Tag Archives: racism

On Racism and the Chronicle of Higher End

Posted on by
Reply

On April 30, Naomi Schaefer Riley published a piece, The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations, in the Brainstorm Blog at the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Her post was a vitriolic, acerbic personal attack on three young black women an the work that they are doing as PhD students and on Black Studies more generally. Let me be clear – her attack was based on the titles and short descriptions of three women’s as yet un-written dissertations. Her arguments boiled down to (and i quote):

What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

And with a felled swoop, she chomped through the three titles and descriptions, explaining why each was, in her opinion, both indicative of an ostensibly dead field and of poor research topics. She dismisses an entire discipline based on a short article highlighting three students. Well done, Ms. Riley – in academia, we call that anecdotal evidence and non-substantive. Blog, or no, you don’t, actually, get to denounce an entire field because you’re having a bad day. Were you my student writing a reflective essay (the equivalent of a blog post, but printed and handed in), i would have spent quite some time patiently explaining to you that you do not get to make generalizations based on a few things that you haven’t even read beyond the title and a description. But, you’re not an undergraduate student. You are a supposed journalist writing in an online journal on academia. So, i’m afraid the expectations are a little bit higher and the onus is on you to actually put a little effort into it.

The three women highlighted in the article wrote an impassioned response that not only responded to the Chronicle, but to Riley directly, and to her (unsupported) claims against black studies, more generally:

Our work is not about victimization; it is about liberation.  Liberating the history, culture and politics of our people from the contortions and distortions of a white supremacist framework that has historically denied our agency and subjectivity as active participants in the making of the world we live in. For the past 40 years, black studies has been instrumental in transforming higher education into a more inclusive, competitive, and rigorous intellectual enterprise. This is a fact. The contributions are irrefutable

They, i thought, were not only civil (more civil, indeed, than Ms. Riley) and responded with a maturity, both intellectual and personal, that i’m not sure i could have mustered.

The Chronicle responded, at first, with a rather watery note about how they’re not responsible for what gets published – it is, after all, “just” a blog. Ms. Riley, also, posted a response. Ungracious and filled with her sense of indignant privilege, she supposedly responded to her detractors on their four main points. It made me feel sorry for her. In a really heartbreakingly anxious way. Again, she failed to construct any real criticism of the discipline and simply wrote off most of academia as frivolous. Someone please explain to me why she is writing in an online news site for higher ed about higher ed topics?

Faculty have responded, other Brainstorm Bloggers have responded, and responded, and responded, and responded, with poetry even, and then the Chronicle fired her.

The response, both in the Chronicle and in other newspapers have been filled with blow back. Most, like the NY Post, obviously have never read the Chronicle before, don’t know a thing about academia, certainly didn’t bother reading all of the posts and responses, and simply don’t understand the difference between a blog post in a relatively uninteresting newspaper and one in an online publication for academics. There has been a one-sided debate about academia and “gagging” and being out of touch. Ms. Riley has become a martyr – a victim of the Ivory Tower, not of her own lack of journalistic integrity. And while she has both blown off criticisms by saying her original article was “just” a blog post, she has also swung back to insist that she is a qualified journalist. Which is it, Ms. Riley? You don’t get to wear your credentials and then blow them off at will until you need them to shield you.

What is particularly interesting is that Ms. Riley was given space in the Wall Street Journal to “tell her side”, as it were. What is fascinating is the utter shift in tone. She suddenly finds room to cite (herself, mostly) and is actually *gasp* polite in her discourse. Almost.

I’m not saying that all people must be always polite in all things they write (though Mike Fossum at WebPro News had a bit to say about this). But i find it fascinating that when in search of support outside of academia, Ms. Riley finally figures out how to write like an adult. So i’m left with a sense of something else entirely – does perhaps, Ms. Riley have  chip on her shoulder about higher education? Is her vitriol actually about something else, entirely? That her anger isn’t about a particular discipline but of something more deeply-seeded? In her response in the Chronicle, she closes her response by saying:

Such is the state of academic research these days. The disciplines multiply. The publication topics become more and more irrelevant and partisan. No one reads them. And the people whom we expect to offer undergraduates a broad liberal-arts education (in return for billions of dollars from parents and taxpayers) never get trained to do so. Instead the ivory tower pushes them further and further into obscurity.

