as the rhetoric around immigration draws attention to those whom some people, with seemingly more audacity than before, judge as not belonging.

"I've never committed a crime, I try to be a good neighbor, a good friend, a good person," Flores said. "And to know that any contribution, however big or small I've done, is seen as irrelevant in certain eyes because I'm not blond-haired, or blue-eyed or light skin-colored, that all I'm seen as is somebody that ... they consider as an invader, as an alien, as a criminal, is disheartening."

The day after President Trump's election in 2016 - according to Documenting Hate, a project that tracks bias incidents around the country - a student reportedly told a seventh-grade girl in Clarksburg, W.Va., "You're going back to Mexico now." The girl's father is Native American and she is not of Mexican descent. Her skin is darker, the report noted.

Later that month, a woman reported that she was in line at a grocery store in Austin, Texas, when an older man picked up a newspaper with a picture of a Latino man.

"Trump is going to get rid of you people," she said he exclaimed before shaking the paper at her. The woman was white, but had darker skin.

For many Latinos, the Trump era has hammered home the privilege, or lack thereof, that comes from being the light-skinned güero or dark-skinned prieto of the family.

On social media, some Latinos have called on others whose appearance makes them closer to "whiteness" to acknowledge their privilege and support Afro Latinos and indigenous Latinos.

"People who can pass [as white] are less likely to be called names on the street or at sporting events and that kind of thing, which can make it easier to turn a blind eye to or to minimize when you're not facing it as directly," said Margaret Hunter, a sociology professor at Mills College in Oakland. "Some of the fissures in status by skin tone are getting amplified in this context of heightened racism and xenophobia."

Celia Lacayo was known in her family as " negrita," little black girl. For her godparents, her mother and father picked her darker-skinned aunt and uncle.

"The three of us were the outcasts in the family, so to speak. We were called these words, and oftentimes they would say, 'Oh, it's just out of love.' But it really didn't feel that way," Lacayo said. "You see the preferences - the preference for the lighter-skinned child, the child who has straight hair, the child who has light eyes. Anything more Anglo or European."

In addition to praise within families, being a light-skinned minority also translates to material benefits, including a higher income and greater educational attainment, data show. Latinos and black people deemed to have lighter skin tones are significantly more likely to be seen as intelligent by white interviewers than their dark-skinned counterparts, according to a 2015 study published in the journal Social Currents.

The colonization of the Americas and spread of slavery played a large role in the denigration of dark skin and indigenous features, Hunter said.

Skin color and language are stereotypical factors that many people use to judge someone's Americanness. In the same way that some Indian Sikhs have been attacked for wearing turbans, darker-skinned Latinos can become targets simply because they fit some stereotype of what a Mexican looks like.

"When you're in an era of Euro and white nationalism, color or skin tone can often be a proxy for a variety of distinctions," said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. "Oftentimes, darker complexion is exploited as visual proof of a parasitic invasion of the country, that is not just evidence of changing demographics, but a proxy for a sinister attack on our values, culture, economy and safety by outsiders."

Growing up, Gloria Calderón Kellett recognized that she and her brother, both Cuban American, were bound to have different experiences because her skin is light and his is dark.

"We would go out places together and he would be treated so differently than me," Calderón Kellett, a TV writer and producer, said. "He walked around the world differently than I did."

Last year, as her brother walked with his two children on a San Diego beach, someone told him to go back to Mexico.

"He was just so stunned," Calderón Kellett said. "We've never experienced that in San Diego."

Calderón Kellett decided to reference the incident in her Netflix show "One Day at a Time," which focuses on a Cuban American family living in Los Angeles.

In the first episode of the second season, the character played by actor Marcel Ruiz is told to "go back to Mexico" after he is overheard speaking Spanish with a friend. He tells his mother that, in another incident, the opposing baseball team saw him and yelled, "Build the wall!"

"Ever since somebody decided to call an entire group of Latinos rapists and criminals, everyone thinks they can say whatever racist thought occurs to them," his sister, played by Isabella Gomez, says in the episode.

"It's amazing how lucky I've been," she adds. "Even these days in this openly racist world, I've managed to never have an incident."

"You and your brother are of different shades," her mother, portrayed by Justina Machado, says.

Aneliza Ruiz, who was raised in East L.A. and is second-generation Mexican American, has hazel eyes and light skin. Growing up, the 21-year-old felt she "represented this sort of assimilation dream."

"I think it's rooted in wanting to be successful in the U.S., and that means being white and wanting to attain some sort of easier life through this inherited privilege, and I think that's really screwed up," Ruiz said. "I think this conversation is important to have ... especially right now in moments when it is tempting to separate yourself from a community that is marginalized, that is racialized as different. It's important to center and support those who are at most risk."

When Gisela Meza Salinas, 22, received compliments when she was younger, they were often tied to her skin color. Meza Salinas' father was born in Puerto Rico and her mother in Mexico. Whenever she visited Mexico, her grandmother's friends would comment on her light skin.

"She's so pretty, she's so white, she's so pale," they said.

"It's really uncomfortable, but I can't imagine my discomfort compared to my cousins who are darker-skinned," Meza Salinas said. "My discomfort is because I'm hyper-aware of the benefit I'm receiving. I can't imagine being on the other side of the spectrum."

Meza Salinas has heard of recent racist incidents, but she has not personally experienced any. And that, she believes, has to do with the most superficial of all things: the color of her skin.

"They have to know I'm Hispanic to target me, and because I'm white passing, I'm pretty much in a bulletproof vest."

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In the Trump era, a lighter shade of Latino can make life easier

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Over her 42 years, Lisette Flores' brown skin has at times struck at a rich vein of insecurity. In the more mundane moments, she's been quizzed about her background, whether she's Mexican or Native American. In college, the young woman taking her ID photo offered to lighten the shade in the background to make her look less dark.

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The three top winners of the prestigious Taylor Wessing Prize depict people of color, photographed by white photographers.

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The three top winners of the prestigious Taylor Wessing Prize depict people of color, photographed by white photographers.

