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Our racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds shape how we react to racism. The researchers write, "Our findings are consistent with black women's cultural heritage, which celebrates the past accomplishments of other black confronters of discrimination, as well as Asian women's heritage, which advises finding expedient resolutions in the name of peaceful relations."
But suppose integration doesn't change the culture of underperformance? What if integration inadvertently created that culture in the first place? This is the startling hypothesis of Stuart Buck's Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation. Buck argues that the culture of academic underachievement among black students was unknown before the late 1960s. It was desegregation that destroyed thriving black schools where black faculty were role models and nurtured excellence among black students. In the most compelling chapter of Acting White,Buck describes that process and the anguished reactions of the black students, teachers, and communities that had come to depend on the rich educational and social resource in their midst.
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even if school desegregation hadn't shuttered many promising black schools, the rest of the civil rights revolution would still have undermined them. In the segregated job markets, many of the most talented blacks became school teachers and principals in black schools; after the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, they moved into more lucrative jobs in racially integrated firms and businesses. The costs of school desegregation that Buck identifies—the disruption of nurturing all-black institutions and communities, racial antagonism, mutual distrust, and black alienation in white dominated settings—are among the unintended consequences of desegregation generally. If many children growing up in these neighborhoods think of education as the exclusive domain of whites, that's because they think of almost every mainstream aspiration as the exclusive domain of whites.
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Buck describes the legacy of desegregation as ironic, but there's an unintended irony in the book's focus on school desegregation itself. Despite its status as the defining achievement of the civil rights movement, public-school desegregation is, for most practical purposes, dead. Since the Supreme Court's 1991 decision in Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell, the federal courts have rushed to lift desegregation orders and many once-integrated schools are now steadily resegregating. America's public schools are more segregated today than they were in 1988, and they are becoming ever more segregated with each passing year. In Parents Involved in Public Schools v. Seattle School District(2004), the Supreme Court invalidated the modest and voluntarily adopted public-school desegregation plans of two formerly segregated districts, a decision that will accelerate resegregation nationwide.
But suppose integration doesn't change the culture of underperformance? What if integration inadvertently created that culture in the first place? This is the startling hypothesis of Stuart Buck's Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation. Buck argues that the culture of academic underachievement among black students was unknown before the late 1960s. It was desegregation that destroyed thriving black schools where black faculty were role models and nurtured excellence among black students. In the most compelling chapter of Acting White,Buck describes that process and the anguished reactions of the black students, teachers, and communities that had come to depend on the rich educational and social resource in their midst.
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Buck draws on empirical studies that suggest a correlation between integrated schools and social disapproval of academic success among black students. He also cites the history of desegregation's effect on black communities and interviews with black students to back up a largely compelling—and thoroughly disturbing—story.
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Black students bused into predominantly white schools faced hostility and contempt from white students. They encountered the soft prejudice of low expectations from racist teachers who assumed blacks weren't capable and from liberals who coddled them.
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The bewildering feature of political correctness is the mandated replacement of formerly unexceptionable terms by new ones: "Negro" by "black" by "African-American"; "Spanish-American" by "Hispanic" by "Latino"; "slum" by "ghetto" by "inner city" by, according to the Los Angel
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THE Los Angeles Times' new "Guidelines on Racial and Ethnic Identification," for its writers and editors, bans or restricts some 150 words and phrases such as "birth defect," "Chinese fire drill," "crazy," "dark continent," "stepchild," "WASP" and "to welsh."
Defying such politically correct sensibilities, the Economist allows the use of variants of "he" for both males and females (as in "everyone should watch his language"), and "crippled" for disabled people.
One side says that language insidiously shapes attitudes and that vigilance against subtle offense is necessary to eliminate prejudice. The other bristles at legislating language, seeing a corrosion of clarity and expressiveness at best, and thought control at worst, changing the way reporters render events and opinions. -
First, words are not thoughts. Despite the appeal of the theory that language determines thought, no cognitive scientist believes it.