I beg to differ, Ms. Riley. But that’s for another post another day.

Racism and peace in America

Posted on by
2

I made the mistake of looking at More Deleted Comments from White Readers on the United Black America website this morning. The question at the end, from the author, was, What’s your comeback to these comments?

My first instinct was none. Absolutely no comeback  - just compassion. But can we simply sit in a state of compassion when faced with the virulence of violence that stems not just discursively, but also physically, legally, socially, economically? I realize that this is one site – one that probably attracts trolls (not purposefully, mind you, this is not a “blame the victim” moment – rather, there is a quiet part of my heart that is hoping that it’s just a few drunk idiots who had nothing better to do than leave ratty comments).

But this isn’t the only moment of virulent racism i’ve bumped up against in the past few weeks. In the last two weeks of the quarter, my students and i tackled very large questions around the War on Terror. I started to type “Muslim” and “Christian” into search engines. It dragged me down a horrifying rabbit hole of hate.

Do we continue to sit in peace? Can we?

My students and i struggled with this question in Week 8. We read Martin Luther King’s “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” and three other works about women who are working toward peace (listed at the end of this post). What we came back to again and again was the question of what it means to enact peace and must there be violence to even bring issues to the forefront. But that can’t’ be it. It can’t just be that heinous acts of violence bring racism and other oppressive forms of marginalization (and hate, really) to the front stage – there is violence happening every day for a wide range of perceived differences, in all kinds of places.

Judith Butler (Precarious Life) tells us:

…the shared condition of precariousness leads not to reciprocal recognition, but to a specific exploitation of targeted populations, of lives that are not quite lives, cast as “destructible” and “ungrievable.” Such populations are “lose-able” or can be forfeited, precisely because they are framed as being already lost or forfeited; they are cast as threats to human life as we know it rather than as living populations in need of protection from illegitimate state violence, famine, or pandemics.

That anyone can call this a post-racial society is beyond comprehension when you consider these delightful campaign ads of 2010. How is it that we live in a society that can equate Christianity with Americanness and Americanness with hate. Take, for instance, the latest Perry campaign ad. (Or, as my partner just said, when i played it for him “Freaky-deaky! Have you got your [EU Country] citizenship paperwork finished?”)

Paul Farmer (2003) and others (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004) have pointed to structural violences as equally demanding of our attentions as the political violences which, for so long, were deemed somehow more “worthy” of attention and analysis. Yet, structural violences hold every bit of the historical and social processes that are embedded in so-called political violences. It is not enough to narrate the violences so much as it is important to trace them back to the social, political and economic ideologies underpinning these violences – the construction of hate.

But sometimes, i wonder if tracing is enough… if protesting is enough…

other readings for week 8

Hays-Mitchell, Maureen. 2005. Women’s struggles for sustainable peace in post-conflict Peru: a feminist analysis of violence and change. InLise Nelson & Joni Seager, eds., A companion to feminist geography. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 590-606.

Berger Gould, Benina. Ritual as resistance: Tibetan women and nonviolence. In Marguerite R. Waller & Jennifer Rycenga, eds., Frontline feminisms: women, war, and resistance. New York: Routledge, 206-228.

Fluri, Jennifer L. 2006. “‘Our Website Was Revolutionary’: Virtual Spaces of Representation and Resistance.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographers 5 (1): 89-111.

UPDATE

I would like to point to the number of “Likes” and “Dislikes” for this ad… i feel a little better about life, today:

Food, anti-racism, and justice in the city

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday, Laura Pulido and Nik Heynen were on campus for a NOW Urbanism lecture at the University of Washington, of the John E Sawyer Seminar in the Study of Comparative Cultures, titled Social Justice, Inequality and Cities.