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize calls itself "the leading international competition, open to all, which celebrates and promotes the very best in contemporary portrait photography from around the world." The first prize winner is awarded £15,000 (~$20,000), and an exhibition of 50-plus winners goes up at the UK's National Portrait Gallery each year. The globally heralded competition rewards the work of photographers - both amateur and professional - best capturing the world's most intimate moments and enthralling scenes. But, according to who?

John Edwin Mason, a professor of African history and the history of photography with an expertise in the legacy of Gordon Parks, took to Twitter to express the ways the prize, and the demographics of its winners, speak to photography's greater shortcomings.

"So, let me get this straight ... " he wrote. "All four prize winners in this year's Taylor Wessing competition are portraits of black or brown people made by white photographers. That's fucked up."

One of his tweets reads: "White people like to look at photos of black people. No question. There's a seemingly insatiable demand photos of black folks. Part of the reason is that photos give us permission to stare."

Twitter user Melissa Lyttle also pointed out the prize's history, noting 2017's two grand prize winners showcased the same demographics.

Mason and I discussed the Taylor Wessing prize and its position in a larger, troubling legacy of photography's ogling of nonwhite bodies. He explained, "[The prize] has become a high profile and particularly egregious example of problems that fester within the photo industry and the art world." Regarding the systemic exploitation of Black bodies in photography, Mason offered, "These images create false knowledge about backwardness, barbarity, or sensuality of their subjects and continue to be part and parcel of the visual culture of white supremacy."

"One of the purposes of art is to allow us, encourage us, and provokes us to see the world with new eyes. Here, the Taylor Wessing portraits of black and brown people fail," he shared.

The Wessing prize winners serve as a more innocuous example than more egregious pattern within the medium. Susan Sontag's 2003 essay, " Regarding the Pain of Others " explores the ways in which photographers are limited by an inability (or limited ability) to capture experiences they themselves have not lived.

Steve McCurry's 1984 portrait, "Afghan Girl," which is arguably one of the world's most recognizable photograph, serves as a more conspicuous case. The National Geographic cover shot has circulated for over three decades in spite of accusations against McCurry of exploiting and stereotyping non-Western people throughout his career, particularly poor communities in South Asia.

Perhaps the most egregious available example is South African photojournalist Kevin Carter's 1993 photograph, "Struggling Girl," in which Carter captured a lurking vulture over the body of a malnourished child during a famine in Sudan. According to Time magazine, having been advised not to touch the children, Carter waited for 20 minutes in hopes the vulture would spread its wing over the child's weary body - the money shot - becoming a vulture himself. The creature did not act, and eventually, Carter scared the bird away and wept. The New York Times ran the photo with a criticism of his inaction, and the image was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. Not long after, Carter tragically took his own life, writing, "I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain." The photograph's controversial history was the focus of Alfredo Jaar's exhibition at Galerie Lelong in 2015.

Shots of this nature - those which give white viewers the ability to gaze without action - circulate widely, and popularly. But whom are they for, and what do they accomplish?

Past Taylor Wessing winners, Mason says, "cast [Black and brown people] as passive receptors of the white gaze - objects of fascination, curiosity, or concern. They don't take white viewers out of their comfort zones. They neither ask nor demand that viewers see black and brown people in new ways. They don't encourage or require viewers to think anew."

He says few photographers of color have received the prize. Mason mentions the success of Carrie Mae Weems, Zanele Muholi, and Deana Lawson - Black female photographers who dominate the photography industry with their depictions of Black life - but speculates the work of these women would not be capable of nabbing the prestigious accolade.

He affirms that though the images are by no means inherently racist, they make no effort to operate in the effort of anti-racism.

"I'm by no means saying that white photographers can't make portraits that challenge the white supremacist gaze. Some have and some do," he said. "But photographers of color, by and large, are more likely to make images that subvert the white gaze. They do it by creating images that are rooted in the particular historical experiences of black and brown peoples. They create, that is, new ways of seeing and of knowing."

One commenter argued that one of the 2018 jury members was a woman of African descent. To this, Mason told Hyperallergic, "Institutions and cultures are stronger than any individual. After all, Obama's election didn't signal the birth of a non-racial America."

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The three top winners of the prestigious Taylor Wessing Prize depict people of color, photographed by white photographers. The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize calls itself "the leading international competition, open to all, which celebrates and promotes the very best in contemporary portrait photography from around the world."

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Fear Of The Black Man: How Racial Bias Could Affect Crime, Labor Rates

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Fear Of The Black Man: How Racial Bias Could Affect Crime, Labor Rates

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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Deadly confrontations between police officers and unarmed African-American men and boys have raised troubling questions in recent months. Among them is whether a fear of black men fuels racial disparities throughout society. NPR's Michel Martin has been taking a close look at that issue.

MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: It's an open secret among African-American men and boys that people are often afraid of them. Ways to deal with this are discussed among family and friends. But today we're focusing on research about how that fear may influence law enforcement and potential employers. We called Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University who has studied the way race can affect hiring. UCLA social psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff also joined us. He's researched how police officers view even very young African-American boys, and I began our conversation by asking about his findings.

PHILLIP ATIBA GOFF: What we found was consistent with the previous research that showed that there was an age overestimation of black children. And to some degree, we think it has to do with a lack of familiarity. To some degree, it has to do with these implicit associations we have between black and something sometimes less than human. But what it definitely has to do with is a lack of the full visibility of the humanity of black people from cradle to grave.

MARTIN: You know, we invited our social media followers to tell us whether they ever felt afraid of the presence of African-American men, or - if they were black men themselves - if they felt that they had experienced this fear themselves. We heard from quite a few black men in this callout. We also heard from a number of white women who reported on their experiences. I just want to play one clip from a woman named Angela Dryden. And she says that years ago she was mugged by a group of young black men, and this is how she says this followed her years later into a new neighborhood.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ANGELA DRYDEN: It was Valentine's Day, and I noticed three young black men were, you know, walking behind me. And it reminded me of the mugging scene. And I didn't want to cross the street because there were three young black men walking the same direction as I was, but it was having an effect on my physiology. I started to shake, and my heart was beating. But I kept walking, and they slowly kind of walked around me, and one of the young men turned round and said, hey, lady. And I said, yes? You know, and it croaks out of my mouth because I was totally desiccated from the terror. And he said happy Valentine's Day.

