‘Untrustworthy’ (Read: Black) Students Banned from Chicago Bar

Six black students from Washington University on a senior trip were denied admission to a bar in Chicago because the manager said their "baggy jeans" violated a code. The Student Life newspaper at Wash U has done a good job of covering the story, and has a summary of what happened:

Washington University seniors on their class trip accused a Chicago nightclub of racial discrimination over the weekend, protesting nearby after the club allegedly denied entry to six black male students because of their race. “I think it’s because we were a group of predominantly black men and they felt threatened,” said senior Blake Jones, one of the students who was not allowed into the bar. About 200 Washington University seniors were attending Mother’s Night Club Original bar on Saturday night as part of their class trip to Chicago, sponsored by the Senior Class Council. According to Senior Class President Fernando Cutz, the six black students were told they would not be allowed in because of their failure to comply with the bar’s “baggy jeans” policy. A few white students who had already been admitted then came out to demonstrate that their jeans were more “baggy,” but the black students were still denied admission. The six students offered to change their clothes, but the bar manager still refused to allow them in. The white students were allowed to return.

I blogged about a related situation at Morehouse, in which the school claimed they wanted to outlaw "sagging," or pants worn low enough so that undergarments are revealed. In that post, I also placed a photo of a dress code policy of a bar in Grand Forks, N.D. that said anyone wearing "excessively long shirts" and "flat caps" would be refused service. Many of these policies target a style that is predominantly worn by young black men.

A clever person might be able to argue that the policies themselves aren't racist – they just so happen to target a group of people that is predominantly black. But go back and take a look again at that photo I took of the bar in Grand Forks prohibited FUBU specifically, a clothing line that was designed for and by black people as a response to the marketing of Nike and other companies that were designed by white people. Southpole is a clothing line founded by Korean Americans, and G Unit is 50 Cent's clothing line. None of the designers called out are white, and all of them market their lines to minorities.

Weirdly enough, outlawing overly baggy jeans is kind of outdated – Not only has the "baggy jeans" look become standard for black and white men (and sometimes women) today, but "hip hop style" has moved from Kris Kross-era bagginess to a more fitted kind of jeans. Such policies almost seem to be created by a white person who has a stereotype of a black person that is 10 years old.

The interesting thing about the students from Wash U is that the bar definitely seemed to selectively enforce its policies – the student paper reported that other white students with baggy jeans weren't kicked out. Furthermore, the manager called the students "untrustworthy," according to a press release sent to Campus Progress by the president of the Association of Black Students at Wash U, Tiffany Johnson.

The press release also noted that more than 170 students participated in a 15-minute protest on Sunday morning outside Mother's. Johnson noted that Wash U students plan a second protest in November, presumably to be larger in scale.

The instance of banning black students from a bar in Chicago – and its subsequent fallout – is a harsh reminder that race relations are still a touchy subject in this country.

Cross posted.

Horrifying Serena Williams Thread

This Friday Serena Williams will appear on newsstands naked. She's posing for the cover of ESPN's body issue. Although I'm generally a little squeamish about the commodification of women's bodies that comes with the naked woman on the cover (magazines often use it to boost newsstand sales). But I couldn't help but feel a little happy that for once the naked woman was a beautiful, curvy, dark-skinned woman. All too often the women that pose naked on magazine covers all look the same: bronzed white women that look freakishly thin. But on Just Jared goes ahead and askes the problematic question, "Hot or Not?"

Some of the answers are wonderful. They mention how empowering it is for women to see a healthy black woman on the cover of a magazine.

Many comments pointed out that the cover was probably Photoshopped. Well, duh. Every commercial image we see has gone through Photoshop. France is even considering a law requiring that advertisements that are Photoshopped carry a "health warning."

But there are some comments that are pretty horrifying:

• Why? @ 10/06/2009 at 3:00 pm

  I don’t know why she had to do this. She’s a great athlete, but her body could be a lot better if she slimmed down some. I think she’s a little too thick and she does not have pretty feet.

• Tom @ 10/06/2009 at 3:11 pm

  She is a bit scary. I would love to do her in the ass.

• this family is so fubar @ 10/06/2009 at 3:14 pm

  Oh yuck - tubby checkers!

• Neorules2112 @ 10/06/2009 at 3:15 pm

  Gross
  Gross
  and Gross

• ew @ 10/06/2009 at 3:31 pm

  Ew, she’s so dark!

• pam @ 10/06/2009 at 4:42 pm

  Yuck, don’t like big black women..

• ilovemykittyb @ 10/06/2009 at 5:05 pm

  gross. like A Monkey…..

Cross posted.

The International Black Conspiracy

This is possibly the funniest thing I've seen today:

FACT! Barack Obama spent twenty years in the same church as radically black pastor Jeremiah Wright, who has been known to make such incendiary claims as "white people enslaved black people" and "white people killed Native Americans." Is Barack Obama part of the international black conspiracy to trick white people into thinking about racism? Answer: maybe.