People coin new words, grapple for le mot juste, translate from other languages and ridicule or defend PC terms.
None of this would be possible if the ideas expressed by words were identical to the words themselves. - 4 more annotation(s)...
Mr Brown asked:
"Is the Sun Xu lynch mob going to go after Lai Shimun too?"
I observed that they aready had, and also that nationalism is not a sacred cow here like race and religion are.
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"All things being equal, it's your diet that effects your body's smell most, both positively and negatively. A fishy smell, for instance, may be caused by too much of the B vitamin choline in your diet. Curry, cumin, fish, garlic and onion in the diet are notorious for giving people who eat a lot of these foods and spices a particular smell as they stay in your body's secretions for hours after eating them. Butyric acid in butter and other dairy foods makes Westerners stink to Asians who eat no milk products."
"Eating foods like cumin, curry, garlic, fish, onion and dairy could also cause body secretions to smell" --- Better Nutrition Magazine, July 2000 -
Studies have shown that different races have different characteristic smells. Some of these differences are due to variations in diet: People in India, for example, eat a lot of curry and spices, a diet that is reflected in their body odor. Racial differences also depend on hereditary traits. Asians tend to have very little body hair and few sweat glands to produce odor chemicals. Koreans, for instance, have litle body odor even if they do not wash regularly; underarm odor is so rare among Japanese that they consider it an illness. Caucasians, on the other hand, have more body hair and plenty of sweat glands. Africans have even more sweat glands. People's unconscious reactions to others who 'smell different' can contribute to distrust and intolerance.
Understanding what causes these emtoional reactions can help us to behave more reasonably."
--- Senses and sensors: Smelling and Tasting / Authors Alvin Silverstein, Virginia B. Silverstein, Laura Silverstein Nunn
Q. A friend of mine became upset when I used the phrase “to call a spade a spade.” She says that it’s a vicious racist term. Is she right?
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If you go back to the earliest written version of the saying, you bump up against a Greek satirist named Lucian (2nd century A.D.). To express the idea of speaking bluntly, of calling things what they are, he used the phrase (in his language), “to call a fig a fig and a boat a boat.” So where did the word spade come from?
It’s based on a mistranslation by the Dutch Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus [ca. 1466 - 1536]. In Greek, skaphis is a shovel or spade, and skaphos is a boat, a skiff. He chose the wrong word, and “to call a spade a spade” came into being. In 1539, John Tavener brought Erasmus’ Latin version into English in his Garden of Wysdome: “Whiche call . . . a mattok nothing els but a mattok, and a spade a spade.” A mattock, by the way, is a digging tool with a flat blade set at right angles to the handle. So Tavener was advancing the meaning of the proverb to show that even allied objects should be carefully distinguished. After that, the saying was off and running, and it was used by dozens of writers, eventually dooming it to cliché status. -
Twisted minds can take innocent words and images and turn them into an attack, but sometimes the fault is with the listener or reader who, through ignorance, interprets an innocent or unconnected word with verbal assault. This is why I take Ludwig Wittgenstein’s words to heart: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
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It is official: Racial attacks against white people are excusable. Much of the judicature can be relied upon to deliver justice according to liberal-left, Frankfurt School ideology. What other explanation is there for Judge Robert Brown’s decision to excuse a quartet of “Muslim” girls that attacked Rhea Page, kicked her in the head and tore out her hair. In case there was any doubt that the attack was racially aggravated, the four-piece gang (actually clan, as they comprised of three sisters and a cousin) yelled “kill the white slag”.
Now, if the racial profile was reversed and four white girls attacked a person of another race, while cajoling and exhorting one another to “kill”, then I’m pretty confident a custodial sentence would have been passed.
Nearly half of all victims of racially motivated murders in the last decade have been white, according to official figures released by the Home Office.
The data, released under Freedom of Information legislation, shows that between 1995 and 2004 there have been 58 murders where the police consider a racial element played a key part. Out of these, 24 have been where the murder victim was white.
