Reality Check Reveals Racism Continues as Inequality. Update July 2013: In the wake of Trayvon Martin and the George Zimmerman verdict, revisited this Race Remixed post from March 2011, one of my very first blog posts.
Strangely, many people seem unaware that since at least the 1980 US Census there is a mandatory yes/no question on Hispanic origin as well as a separate and mandatory question about race. But if you want to get really depressed about how dumb and confused people are about racial assignments–and apparently have not read their own Census forms for 30 years or so–just do a little Twitter search on “White Hispanic…” My thanks to Chris Escalante for the tweet update and his Twitter campaign–over 26 million people identify on the US Census as White Hispanic.
Take a look at the 2010 US Census form (the Hispanic yes/no and separate race check-boxes are unchanged from 2000). The original post questioned the New York Times Race Remixed series, challenging the popular notions that race is becoming more fluid. White supremacy and white privilege; same coin. A few weeks ago I met Chris Mooney for some drinks & snacks, and we talked about his new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science–and Reality.
It was an interesting conversation. We have a long history, so it wasn’t as if we were strangers. I recall Chris from the late 1990s when we were both involved in the college “freethought” movement, and later when I followed his political journalism at The American Prospect. On the whole we’re on different political “teams,” though neither of us seems particularly enthusiastic “players,” so to speak (I think at this point I can disclose that when I emailed Chris a few times when he worked at TAP to object to items in a particular piece, I often found that he concurred with my specific objections).
I assume that to push copies Chris had to make sure that the emphasis was on Republican and not conservative in the title for his new book (and also, it exhibits nice parallel to The Republican War on Science). Lothrop Stoddard. White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945: Thomas A. Guglielmo: 9780195178029: Amazon.com. Racism and Anti-White Bias - A so-called historical study. Updated July 2013: In the wake of Trayvon Martin and renewed calls for a national conversation on race–see How Not to Derail the Dialogue on Race by Jenée Desmond-Harris for some helpful ground rules–revisited this post from May 2011.
Although I took this perceptions of bias study to task for the completely unfounded claim that perceptions of anti-white bias had changed over time, the study certainly does reveal that many white people live in a delusional world in which they perceive anti-white bias to be a bigger problem than anti-black bias. Under those conditions, of what use opening a national conversation on race? [See White-Race Problems: White Hispanic, White Black, Geraldo Rivera for a current update and below for the full 2011 analysis.]
Is Anti-White Bias a Problem? Asks the “Room for Debate” section of the New York Times. What Norton and Sommers say is new is that But how did they get this historical data? This may be true, but it is hardly news or a new reality. . See also: Whiteness is a project, not a skin tone. The title for this post is borrowed from Edouard Glissant’s Carribbean Discourse via Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Global Transformations.
Diane Tobin: Are All Jews White? The Woody Allen Syndrome. In the common childhood game of telephone, a phrase is whispered from one person to the next until the last person repeats what is inevitably a distorted version of the original.
A version of this game played out over the weekend, albeit unintentionally, when reports came out of a new policy instituted by the City University of New York (CUNY) to augment their racial categorization by adding a White/Jewish category for faculty applicants. As it turns out, while CUNY had held focus groups of Jewish faculty to discuss diversity, and labeled it White/Jewish, the idea of an official check box seemingly came out of the blue.
But it didn't. Just like in telephone, where the final distorted phrase often reflects the thoughts, concerns and humor of those who pass the message along, the flawed report of CUNY's misstep reflects a conversation about Jewish identity that is bubbling up and seeping through the cracks of what it means to be Jewish in America.