What the Attack on Gwen Ifill Really Says

A couple days ago a few right-wing bloggers, including the notoriously awful Michelle Malkin, started calling tonight's debate moderator, PBS's Gwen Ifill, "biased" in favor of Barack Obama because she has a forthcoming book called The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Now it seems woman who has a long and proud journalistic career is fending off smears to maintain her "neutrality." But just because Ifill has a forthcoming book about Obama, race, and politics doesn't automatically make her in the Obama camp. By all accounts Obama's candidacy signals a new era in way race is perceived in politics. Obama has literally broken through a barrier that no one else has. As a journalist who covers other black politicians and a student of the civil rights era, it is well within the realm of possibility that she would write a book about this change.

But in a weird way, the attack implies something much darker than the conservatives are willing to say out loud. After all, Ifill successfully moderated the vice presidential debate in 2004 between Dick Cheney and John Edwards without a complaint. The implication by conservatives here is that Ifill might treat Obama more favorably because they share the same race. The book merely gives them an excuse to raise objections (the book was also publicly listed when the McCain campaign agreed to the terms of the debates, which listed her as moderator of the vice presidential debate). The implication is that there's bias in favor of people if they share the same race.

It's sort of an odd argument for the right to be making, since this is the case that affirmative action activists have been making about white people favoring white people for years. Still, the idea that a political journalist would want to write about race in America and use Obama as a hook is somehow more sinister. This is a low for right-wing pundits, but not a particularly new one.

Switzerland's Black Sheep Ad Campaign

Switzerland has finally rejected a series of ads that could only be defined as xenophobic. Photos of the ads and analysis by Joël Vacheron can be found on The Root, including this summary:

The latest ad campaign features black and brown hands grabbing at Swiss passports with the catch phrase "STOP." The SVP/UDC implies that obtaining citizenship is still too easy and permissive for certain ethnic groups. During the campaign, the SVP/UDC supporters claimed that discrimination was not a problem as long as Swiss citizens have the last say about naturalization. Sadly this rhetoric becomes a simple game on the party's Web site where one can play the goat, emblem of the SVP/UDC, and kick the maximum number of black sheep out of the borders to win.

Voters, however, had other ideas. Last Sunday, they rejected this initiative with 64 percent of the vote sending the message that they want the game to be over. Hopefully, this other slap in the face will show Blocher and his disciples that their foolish propaganda has reached its limit. The Swiss voters showed that they want to bring the shameful xenophobic climate to an end.

It seems that while America is known to have a race problem, Western Europe is far from perfect (anyone remember the Muhammad cartoons in the Netherlands?) when it comes to race. It's just that the race narrative in Western Europe isn't such an obvious one. While they don't have quite the same record with civil rights and slavery as in America, they still struggle with xenophobic tendencies when it comes to immigration. I guess it's a battle that's getting fought on both sides of the pond.

Race Has Never Been a Problem ... For a White Person

Latoya's post over at Racialicous makes a point that's been made many times before, but is made in a sort of funny way. An old article a reader sent in makes the claim:

Despite Obama’s hybrid racial pedigree, he is “black” by the one-drop tradition. Unlike most black Americans, however, his history is not framed by generations of racial subordination. This distinction is significant. Because Obama’s ancestral narrative lacks slavery, his self-image likely lacks the wounds from that history.

A commentor responds to the article:

I am young (29) and white. Like many others in those categories, I am voting for Obama. Like anyone my age, I have never seen a race-based drinking fountain or a segregated bus. Race is not an issue for me and I think that is true for most people of my generation.

Of course this male commentor has never experienced problems with race. By the very benefit of his skin color he is largely blind to some of the really awful shit that happens in America. It's easy when you never experience racism, firsthand or otherwise, to pretend that we live in a world that is "beyond race."

WAM!: Race in the Blogosphere

I'm in a panel that asks the question, "Can blogging end racism?" Before even entering the room, I decided the answer to that question is no, but the panelists had a lot of really great advice about how to foster a dialogue about race on blogs. Of course blogging won't end racism, I thought to myself. Are we kidding? Racism is so complex blogging doesn't even scratch the surface.

But when it comes to subjects sensitive like race, Carmen Van Kerckhove (New Demographic/Racialicious) , Latoya Peterson (freelancer), and Wendy Muse (The Coup Magazine) had really great advice about how many layers to think and write about this issue. They advised against getting into the weeds of "oppression Olympics," be conscious of your own biases, and don't be afraid to be wrong and learn more once the dialogue opens up.

It was a great panel, even if I was initially put off by the title.

Cross posted.

Putting a Price On Race

Shankar Vedantam has a great column today on the whole discussion of race in America. First he outlines a rather unusual experiment.