I had the great pleasure of getting to speak to Laura Pulido in a small session with only a few other graduate students. What a delight! I, unfortunately, was unable to meet with Nik Heynen- much to my chagrin.

The talk went swimmingly…

Nik came to the talk with much to say about invisible geographies and food insecurity.  What struck me the most was his pointed interventions in trying to understand the ways in which social movements work. What is it about survival that is so scary to people? that here in America, we do have millions of people struggling to feed themselves? This isn’t a new topic, but it is a topic that loses steam from time to time – and Nik Heynen was so ready to re-infuse it – to remind students and faculty that hunger is a matter of survival – that children who do not have enough to eat are a product of a system that does not take seriously the growth and flourish-ment of entire generations.

He then went on to speak about the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program that fed 250,000 children through 45 chapters a day. It grew into a federal program – but more importantly, it was a moment of self-empowerment and of owning the processes of redistribution (my words, not his) among people in need. I so wished i’d had the chance to speak to him. My own work with the Model Cities Program here in Seattle matched so well with his – there is so much more to say about the possibilities born out of political empowerment and infusion of funds.

He was followed by Laura Pulido who spoke about racialisation. Non-whites account for 91% of the growth in population today. In Seattle 1 in 6 children born are of mixed race. What i loved was her ability to speak about whiteness without pulling punches or apologising…

A white supremacist society, she tells us, is interested in inter-racial tensions. “In our zeal to lock up the black surplus labour” we have accidentally swept up whites as well – even some who have voted for the policies (makers). But who is profiting, she asks? Who is being locked up? Who is living under terror? Who is living under deportation?

In a recent study of the LA Times, it was found that 70%+ of articles show blacks and Latinos in tension and in a negative light. What does this do?

  1. it is a relief to white people to have the pressure taken off – every (racial) group lays out their history of oppression through the history of whites
  2. the emphases on the conflict shows that whites are not the only racists – Latino gang members are being charged with hate crimes in LA against black gang members even though less than 20% of black gang crimes and less than 10% Latino gang crimes are even about racially biased gang-related violence (as opposed to robbery, drug-related, etc.)
  3. this offers an aura of moral authority of whiteness in which urban whites are seen as “pioneers of the urban frontier” and yet, it is still about whiteness and the power dynamics inherent in these discourses

So, she says, we all have a responsibility to:

  1. RECOGNIZE diversity of interactions: that it is not just about tensions between racial groups, but also about co-operation, integration, collaboration, etc.
  2. ANALYZE racial dynamics – there is no such thing as a colour-blind society, so why do we keep saying there is? we end up perpetuating racism through trying to find the colour-blindness in society
  3. ROLE OF ANTI-RACIST WHITES – de-investment in whiteness begins with whites; organise whites against racism, be an “ally” to people of colour … only white people can reach white people in ways that people of colour cannot…

The conversations i had with fellow geographers, the John E. Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow, Michael Powe, and a PhD student in Literature from UC Irvine, Angela,  after the talk was priceless. It was one of the rare times that my not-whiteness was neither touted as a singularity amongst whites, nor overlooked, as though my positionality precluded my non-whiteness, and i am terribly grateful to my bar-mates for their sensitivity to that.

Race and racism in humanitarian assistance in Haiti

Posted on by
Reply

Since the earthquake, i have avoided a subject that makes me (and really most people) terribly uncomfortable: racism. I thought i might write about it in my generals, but got cold feet as it seemed that i could read about race, racism, critical race theory till my dying days and never have gotten through half what i needed to to be able to speak with any kind of clarity of possible expertise. But today i opened my inbox and found the email from Lawrence Berg, founding editor of ACME: An international E-Journal for Critical Geographers, with the contents for the latest issue. The very first article was Fear and Loathing in Haiti: Race and Politics of Humanitarian Dispossession in Haiti, by Beverly Mullings, Marion Werner, and Linda Peake. Attached to that email was a very nice email from my chair pointing me to read it.

