Bloggy Monday | Race & Racism

This week’s Bloggy Monday focus is on blogs that offer good insights and ground for learning on issues of race and racism. They tackle not only the blatant issues of racism that occur in daily life or are highlighted in pop culture, but also the more sublte aspects of privilege and power that harm efforts toward mutuality and harmonious pluralism. The great part about these blogs is, no matter how uncomfortable the issues can make us or how hard they are to deal with, they always tackle these issues head one.

Don’t forget, if you’re a reader or lurker of a blog that deserves to be on the Xenia Institute News & Analysis RSS feed, let us know! E-mail suggestions to me at barbara@xeniainstitute.org, and put “Bloggy Monday” in the subject line.

Links for the day include:

Racialicious

Racialicious is a blog that discusses race, ethinicity and pop culture and the myriad awkward, painful and occasionally wonderful ways that they meet. Commentary by Racialicious staff and guest writers range from celebrity mistakes, musings about race and politics, relationships, friendships and work, and links to issues in the news about all these topics. Often they lift up issues of vital concern that are being ignored by the mainstream media.

One example of their work came last week in a post about hate speech and media reform. Guest writer Hannah Miller wrote about the National Hispanic Media Coalition’s efforts to get the FCC to consider taking action against rising hate speech online and on the radio airwaves against Latinos. Miller writes:

The percentage of our time that the American public spends with media has been steadily climbing for 40 years, and with that, its influence over our lives. The media is our environment, and the battle I am engaged in is over the nature of this environment: whether it is an environment in which ordinary people have a voice – or whether we are to passively absorb content controlled by a small number of people and corporations. Whether the media is democratic, and reflects a variety of voices.

Stuff White People Do

Written by Malcom D, this blog is one white man’s attempt to examine whiteness in the U.S. The gift of this blog is Malcom D’s ability to take pieces of pop culture minutiae or current event zeitgeist, find the angles in which white privilege or racism are at play and then explain to people (usually white people, although Malcom D says that part of the blog’s point is to help him figure out the “white part”) the why and how. For example, SWPD commented on a recent KFC commercial that featured two Asian men dressed in ethnic costume … for no apparent reason:

Law Professor Frank Wu calls the racist phenomenon exemplified by this ad the “perpetual foreigner syndrome.” The term should be self-explanatory, but for many, it’s not. Wu’s label basically identifies a common American conception of Asian Americans as outsiders, as “un-American,” no matter how fully they signal their American-ness.

Advertisements like this one play up to and perpetuate this syndrome. Ordinary Americans demonstrate that the syndrome has penetrated and infected their psyches when they laugh along with such portrayals, and when they think of those who object to them as oversensitive purveyors of “political correctness.”

He ends the post by explaining how readers can contact KFC to express their displeasure with this commercial.

Racism Review

Racism Review provides solid, credible information, and research and analysis about race and ethnicity and racism. Its writers are primarily scholars in the social science field. Its writers have been turning over thorough analyses of recent hot topics such as the race discussions about Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor. For example, Tim Wise recently took down the extreme right’s screeds about Judge Sotomayor:

The law is not, as some appear to believe, a fixed, scientific thing, free from differing interpretations. This, after all, is why so many Supreme Court opinions are split, rather than unanimous, 9-0 renderings. Rational and fair minded people, all of them legal scholars, can and do come to different conclusions about the same set of facts, the same legal precedents, and the same Constitution to which all are sworn. And when considering the reasons why two judges may look at the same facts and see totally different realities, race, gender, class and other identity markers might be found among the answers. Not because there is something inherently different about whites or people of color, men or women, which leads them to different conclusions, but because our social location can mightily influence what we see and what we don’t see.