MARTIN: Professor Goff, how do you respond to that?

GOFF: I mean, you have to feel for this woman who's having a very human experience, and yet she's self-aware enough to understand that if she crosses the street, she's playing into a role that she finds anathema to her own values. I think that's a situation that many people in America find themselves in where they have these sort of bad facts about racial disparities. They know the rate of criminal activity is higher in black communities. They know educational achievement is lower, and yet they don't want to be a person who thinks that about an individual. And so that's kind of the conundrum we find ourselves in in trying to find better language to get ourselves out of.

MARTIN: So Professor Holzer, you have long been interested in the question of how race plays out in the labor markets. From your research, do you think fear plays a role in hiring decisions - particularly race-based fears?

HARRY HOLZER: I think it does, and I think it's fear of several different things. I think employers, first of all, worry about weaker performance of black males relative to black women, relative to other groups. And if their performance is weaker, then along with that they might fear more quits, more discharges, needs to discipline employees.

Then a second fear, I think, comes in. There's the fear of conflict, which can be verbal. It can be physical. It could be anything. And then finally - and I think this is a bit of an irony - EEO law. EEO stands for equal employment opportunity law which forbids discrimination in the workplace. It hasn't eliminated it, but it's reduced it. I think EEO law plays a funny role in all of this because most suits for discrimination in the workplace are for wrongful termination and wrongful denial of promotion, which means many small, white employers fear that if they have to discipline a black male employee and maybe even discharge them, that there's a bigger chance that they'll be sued for that than if they turn them away at the gate.

MARTIN: (Unintelligible) that we heard from quite a few black men in our callout, including Leo Cunningham. He's an ordained minister in Columbus, Ohio, and he told us that he has personally experienced potential employers becoming cold to him - in this case, that would be churches - when they found out that he's black.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

LEO CUNNINGHAM: To have someone look at you and say, your two master's degrees, your undergraduate degree, your previous experience - it doesn't matter if we as Christians think that you are called and ordained by God to be a pastoral leader. The color of your skin prohibits us from wanting to hear anything you have to say about God or our community. That's a gut punch.

MARTIN: What about that, Professor Holzer?

HOLZER: That's bias. That's bias and fear and perhaps fear of the unknown. And there are, in the background of this whole story, a troubling set of statistics that people keep in their heads - lower achievement among black males than almost any other group even if they have the same educational attainment, more behavioral problems in school, lower employment activity, more crime. Now, it's unfair for those facts to be applied to any particular individual, especially an individual with strong credentials.

MARTIN: Professor Goff, what about you? What do you think?

GOFF: Well, I mean, in terms of the labor economy, I think that when you get past counting - so diversity for so long has been about just making sure the numbers are right. But when you get past counting, it's not a done deal. You have to set up a workplace so that people feel safe in their identity, and that's not just a touchy-feely Kumbaya thing. It actually affects people's capacity to do their best.

MARTIN: I was going to ask you about that. Why do you have to set up an environment where people feel safe in their identity? Some people would say, no I don't. I just have to set up an environment where people will get the job done. They get paid and go home.

GOFF: That - right. I don't care about your identity.

MARTIN: Yeah.

GOFF: You do that on your own. You take that home with you. It turns out that that's not a very successful strategy for employers, for educators or anybody else who's interested in having a diverse team do well. And the reason is because we all walk around with concerns about how we're going to be evaluated. That's a human thing. There's - you're not paranoid or neurotic because you're thinking it.

But people who come from groups that have stigmas about them - and we all do - when that stigma is relevant, then it can consume your ability to do anything else. So what then happens is they're spending time having to deal - having to negotiate with it, right? And that's time they're not spending focusing on the task. They're not able to do nearly as well, and part of the reason is 'cause the work environment feels hostile through no direct animus. No one's using racial epithets or using sexual slurs, and yet the environment ends up making people sort of focus on concerns about their identity to the exclusion of doing their work in an excellent way.

MARTIN: Given, though, Professor Holzer, that most hiring managers, I think it's fair to say, are still white males, the question that comes up for me is are the right people invested in asking themselves these questions?

HOLZER: Well, I'd say two things. First of all, the number of managers who are not white males is certainly growing. A lot more white females are showing up in those jobs, a lot more minorities. And the ray of hope - the real ray of hope on all of this is that as the American customer base becomes more diverse, more and more owners of those businesses and more managers whose performance is judged, for instance, by sales to those groups are going to see that they have a real interest in trying to deal with this. And so hopefully they will have an incentive to overcome some of those negative stereotypes that they've walked into the room with.

MARTIN: Harry Holzer is a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, currently a fellow at the Brookings Institution which is a research institute in Washington, D.C. Phillip Atiba Goff is the president of the Center for Policing Equity at UCLA and a visiting scholar at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Thank you both so much for speaking with us.

GOFF: Thank you.

HOLZER: Thank you very much.

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Fear Of The Black Man: How Racial Bias Could Affect Crime, Labor Rates

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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: Deadly confrontations between police officers and unarmed African-American men and boys have raised troubling questions in recent months. Among them is whether a fear of black men fuels racial disparities throughout society. NPR's Michel Martin has been taking a close look at that issue.

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Black Kids Get Less Pain Medication Than White Kids in ER

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Black Kids Get Less Pain Medication Than White Kids in ER

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(Pictured is the author, Maggie Fox

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Black children with acute appendicitis -- a clearly painful emergency -- are less likely than white children to get painkillers in the emergency room, researchers reported Monday.

And nearly as troubling, only about half of any of the kids got painkillers, even though they're strongly recommended in cases of appendicitis, the researchers found.

