She became a global hate figure this year when she was outed as a ‘race faker’. Here, she talks about her puritanical Christian upbringing, the backlash that left her surviving on food stamps – and why she would still do the same again
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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”
“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.”
You’ll notice producers from a variety of television programs — “Good Morning America,” Fox News, CNN — all asking for permission to use the video on their broadcasts, because they know this type of shopper-on-shopper violence is a huge draw. Mixed in with those, perhaps unsurprisingly, are a bevy of comments comparing the shoppers to animals, or savages, or making horrifically offensive racist comments.
…this kind of gawking shows how our lurid interest in these stories is connected to issues of class and race in America.
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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The hilarious Aziz Ansari recently wrote an article for NYTimes about the lack of opportunity for PoC actors in the entertainment industry. He notes that even when the rare non-white character is available, the challenges of casting tend to lead to either a white-washing of the role or to the casting of a white actor in black/brown/yellow-face.
“Even at a time when minorities account for almost 40 percent of the American population, when Hollywood wants an “everyman,” what it really wants is a straight white guy. But a straight white guy is not every man. The “everyman” is everybody.”
On Facebook, Ansari calls for more effort on the part of producers to cast non-white actors to represent diverse roles: “We are all more sophisticated, compelling, and interesting than our ethnicities, accents, and stereotypical jobs. Let’s see that on TV and film.”
Click here to read the full article.
Ansari’s been on a roll tackling Race in America; during his Tuesday night interview with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, Ansari pointed out the rare 50% percent diversity rate of a white guy and an Indian guy sharing the stage… “an all-time high for CBS!” ???
If there’s one thing to know about racism, it’s that racism (and race) is incredibly complex. Many people think racism means one group of people hates another group of people. However, racism manifests in all kinds of subtle and insidious ways. It operates on both a micro and macro level. For this reason, it’s so hard to talk about racism, or even recognize it when it’s going on.
So sorry, just because you’re not burning crosses on some black person’s lawn doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not part of the problem. It’s important that we recognize the different ways racism exists in the world, because being aware is the first step in fixing the problem. The fact of the matter is, there’s no one specific kind of racism or racist. There are many types of racists, and they come in all forms, from the blatant to to the inconspicuous. Below is a list of just a few of the different kinds….
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“For this Channel 4 documentary Jane Elliott, a controversial former schoolteacher from Ohio, is recreating the shocking exercise she used forty years ago to teach her nine year-old pupils about prejudice.
Elliott is asking thirty adult British volunteers – men and women of different ages and backgrounds – to experience inequality based on their eye color to show how susceptible we can all be to bigotry, and what it feels like to be on the other side of arbitrary discrimination.
Does Elliott’s exercise still have something to teach us four decades on and in a different country? Presented by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, the exercise is observed throughout by two expert psychologists, Prof Dominic Abrams and Dr Funké Baffour, who will be unpicking the behavior on display.”
Video: How racist are you?
What do you think about this social experiment?
Are we all more racist than we realize or would like to admit?