Social psychologists Philip Mazzocco and Mahzarin Banaji once asked white volunteers how much money would cover the "costs" of being born black instead of white. The volunteers guessed that about $5,000 ought to cover the lifetime disadvantages of being an average black person rather than an average white person, in the United States. By contrast, when asked how much they wanted to go without television, the volunteers demanded a million dollars.

This is indicative of how whites in America tend to judge race as rather inconsequential. There's a weird optimism among whites -- especially white men -- in America. These are the same guys that get angry about affirmative action and the "unfair" advantage women and minorities get from such policies. They tend to think everyone pretty much starts on a level playing field, even if that couldn't be further from the truth.

Mazzocco and Banaji were taken aback: The average black person in America is 447 percent more likely to be imprisoned than the average white person, and 521 percent more likely to be murdered. Blacks earn 60 cents to the dollar compared with whites who have the same education levels and marital status. The black poverty rate is nearly twice the white poverty rate. Blacks tend to die five years earlier than whites; the infant mortality rate among black babies is nearly 1 1/2 times the rate among white babies. And because of long-standing patterns of inheritance, blacks and whites begin life with substantial disparities in family wealth.

"The point we were making is, whatever the cost of being black might be, whites are vastly underestimating it," said Mazzocco, of Ohio State University at Mansfield. "You throw in the 5-to-1 wealth gap . . . if you wanted to put a dollar-and-cents value on the difference, you would come up with a number much larger than $5,000."

To me the consequence isn't the lost lifetime earnings, it's more about a lack of perception about how pervasive racism still is in America today. It's not just about the moment of hiring or college admissions, it has to do with compounded circumstances that put young black men in prison rather than in college. It is sometimes helpful, though, for those white guys to think about it in terms of dollars to get a perception of just how unequal opportunities in America are.

In a speech last week, Obama similarly argued that his former pastor had failed to acknowledge how America had changed for the better. But Wright's critics, Obama added, were also wrong -- because true equality is still remote.

This is because of the "varying yardsticks" Shankar talks about. Whites tend to measure the status of blacks today in comparison to the past -- slavery -- while blacks tend to measure their status to a future equality. By any measure, blacks are definitely better off than they were at the time of our country's inception, but so are whites. But they are still facing inequality at any number of levels that often get overlooked. Most recently, when Bush cut funding for historically black colleges and universities, it was a clear signal in economic terms of how valuable the opportunities outlined especially for blacks are to Bush's budget.

Update: I forgot to link to the column.

Update II: Case in point: Pat Buchanan thinks America is the best country on Earth for "black folks."

Campus Press Starts a 'War on Asians'

Via racialicious, a columnist for Colorado University's Campus Press wrote a column that essentially declared war on Asians (note: an entire race) based on a bad experience he had with someone at the Rec Center when a kid lost his racquetball.

After my friend and I finished working our abs at the Rec Center, we decided to head upstairs to tighten our buns on the StairMaster. As we walked down the hallway, a rubber ball bounced out of one of the racquetball courts and landed at the feet of an Asian in front of us. He picked up the ball and leaned over the railing of the court nearest to him.

“Hey, that’s not ours,” I heard a guy call up from the court. The Asian stared down at him for a moment, and then held the ball out to him. “That’s not ours,” the guy said again.

Then another voice called out from a different court, “Hey, does anyone see a ball up there?”

The Asian looked over, confused.

“I think it goes to that court,” I said, pointing to the one nearest to me.

The Asian stared at me blankly for another second, and then he looked back down into the court next to him and offered them the ball again.

“That’s not our ball,” the guy called up.

“Excuse me,” I said. The Asian whipped his head around and scowled at me. “I think it goes to that court.”

He paused a few seconds, and then he said, in a perfect American accent, “Okay,” and tossed the ball into the court next to me.

That’s when it hit me.

The Asian was so jaded by his experiences with the whitebread, brainless tree sloths of CU that even though three people had explained to him that he was trying to return the ball to the wrong court, it was inconceivable to him that we might be right.

And when he looked into my eyes, it wasn’t just irritation and disgust that I saw-it was hate. Pure hate.

I’m such a fool for not realizing it sooner. I can’t tell you how many times the Asians have treated me like a retarded weasel and I’ve forgiven them. But now I know that Asians are not just “a product of their environment,” and their rudeness is not a “cultural misunderstanding.”

They hate us all.

No, it's not because this kid was having a bad day and you were in his way. It was because this Asian kid represents all Asians and their pure and unjustified hatred for white kids. Right. Also, thanks for your generosity in forgiving all those Asians and their rudeness. That was very benevolent of you.

The head editors at Campus Press [BTW, could they come up with a more generic name?] issued something of an apology, but most people aren't buying it. The columnist, Max Karson, already has a legacy of racism chronicled by Wikipedia. The thing is, if the editor of the commentary section was a person of color, it seems unlikely that this column would have ever made its way onto the printed page.