"Black patients with moderate pain were less likely to receive any analgesia, and black patients with severe pain were less likely to be treated with opioids," Dr. Monika Goyal of the Children's National Health System in Washington and colleagues wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association's JAMA Pediatrics.

What's to blame? Probably a combination of an unwarranted fear of opioids such as morphine and fentanyl, combined with unconscious bias against African-American kids, experts said.

"Black patients with severe pain were less likely to be treated with opioids."

The researchers used national survey data from 2003 to 2010, covering more than 900,000 children with acute appendicitis. They thought studying appendicitis would be a good starting point since there's broad agreement among experts that it's a condition that merits pain relief.

Only 57 percent of the kids got anything for their pain in the emergency department, they found, and only 41 percent got an opioid drug. And just 12 percent of black children got an opioid drug for pain.

"Our findings suggest that there are racial disparities in opioid administration to children with appendicitis," Goyal's team wrote.

"Our findings suggest that although clinicians may recognize pain equally across racial groups, they may be reacting to the pain differently by treating black patients with nonopioid analgesia, such as ibuprofen and acetaminophen, while treating white patients with opioid analgesia for similar pain."

The researchers note that painkillers, including opioids, are strongly recommended for appendicitis. There were fears in the past that giving painkillers would mask symptoms important for diagnosing the causes of abdominal pain, but those fears have long been shown to be unfounded.

There's also a fear of giving opioids to children. It's possible to overdose and to have dependence develop. But the whole point of opioids is to control severe pain like that seen in appendicitis, and there are protocols for making sure children don't overdose and don't become dependent.

"We are left with the notion that subtle biases, implicit and explicit, conscious and unconscious, influence the clinician's judgment."

Dr. Eric Fleegler and Dr. Neil Schechter of Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School say emergency department doctors aren't doing their jobs if they don't control pain in all children, including black children.

"If there is no physiological explanation for differing treatment of the same phenomena, we are left with the notion that subtle biases, implicit and explicit, conscious and unconscious, influence the clinician's judgment," they wrote in a commentary.

"It is clear that despite broad recognition that controlling pain is a cornerstone of compassionate care, significant disparities remain in our approach to pain management among different populations," they added.

"Strategies and available knowledge exist to remedy this unfortunate situation; we can and should do better."

The findings are not surprising, they added. Other studies have shown biases in giving pain medication and in medical treatment in general.

"Unfortunately, however, these findings fit a longstanding pattern. There is a substantial body of evidence documenting health care disparities during the past three decades, including disparities in pain management," they wrote.

It's possible that black kids are less likely to say they're in pain

There's one easy solution, the researchers suggested: Ask patients if they want pain medication.

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Black Kids Get Less Pain Medication Than White Kids in ER

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Black children with acute appendicitis -- a clearly painful emergency -- are less likely than white children to get painkillers in the emergency room, researchers reported Monday. And nearly as troubling, only about half of any of the kids got painkillers, even though they're strongly recommended in cases of appendicitis, the researchers found.

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Guest Contributor: Mark Tseng Putterman (@tsengputterman)

Asian American Twitter has been abuzz this week with news that Tilda Swinton singled out Margaret Cho to explain to her the backlash surrounding her whitewashed casting as "The Ancient One" in . On a recent episode of Bobby Lee's TigerBelly , Cho the odd email exchange with Swinton, who she had never met, explaining that it left her feeling like a "house Asian, like I'm her servant."

While many commentators have rightfully jumped on Swinton's behavior as another example of white people expecting people (especially women) of color to perform uncompensated intellectual and emotional labor, few have discussed how Cho's coopting of the term "house Asian" represents a parallel trend of non-Black Asian Americans repurposing Black movements, analyses, and terminology for our own purposes.

The singular history of chattel slavery in the United States tells us that there were no "house Asians," only "house n-ers." While Cho placed her use of the term in the context of British imperialism, the phrase is clearly lifted from the context of American slavery, in which slave owners "elevated" the status of some slaves from working in the fields to the household. But Cho's casual appropriation of the term reduced the history of slavery and its afterlives to a rhetorical device. To Black Americans, the commodification and eradication of Black bodies under slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration is a terrifying inherited trauma, lived experience, and daily threat of violence. But Cho, like too many non-Black Asian Americans, chose to use antiblackness as a metaphor.

Given the hypervisibility of Blackness under white supremacy, many Asian Americans have found Black history and terminology useful as explanatory frameworks to visibilize our own histories of oppression. Cho's "house Asian" remark leverages Black histories of oppression and the singular history of chattel slavery as a shortcut for explaining her own positioning as a Korean American woman asked to do unpaid labor for a white actress apparently entitled to her time. The shortcut works so well not because average Americans inherently pay more attention to Black issues than Asian American ones, but because of the work of generations of Black thinkers and activists who have pushed Black history and struggle at least marginally into the American mainstream. It's a shortcut that erases Black struggle while using their histories as a metaphor to advance an Asian American agenda. But using antiblackness as a metaphor for Asian American struggle also limits the ways we talk about our own histories and movements. When we fail to employ nuance and specificity in our discussions of Asian American experiences with racism, we risk misdirecting Asian American anger away from the structures of white supremacy and towards Black communities-hurting all of us in the process.

When Cho calls upon Black history to explain her exchange with Swinton, or when Constance Wu on using the term "blackface" to describe Hollywood practices of yellowface because it's "more evocative," they model to non-Black Asian Americans that the only way to articulate our grievances is on the backs of Black thinkers. As Felix Huang described in a for Reappropriate, we need a new language for expressing Asian American aggrievement, one with space for holding the singularity of Black oppression the unique experiences of Asian Americans under white supremacy. Black analytical frameworks cannot be used as props for Asian American spokespeople to claim when useful and discard when they get in the way. Instead, they are a call for us to sharpen our own analytical frameworks, to work to push our own issues into the popular agenda, and to recognize that Asian American movements must take place in deep critical conversation with the mechanisms of antiblackness that are so foundational to systemic racism in the U.S.

