Tag: Racial Identity

A Conversation With Black Women on Race

Click Here to watch a short documentary in which black women talk about the challenges they face in society. 

This latest installment of the NYTimes “Conversation on Race” Op-Doc video series highlights the negative emotional impact of racist attitudes on black women’s lives. Everyone we reached out to for this project was eager to tell her most intimate stories of pain and discrimination, from childhood, to work, to profiling by the police. We hope that in sharing them, we are helping to complicate the public representations of black women and girls — highlighting the unique challenges they face, as well as experiences and feelings that are universal.

From Harriet Tubman to Ida B. Wells to Dorothy Height, black women have been heavy presences in social justice movements throughout history. However, issues particular to these women are often relegated to secondary status in our collective consciousness. This seems to be changing. Recent events in Texas, Baltimore and Missouri show that black women are again in leadership roles, and are speaking out against the mistreatment they regularly experience. But in our nation’s current movement for social justice, women’s voices need a louder bullhorn. Conversations like the one we’re hoping to start with this Op-Doc are a first step to understanding, and to changing.

 

See below to watch the other installments of this Op-Docs series:

“A Conversation With Police on Race”

“A Conversation With My Black Son”

“A Conversation About Growing Up Black”

“A Conversation With White People on Race”

In ‘Citizen,’ Poet Strips Bare The Realities Of Everyday Racism

African-American poet Claudia Rankine’s latest collection, Citizen: An American Lyric is a personal meditation on race in America with a cover that recalls Trayvon Martin — a black hoodie against a white background.

Citizen was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award. The book reads like a series of diary entries about encounters with racism. Here’s one of the book’s anecdotes:

You and your partner go to see the film The House We Live In. You ask a friend to pick up your child from school. On your way home your phone rings. Your neighbor tells you he is standing at his window watching a menacing black guy casing both your homes. The guy is walking back and forth talking to himself and seems disturbed.

You tell your neighbor that your friend, whom he has met, is babysitting. He says, no, it’s not him. He’s met your friend and this isn’t that nice young man. Anyway, he wants you to know, he’s called the police.

Your partner calls your friend and asks him if there’s a guy walking back and forth in front of your home. Your friend says that if anyone were outside he would see him because he is standing outside. You hear the sirens through the speakerphone.

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The Social Construction of Race

“Unemployment, imprisonment, and other life events can change what race those around you perceive you to be.”

“Stanford sociologist Aliya Saperstein discusses her research showing that the perception of other peoples’ race is shaped by what we know about them…Race is a social construction, not just in the sense that we made it up, but in that it’s flexible and dependent on status as well as phenotype.”

 

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Hey Donald Trump: Japanese internment was paranoid and racist

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he’s not sure if he would’ve supported or opposed Japanese internment during World War II.

He told Time Magazine that he “hates the concept of it,” but added: “War is tough. And winning is tough. We don’t win anymore. We don’t win wars anymore.”

To be clear, Japanese American internment is almost universally considered one of the most egregious things the United States has done to an entire ethnic group…

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10 Million Americans Switched Their Race or Ethnicity for the Census

The inconsistencies complicate the Census Bureau’s longtime attempts to improve accuracy of such data

Almost 10 million Americans changed how they identify their race or ethnicity when asked by the Census Bureau over the course of a decade, according to a new study, adding further uncertainty to data officials already consider to be unreliable.

Using anonymized data for 162 million Americans who responded to census surveys in 2000 and 2010, researchers at the University of Minnesota and the Census Bureau concluded that self-identified race and ethnicity are fluid concepts for millions of Americans.

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Being colorblind to race is not the answer

Keith Maddox and Sam Sommers, associate professors at Tufts University, speak on racial stereotyping and its effects on employment. They discuss the research behind claims of “colorblindness” and how this thinking is ineffective.

“Stereotype threat is real. Know the source of anxiety and work to diffuse it. Facing your anxiety can have long-term benefits. Make implicit processes explicit [and] strategize to minimize their impact. Understand yourself and your audience. It’s OK to talk about race … even necessary.”

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Who Gets To Be A Superhero? Race And Identity In Comics

In artist Orion Martin’s project, X-Men of Color, he reimagined this famous X-Men cover by recoloring two characters as brown. This cover comes from a storyline in which mutants are being rounded up and exterminated by the government.

The X-Men comic franchise is a story of a minority group struggling with discrimination due to their superhuman mutations — a sci-fi allegory that  illustrates the troubles of real people dealing with bigotry regarding race, sexuality, health and a host of other social issues. However, many readers note that the comics fail to actually depict the people that face real-life discrimination, and instead include mostly straight, white men.

Neil Shyminsky, an academic who’s written about the X-Men‘s complicated relationship with real-life racism:

[He] argues persuasively that playing out civil rights-related struggles with an all-white cast allows the white male audience of the comics to appropriate the struggles of marginalized peoples … “While its stated mission is to promote the acceptance of minorities of all kinds, X-Men has not only failed to adequately redress issues of inequality – it actually reinforces inequality.”

Orion Martin reimagined several iconic X-Men covers, recasting the superheroes as people of color. The move sparked a discussion on race in comics, both on the page and in the writers’ rooms.

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Click here for the rest of the NPR article.

More about Race & Racism in Marvel Comics