I’ve started it. It’s incredibly well-written (as one might expect) and has, in the first few pages, managed to neatly unravel my fears of writing about race and securitization. It has also already had me in tears. I’ve (very rudely, and without permission) inserted the abstract:

The response by Western governments to the earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12, 2010 throws into sharp relief the connections between racism and dispossession in times of humanitarian crisis. In this article, we take the 2010 earthquake as a point of departure in order to examine the purpose that circulating discourses of black criminality serve in narratives of humanitarianism and development in Haiti. Through an examination of debt, financial colonialism and neoliberal adjustment we explore the deep associations between racism,
humanitarianism and ongoing capitalist processes. We conclude by outlining what it would take to dismantle the dispossessions that racialized discourses of blackness, criminality and failed development facilitate in Haiti.

When the earthquake happened, i, like so many others, was appalled and dismayed by the rush to re- and further-militarize Haiti before allowing humanitarian aid to get through. In the first few days, there were reports of Médecins Sans Frontières planes being turned away from the airport that had been taken over by military troops – not Haitian military – there is no Haitian military. Sean Penn, however, was able to get his planes in – but this isn’t about Sean Penn – i’ll save that discussion for later. What i did not realize, and what is mentioned in the article, is that it is estimated that 20,000 more people were dying each day, waiting for the “securitization” program to be in place to allow humanitarian aid in. Eighteen days in, as many as 600,000 people still had not received food assistance.

I remember the day the assistance arrived all that time after the earthquake. There were reports of rioting and violence. That was the headline – not that people were starving to death waiting for help. So why the long wait? Mullings et. al point to the climate of fear promulgated by the US military (construction of high security red zones) and internalized by aid agencies.

In the days after the earthquake, i antagonized myself by reading reader comments to articles about the earthquake and the subsequent horror. What struck me was the vitriolic hatred that was spewed from anonymous internet fingers about the backwardness, the blackness, the inhumanness of the Haitian people – as understood by the American public. I recognize that “the American public” is a bit harsh and broad reaching. Those people with so little to do that they can roam freely in the internets to spread their hatred could and should hardly be considered The Public – they are a special breed, i suppose. But where did their perceptions come from?

Historically, the fear stemmed from two places. I’ve been reading a collected edition of essays, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution on the Atlantic World, (ed) by David P. Geggus. In it Robin Blackburn (in his chapter, The Force of Example) states:

It is worth stressing, however, that it was the new-post slavery order, born out of revolution, not the bloodshed of revolt as such, which eventually won over significant sectors of metropolitan opionion in the antislavery cause. The figure of Toussaint Louverture served as a hugely influential symbol of responsible black power throughout the nineteenth century and beyond…Haiti was a symbol of black power and authority, not of desperate rebellion, that that is why it could inspire or terrify (17).

It was the image of ordered black bodies that inspired or terrified people. Because ordered black bodies can attain power – the kind of power that had been reserved for white men for all of the hegemon of Europe. At the same time, as Mullings (Et al) point out:

Popular discourses of black violence should be understood as historically rooted in expressions of fear, racialized fear of the threat that autonomous communities of poor black people potentially pose to contemporary notions of progress, civilization and the economic and social institutions at the heart of capitalist liberal democracy.

The U.S. and other economic powers of the 19th century crushed the tiny Haitian nation, placing embargoes, imposing restrictive taxes and occasionally invading the island. To what end, exactly?

There is a prevailing discourse that the black nation, so close to the U.S. and so unwilling to bow to the pressure of the neoliberal world order (though, as Peter Hallward points out, Haiti’s economy was 4 times as open as the US’s in 2008), is a threat to world order. Job #1: keep the Haitian people on the island. #2: order and control Haitian people according to “acceptable” economic and social orders that benefit the elite and non-Haitians, only.

Underpinning all of this, Mullings (et al) point out, is the racialized discourse of disorder that incites fear. Fear. But more on that in a day or two.