When the only way we know how to articulate Asian American experiences with racism is by invoking antiblackness as metaphor, we imply that mainstream apathy towards Asian American political conditions is a result of unearned attention on Black communities. When we bemoan that people who would never wear blackface still think yellowface is acceptable, we are asking to shift antiracist attention away from Blackness and towards ourselves. When we complain that everyone knows about the history of slavery but far fewer know about Chinese and Indian coolie labor , we request that Black history be knocked down a peg or two in service of our own visibility.

Aziz Ansari's character falls into this trap on an of Master of None when he claims: "People don't get that fired up about racist Asian or Indian stuff. I feel like you only risk starting a brouhaha if you say something bad about Black or gay people." Like Ansari's character, too often we let our frustrations with Asian American invisibility fester into a wound of antiblack resentment, failing to recognize the violence inherent to the Black hypervisibility so many Asian Americans seem to covet. These resentments have material consequences, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of Chinese Americans who marched to claims that former NYPD officer Peter Liang was a "sacrificial lamb" to the Black Lives Matter movement, or the anti-affirmative action advocates who claim that the policy pushes forward a Black agenda to the detriment of Asian American students. These narratives rely on a false view that Black political movements operate in opposition to Asian/Chinese American ones-that fixing political attention on the many manifestations of antiblackness somehow contributes to the invisibilization of Asian American issues.

In a brilliant scene in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing , as a crowd of Black community members destroy a white-owned business in protest of a police murder, a Korean store owner attempts to diffuse the crowd from targeting his store next with a simple plea: "I'm black! You, me; same." The scene resonates because beneath the simplistic audacity of the appeal, it articulates what so many Asian Americans have felt: a sense of connection to Black struggle as people of color living under white supremacy. Indeed, though one member of the crowd laughs off the Korean store owner's claims to Blackness and another implores him to "open [his] eyes," the crowd eventually turns away as one character remarks: "Leave the Korean alone...he's alright."

When non-Black Asian Americans can relate to Blackness as a political condition, it opens the door for solidarity movements that see Orientalism, imperialism, and xenophobia in relation to antiblackness. But too often, solidarity without specificity leads to erasure of those most marginalized. We must develop the language and frameworks to articulate what Spike Lee's fictitious store owner could not. We are not Black. But when we tie our futures to the political conditions of Blackness, not as mere metaphor but as a moral demand for material justice, we create new pathways towards being seen in all our complexities and contradictions.
Mark Tseng Putterman ( @tsengputterman ) is thinking, organizing, and writing at the intersections of Asian American, Jewish, and mixed race identity and political movements. He is a 2016-2017 Visiting Scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
Learn more about Reappropriate's guest contributor program and submit your own writing here.

Update (12/20/2016): Several readers have raised concerns that the original version of this post used the word "crutch" in a negative and ableist way. The author has elected to revise this post and to remove the problematic usage of the term.

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Guest Contributor: Mark Tseng Putterman (@tsengputterman) Asian American Twitter has been abuzz this week with news that Tilda Swinton singled out Margaret Cho to explain to her the backlash surrounding her whitewashed casting as "The Ancient One" in .

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What I Told My White Friend When He Asked For My Black Opinion On White Privilege

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What I Told My White Friend When He Asked For My Black Opinion On White Privilege

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Recently, I was tagged in a post by an old high school friend, asking me and a few others a very public, direct question about white privilege and racism. I feel compelled not only to publish his query but also my response to it, as it may be a helpful discourse for more than just a handful of folks on Facebook.

To all of my Black or mixed race FB friends, I must profess a blissful ignorance of this "White Privilege" of which I'm apparently guilty of possessing. By not being able to fully put myself in the shoes of someone from a background/race/religion/gender/nationality/body type that differs from my own makes me part of the problem, according to what I'm now hearing. Despite my treating everyone with respect and humor my entire life (as far as I know), I'm somehow complicit in the misfortune of others. I'm not saying I'm colorblind, but whatever racism/sexism/other -ism my life experience has instilled in me stays within me, and is not manifested in the way I treat others (which is not the case with far too many, I know).

So that I may be enlightened, can you please share with me some examples of institutional racism that have made an indelible mark upon you? If I am to understand this, I need people I know personally to show me how I'm missing what's going on. Personal examples only. I'm not trying to be insensitive, I only want to understand (but not from the media). I apologize if this comes off as crass or offends anyone.

Hi, J. First off, I hope you don't mind that I've quoted your post and made it part of mine. I think the heart of what you've asked of your friends of color is extremely important and I think my response needs much more space than as a reply on your feed. I truly thank you for wanting to understand what you are having a hard time understanding.

Coincidentally, over the last few days I have been thinking about sharing some of the incidents of prejudice/racism I've experienced in my lifetime, In fact, I just spoke with my sister Lesa about how to best do this yesterday, because I realized many of my friends ― especially the white ones ― have no idea what I've experienced/dealt with unless they were present (and aware) when it happened.

There are two reasons for this:

1) Not only as a human being do I suppress the painful and uncomfortable in an effort to make it go away, I was also taught within my community (I was raised in the '70s and '80s ― it's shifted somewhat now) and by society at large NOT to make a fuss, speak out or rock the boat. To just "deal with it," lest more trouble follow (which sadly, it often does).

2) Fear of being questioned or dismissed with "Are you sure that's what you heard?" or "Are you sure that's what they meant?" and being angered and upset all over again by well-meaning-but-hurtful and essentially unsupportive responses.

So, again, I'm glad you asked, because I really want to answer. But as I do, please know a few things first:

1) This is not even close to the whole list. I'm cherrypicking because none of us have all day.

2) I've been really lucky. Most of what I share below is mild compared to what others in my family and community have endured.

3) I'm going to go in chronological order so you might begin to glimpse the tonnage and why what many white folks might feel is a "Where did all of this come from?" moment in society has been festering individually and collectively for the LIFETIME of pretty much every black or brown person living in America today regardless of wealth or opportunity.