IQ Sanity

I was horrified when I recently saw a weird debate on the blogs that was pretty much boiled down to: Black people don't have as high IQ scores as white people. Does that mean they're just dumber? Thank goodness for Amanda Marcotte. Finally, she (and Malcom Gladwell through a recent book review) brought some sanity to this debate.

It’s quite timely now that the racists are trotting out their favorite theory that gets trotted out every few years, smacked down, and then trotted out again once they figure everyone has forgotten the last smackdown, the theory that the IQ gap between whites and blacks must reflect fundamental, immutable, genetic traits, ergo a racist caste system is organic and not the product of oppression.

Now, she's finally making the point I'd been hoping someone would make all along: No, black people aren't dumber. The tests and social standards are biased in a certain way.The fact that the IQ test has long been billed as "a measure of raw intelligence" just seemed silly to me. Gladwell does a great job of explaining why:

The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits.

I once got criticized for suggesting that maybe the SAT was biased toward white people because non-white groups were lagging behind. What this really shows me is that intelligence, as we tend to measure it, has a lot more to do with class and buying into a certain set of social standards and assumptions. Of course it's hard to think that maybe the way you view the world is really specific to how you were raised. Realizing that is the easy part. Breaking down biases in supposedly objective data is the hard part.

Cross-posted on campusprogress.org/blog.

Racism in Crime

I agree with Matt that American Gangster was good but not great, but the question of glamorizing criminals is an interesting one. I initially had the same gut reaction to the movie, and found the 30-second cameo of a few nameless heroin addicts lacking after most of the movie was devoted to the high style of the gangsters. The women cutting and bagging the product seemed to be having fun, when the reality is that the work conditions in reality weren't so great.

But let's take a step back here. The movie depicted the cops as corrupt. Even though what Frank Lucas did was certainly bad, it's not as if the cops that were supposed to be keeping order were any better. They were racist and corrupt. Lewis emerged at at time when black men couldn't make it to the top of the legitimate world, so making it to the top of the criminal world was something. It's easy to discount people because they're criminals, but you also have to look at the opportunities in the legitimate world. If there's nothing offered there, of course the criminal option seems better.

Jena 6

If you, like me, are looking for some clarity on the Jena 6 rally, Courney Martin has a great piece up at The American Prospect today that explains it:

Indeed, the Jena 6 case, like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is a violent reminder that our country is actually many nations. Despite all of the progress that has been made, racism is still a part of too many American kids' ideological diets. A noose, even in 2007, struck these good ol' Southern boys as an apt symbol for the fear of "the other" that had been bred in them from birth. And their elders -- the school administrators, city officials, and parents -- called their inexcusable hatred by cutesy names: pranks, child's play, boys will be boys. It is a wake-up call to us all: The work of ending racism is far from over.

I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Cross-posted on campusprogress.org/blog.

Annals of Xenophobia

I think the subtext here is: Black people are invading our state. (Also, most racially insensitive headline ever.)

"People who think racism is a thing of the past"

Via Chronicle's Footnoted blog: Oh No a WofC PhD responds to Bitch PhD's whining about how she can't afford to live on what her household income is. On No a WofC PhD has a "shame list," basically a list of all the things that piss her off about being an academic. Two things stuck out to me:

• I chose a profession in which I have to work with people who think racism is a thing of the past, LGBT people are “gross” and “sinful,” and who when hiring decisions are made never hire these people but are more than happy to fill the adjunct ranks with them
• I chose a profession based on inequality in which women and people of color make up the ranks of the lowest paid, least tenured, and most over-worked (through demands placed on them to do extra teaching loads or not be asked back the following semester or year, by being asked to officially or unofficially mentor all the people in their identity group, and teach most if not all of the courses associated with their identity group)

I wrote a while back about women in academia, but women of color especially have a hard time getting placed in prestigious (and not so prestigious) institutions as full-time tenured professors. While institutions are generally moving away from the tenure model, I think it's especially true that these institutions are more than happy to hire in their lower ranks but have different standards that are much harder to meet if women have pregnancies. I think Oh No a WofC PhD put it in a frank and honest way. These professors and deans don't think of themselves as perpetuating racial and gender divides, but they are.

Young, White, and Happy

MSNBC reports in a poll that "from their relationships to their jobs to their money" young white Americans are happier than young people of color. The response?

“It doesn’t surprise me,” said Martin Carpenter, 21, a black New Jersey resident.

These young people on the whole are less at risk for financial trouble and drug use, less likely to be targeted by police, more likely to go to college, and not the target of racism then of course this poll would produce such results.

Maybe next we can get MSNBC to take a poll that finds business majors are more likely to have higher incomes than English majors.

Cross-posted on campusprogress.org/blog.