4) Some of what I share covers sexism, too ― intersectionality is another term I'm sure you've heard and want to put quotes around, but it's a real thing, too, just like white privilege. But you've requested a focus on personal experiences with racism, so here it goes:

One day my mom ID'd one as the boy from across the street, went to his house, told his mother and fortunately, his mother believed mine. My mom not only got an apology, but also had that boy jump in our pool and retrieve every single rock. No more rocks after that.

Then Mom ― a primary school teacher and always the educator ― even invited him to come over to swim sometime if he asked permission. Everyone became friends. This one has a happy ending because my mom was and is badass about matters like these, but I hope you can see that the white privilege in this situation is being able to move into a "nice" neighborhood and be accepted not harassed, made to feel unwelcome, or prone to acts of vandalism and hostility.

The point here is, if you've never been on the receiving end of the assumption that when you've achieved something it's only because it was taken away from a white person who "deserved it," that is white privilege.
The first was the white doctor giving me a physical at Kaiser:
Me: "I need to send an immunization report to my college so I can matriculate."

Doctor: "Where are you going?"

Doctor: "You mean the one in Massachusetts?"
The second was in a store, looking for supplies I needed from Harvard's suggested "what to bring with you" list:
Store employee: "Where are you going?"

Store employee: "You mean the one in Massachusetts?"
The third was at UPS, shipping off boxes of said "what to bring" to Harvard. I was in line behind a white boy mailing boxes to Princeton and in front of a white woman sending her child's boxes to wherever:
Woman, to the boy: "What college are you going to?"

Woman: "Congratulations!"

Woman, to me: "Where are you sending your boxes?"

Woman: "You mean the one in Massachusetts?"

I think: "No bitch, the one downtown next to the liquor store."

But I say, gesturing to my LABELED boxes: "Yes, the one in Massachusetts."

T hen she says congratulations but it's too fucking late.

6. In my freshman college tutorial, our small group of 4-5 was assigned to read Thoreau, Emerson, Malcolm X, Joseph Conrad, Dreiser, etc. When it was the week to discuss The Autobiography of Malcolm X, one white boy boldly claimed he couldn't even get through it because he couldn't relate and didn't think he should be forced to read it. I don't remember the words I said, but I still remember the feeling ― I think it's what doctors refer to as "chandelier pain" ― as soon as a sensitive area on a patient is touched, they shoot through the roof. That's what I felt.

I know I said something like my whole life I've had to read "things that don't have anything to do with me or that I relate to" but I find a way anyway because that's what learning is about ― trying to understand other people's perspectives.

When what he said about me was revealed months later (by then he'd come to respect and rely on me), he apologized for prejudging me because I was black and female. I told him (not unkindly, but with a head shake and a smile) that he was ignorant for doing so and clearly had a lot to learn. It was a good talk because he was remorseful and open.

He then told me that when he drove home from work late at night, he was getting stopped by cops constantly because he was a black man in a luxury car, and they assumed it was either stolen or he was a drug dealer. When he told a cop friend about this, he told Warren to put a stuffed animal in the rear window because it would change "his profile" to that of a family man and he was much less likely to be stopped.

10. Six years ago, I started a Facebook page that has grown into a website called Good Black News because I was shocked to find there were no sites dedicated solely to publishing the positive things black people do.

And let me explain here how biased the coverage of mainstream media is in case you don't already have a clue ― as I curate, I can't tell you how often I have to swap out a story's photo to make it as positive as the content. Photos published of black folks in mainstream media are very often sullen or angry-looking. Even when it's a positive story!

I also have to constantly alter headlines to 1) include a person's name and not have it just be "Black Man Wins Settlement" or "Carnegie Hall Gets 1st Black Board Member" or 2) rephrase it from a subtle subjugator like "ABC taps Viola Davis as Series Lead" to "Viola Davis Lands Lead on ABC Show" as is done for say, Jennifer Aniston or Steven Spielberg.

I also receive a fair amount of highly offensive racist trolling. I don't even respond. I block and delete ASAP.

Okay, J, there's more but I'm exhausted. And my kids need dinner. Remembering and reliving many of these moments has been a strain and a drain (and again, this ain't even the half or the worst of it). But I hope my experiences shed some light for you on how institutional and personal racism have affected the entire life of a friend of yours to whom you've only been respectful and kind.

I hope what I've shared makes you realize it's not just strangers but people you know and care for who have suffered and are suffering because we are excluded from the privilege you have to not be judged, questioned or assaulted in any way because of your race.

As to you "being part of the problem," trust me, nobody is mad at you for being white. Nobody. Just like nobody should be mad at me for being black. Or female. Or whatever. But what IS being asked of you is to acknowledge that white privilege DOES exist and to not only to treat people of races that differ from yours "with respect and humor," but also to stand up for fair treatment and justice, to not let "jokes" or "off-color" comments by friends, co-workers or family slide by without challenge, and to continually make an effort to put yourself in someone else's shoes, so we may all cherish and respect our unique and special contributions to society as much as we do our common ground.

With much love and respect,
A version of this post originally appeared on goodblacknews.org

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What I Told My White Friend When He Asked For My Black Opinion On White Privilege

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Recently, I was tagged in a post by an old high school friend, asking me and a few others a very public, direct question about white privilege and racism. I feel compelled not only to publish his query but also my response to it, as it may be a helpful discourse for more than just a handful of folks on Facebook.

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I Went To High School In The Suburb From ‘Get Out’ - But I Got Out

Every Black person in America has found themselves in the ‘Sunken Place’ at some point in their lives

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Discovering and becoming comfortable with one's identity is arguably our most arduous undertaking as human beings. In a world that is obsessed with categorization, becoming content with our individual abnormalities can be exceedingly difficult.

This journey is further compounded by race - an illegitimate construct that was, according to Professor Barbara J. Fields of Columbia University, created by Americans of European descent during the era of the American revolution as a way of resolving the contradiction between a natural right to freedom and the fact of slavery. As a result of this creation, Black identity has suffered tremendously, as identity issues and inferiority complexes have seeped deep into the Black psyche. But thankfully, efforts to shed light upon these previously under-discussed and painful topics in our society's culture have become increasingly common.

Jordan Peele's Get Out was a brilliant depiction of contemporary components of race in America - whether in regards to the complexities of interracial relationships or white supremacy or Black identity [in white environments]. The film used the concept of "the sunken place" as an exceptional metaphor for limited [social] consciousness and the power of racism and white supremacy.

In the film, the protagonist Chris was kept mentally and physically paralyzed in "the sunken place" by Missy Armitage's usage of a spoon and tea cup. She was able to hypnotize Chris by redirecting his attention to his failures (i.e. smoking or not saving his mom from dying) to keep him captive. This is an integral element of white supremacy and currently often comes in the form of mass media.

Whether we would like to admit this truth or not, every Black person in America (and arguably the world) has found themselves in "the sunken place" at some point in their lives. This is simply another unfortunate result of colonialism, racism and white supremacy. The length of time in this stunted consciousness state can of course vary greatly - being as brief as slightly changing one's natural voice or mannerisms in certain [white] social settings or as long as denouncing your heritage and referring to slaves as "immigrants."

"The sunken place" was used in the film as a way to debilitate Chris and keep him restricted in preparation for the coagula surgery. This surgery would essentially put him in a permanent sunken place state and allow his mind to be completely controlled by the Armitages.

I was very close to my own metaphysical coagula surgery, but fortunately I, like Chris, was able to break free from the physical and mental confinement of "the sunken place." While Chris was able to use his wit and strength to break this imprisonment, mine came as a result of the costliest natural disaster in United States history.

The resounding message from Get Out is that one can never allow another to dictate how they act or view themselves.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, I was attending an overwhelmingly majority (90-95%) white all-male catholic high school in New Orleans. Academically, it was exceptional as it had produced the top three national merit finalists in the state the year before I attended - and my mother sent me there despite being a social worker in New Orleans' public school system for nearly twenty years at that time. While this concept may seem unique, it was somewhat common in New Orleans as the city still maintains the highest proportion of private school attendees in the country.

For some reason, despite being tested as gifted when I was five years old or skipping the third grade or always finishing at the top of my class prior to attending this school, I evolved into a horrible student once I was there. During my two full years there, I consistently struggled to maintain a 2.0 grade point average and was constantly in detention for infractions such as un-shined shoes and crooked nametags.

These struggles severely impacted my identity and confidence as I would frequently come home to my parents and tell them that I was "inferior" and that they "had to accept that I was stupid and mediocre." The white supremacy disease had severely infected me and taken me to a very deep part of "the sunken place" - to the point that I was vehemently contesting my racial inferiority to a mother who was born in the first independent Black nation in the world and a father who was a former member of the Nation of Islam.

Thankfully, Hurricane Katrina was the camera flash that my soul needed to set me on a new path out of "the sunken place." I was forced to relocate and attend a multicultural public high school in Shreveport, Louisiana where I excelled socially and academically after discovering the beauty of my individuality. I was also able to recognize my true potential and the limitations that certain social constructs such as race can attempt to place on people. This is the type of awakening that many members of the Black community in America need as we work to correct the effects of destructive false narratives born from hundreds of years of systemic transgressions.

But what would have happened had I stayed at my New Orleans high school and continued to exist in an environment that was destructing my identity? What will continue to happen to people, particularly those of color, if they allow their identity to be dictated by others?

No matter what your race, gender, creed or sexuality - one resounding message from Get Out is that one can never allow another to dictate how they act or view themselves. And this message is even more imperative for Black people as we work to rid ourselves of a now 398-year old affliction.

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I Went To High School In The Suburb From 'Get Out' - But I Got Out

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Discovering and becoming comfortable with one's identity is arguably our most arduous undertaking as human beings. In a world that is obsessed with categorization, becoming content with our individual abnormalities can be exceedingly difficult. This journey is further compounded by race - an illegitimate construct that was, according to Professor Barbara J.

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A Sociologist Examines the “White Fragility” That Prevents White Americans from Confronting Racism

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A Sociologist Examines the “White Fragility” That Prevents White Americans from Confronting Racism

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In more than twenty years of running diversity-training and cultural-competency workshops for American companies, the academic and educator Robin DiAngelo has noticed that white people are sensationally, histrionically bad at discussing racism. Like waves on sand, their reactions form predictable patterns: they will insist that they "were taught to treat everyone the same," that they are "color-blind," that they "don't care if you are pink, purple, or polka-dotted." They will point to friends and family members of color, a history of civil-rights activism, or a more "salient" issue, such as class or gender. They will shout and bluster. They will cry. In 2011, DiAngelo coined the term "white fragility" to describe the disbelieving defensiveness that white people exhibit when their ideas about race and racism are challenged-and particularly when they feel implicated in white supremacy. Why, she wondered, did her feedback prompt such resistance, as if the mention of racism were more offensive than the fact or practice of it?

In a new book, " White Fragility," DiAngelo attempts to explicate the phenomenon of white people's paper-thin skin. She argues that our largely segregated society is set up to insulate whites from racial discomfort, so that they fall to pieces at the first application of stress-such as, for instance, when someone suggests that "flesh-toned" may not be an appropriate name for a beige crayon. Unused to unpleasantness (more than unused to it-racial hierarchies tell white people that they are entitled to peace and deference), they lack the "racial stamina" to engage in difficult conversations. This leads them to respond to "racial triggers"-the show "Dear White People," the term "wypipo"-with "emotions such as anger, fear and guilt," DiAngelo writes, "and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation."

DiAngelo, who is white, emphasizes that the stances that make up white fragility are not merely irrational. (Or even comical, though some of her anecdotes-participants in a voluntary anti-racism workshop dissolving with umbrage at any talk of racism-simmer with perverse humor. "I have found that the only way to give feedback without triggering white fragility is not to give it at all," she remarks wryly.) These splutterings "work," DiAngelo explains, "to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy." She finds that the social costs for a black person in awakening the sleeping dragon of white fragility often prove so high that many black people don't risk pointing out discrimination when they see it. And the expectation of "white solidarity"-white people will forbear from correcting each other's racial missteps, to preserve the peace-makes genuine allyship elusive. White fragility holds racism in place.

DiAngelo addresses her book mostly to white people, and she reserves her harshest criticism for white liberals like herself (and like me), whom she sees as refusing to acknowledge their own participation in racist systems. "I believe," she writes, "that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color." Not only do these people fail to see their complicity, but they take a self-serving approach to ongoing anti-racism efforts: "To the degree that white progressives think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived." Even the racial beliefs and responses that feel authentic or well-intentioned have likely been programmed by white supremacy, to perpetuate white supremacy. Whites profit off of an American political and economic system that showers advantages on racial "winners" and oppresses racial "losers." Yet, DiAngelo writes, white people cling to the notion of racial innocence, a form of weaponized denial that positions black people as the "havers" of race and the guardians of racial knowledge. Whiteness, on the other hand, scans as invisible, default, a form of racelessness. "Color blindness," the argument that race shouldn't matter, prevents us from grappling with how it does.

Much of "White Fragility" is dedicated to pulling back the veil on these so-called pillars of whiteness: assumptions that prop up racist beliefs without our realizing it. Such ideologies include individualism, or the distinctly white-American dream that one writes one's own destiny, and objectivity, the confidence that one can free oneself entirely from bias. As a sociologist trained in mapping group patterns, DiAngelo can't help but regard both precepts as naïve (at best) and arrogant (at worst). To be perceived as an individual, to not be associated with anything negative because of your skin color, she notes, is a privilege largely afforded to white people; although most school shooters, domestic terrorists, and rapists in the United States are white, it is rare to see a white man on the street reduced to a stereotype. Likewise, people of color often endure having their views attributed to their racial identities; the luxury of impartiality is denied them. (In outlining these discrepancies, DiAngelo draws heavily on the words of black writers and scholars-Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison, Ijeoma Oluo, Cheryl Harris-although, perhaps surprisingly, she incorporates few present-day interviews with people of color.)

In DiAngelo's almost epidemiological vision of white racism, our minds and bodies play host to a pathogen that seeks to replicate itself, sickening us in the process. Like a mutating virus, racism shape-shifts in order to stay alive; when its explicit expression becomes taboo, it hides in coded language. Nor does prejudice disappear when people decide that they will no longer tolerate it. It just looks for ways to avoid detection. "The most effective adaptation of racism over time," DiAngelo claims, "is the idea that racism is conscious bias held by mean people." This "good/bad binary," positing a world of evil racists and compassionate non-racists, is itself a racist construct, eliding systemic injustice and imbuing racism with such shattering moral meaning that white people, especially progressives, cannot bear to face their collusion in it. (Pause on that, white reader. You may have subconsciously developed your strong negative feelings about racism in order to escape having to help dismantle it.) As an ethical thinker, DiAngelo belongs to the utilitarian school, which places less importance on attitudes than on the ways in which attitudes cause harm. Unpacking the fantasy of black men as dangerous and violent, she does not simply fact-check it; she shows the myth's usefulness to white people-to obscure the historical brutality against African-Americans, and to justify continued abuse.

DiAngelo sometimes adopts a soothing, conciliatory tone toward white readers, as if she were appeasing a child on the verge of a tantrum. "If your definition of a racist is someone who holds conscious dislike of people because of race, then I agree that it is offensive for me to suggest that you are racist when I don't know you," she writes. "I also agree that if this is your definition of racism, and you are against racism, then you are not racist. Now breathe. I am not using this definition of racism, and I am not saying that you are immoral. If you can remain open as I lay out my argument, it should soon begin to make sense." One has the grim hunch that such an approach has been honed over years of placating red-faced white people, workshop participants leaping at any excuse to discount their instructor. DiAngelo, for all the outrageousness she documents, never comes across as anything other than preternaturally calm, patient, and lucid, issuing prescriptions for a better world as if from beneath a blanket of Ativan. Her almost motorized equipoise clarifies the book's stakes: she cannot afford to lose us, who are so easily lost.

Self-righteousness becomes a seductive complement to "White Fragility," as gin is to a mystery novel. ("I would never," I thought, when DiAngelo described the conversation in which her friend dismissed a predominantly black neighborhood as "bad," unsafe.) Yet the point of the book is that each white person believes herself the exception, one of very few souls magically exempt from a lifetime of racist conditioning. DiAngelo sets aside a whole chapter for the self-indulgent tears of white women, so distraught at the country's legacy of racist terrorism that they force people of color to drink from the firehose of their feelings about it.

The book is more diagnostic than solutions-oriented, and the guidelines it offers toward the end-listen, don't center yourself, get educated, think about your responses and what role they play-won't shock any nervous systems. The value in "White Fragility" lies in its methodical, irrefutable exposure of racism in thought and action, and its call for humility and vigilance. Combatting one's inner voices of racial prejudice, sneaky and, at times, irresistibly persuasive, is a life's work. For all the paranoid American theories of being "red-pilled," of awakening into a many-tentacled liberal/feminist/Jewish conspiracy, the most corrosive force, the ectoplasm infusing itself invisibly through media and culture and politics, is white supremacy.

That's from a white progressive perspective, of course. The conspiracy of racism is hardly invisible to people of color, many of whom, I suspect, could have written this book in their sleep.

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A Sociologist Examines the "White Fragility" That Prevents White Americans from Confronting Racism

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In more than twenty years of running diversity-training and cultural-competency workshops for American companies, the academic and educator Robin DiAngelo has noticed that white people are sensationally, histrionically bad at discussing racism. Like waves on sand, their reactions form predictable patterns: they will insist that they "were taught to treat everyone the same," that they are "color-blind," that they "don't care if you are pink, purple, or polka-dotted."