The disclosure will add to the intense debate over multiculturalism in British society. The figures also overturn the assumption that almost all racial murders are committed against ethnic minority victims.
Senior police officers have admitted that 'political correctness' and the fear of discussing the issue have meant that race crime against white people goes under-reported. One chief constable has claimed that white, working-class men are more alienated than the Muslim community.
The reality about "offensive language" is that there's a euphemism treadmill. The PC terms we come up with today will be considered offensive tomorrow. "Idiot" and "retarded" used to be medical terms.
How long will the list of words and terms that we should avoid using be, if everything that could potentially offend someone is avoided?
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It's not really about double standards here, but rather people deciding to decree on a semi-arbitrary basis what is "offensive" and imposing standards on others.
Singaporean Chinese were discriminating against Indians and complaining about the smell of their food long before one million mainlanders flooded the country
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Yeah sure, mainland Chinese are bigoted. They make a big show of belonging to an older culture and thus are “superior” to everyone else. They have paler skins than the south-east Asian Chinese and make a big deal out of that as well. (Malaysian Chinese we’ve met have a particular antipathy towards mainland Chinese, calling them arrogant peasants.) Mainlanders also have singularly undeveloped senses of humour. (We know, we’ve worked with a few of them.)
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we also had to confirm that we weren’t mainland Chinese when we were apartment hunting. You see, the Indians may stink out the place (snort), but those same agents told us that mainlanders trash apartments. If you can see a bigger problem looming beneath this little feel-good band-aid, you’d be right.
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Racism a thing of the past? Think again - "Prof Lee posits that racism is a phenomenon limited by and large to the elderly and the less educated, and cites the substantial Indian population in her working environment and in her social circle as evidence of that claim... I believe the conclusion that Singaporeans are mostly a colour-blind people is an assumption that members of the dominant racial group here, such as Prof Lee and myself, are privileged with, since we do not bear the brunt of racial discrimination and prejudice... don't let the privileged majority fall into the easy trap of believing that racism is a thing of the past, or being complacent with racial diversity and forgetting the pursuit of social justice"
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As someone commented, "For Tamilians like me, the discrimination comes mainly from Northern Indians (especially the new citizens and expats). They have brought their caste system into local society, I'm afraid". Naturally, a dogmatic and simplistic obsession with "privilege" (and with bashing certain groups) blinds one to such intricacies and subtleties of racial dynamics
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#3 Hofstra University gang-rape case
An 18-year-old Hofstra University freshman accused five men, including another Hofstra student, of gang-raping her after a campus party in Hempstead, N.Y., in September 2009.
Four of the men were charged and a fifth was about to be arrested after the woman told police she was lured to a dormitory after a dance party. She said she was bound with rope while the five men took turns sexually assaulting her in a stall in the men's bathroom.
Then a grainy and explicit cellphone video of the incident emerged, showing the sex was consensual. The woman recanted her story after the prosecutor asked her: “If there is a video, and I get that video, it's going to show me that what you're saying is true?”
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"The men did nothing illegal, but that doesn't make the behavior any less despicable," wrote Newsday columnist Joye Brown about the case. At the same time, "one woman's lie could have sent five innocent young men to state prison for up to 25 years."
The advertising watchdog has thrown out complaints accusing an ad by Cadbury of racism for comparing model Naomi Campbell to a bar of chocolate.
This decision follows an assessment by the council of the Advertising Standards Authority on whether to launch an investigation to see if the press campaign is in breach of the advertising code relating to racism.
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The press ad for Cadbury's Bliss range of Dairy Milk chocolate – which ran with the strapline "move over Naomi, there's a new diva in town" – provoked outrage from the supermodel as well as campaigning group Operation Black Vote.
Campbell said she was shocked by the ad, while her mother Valerie said she was "deeply upset by this racist advert".
Cadbury initially defended the campaign, saying it was intended as a tongue-in-cheek play on her reputation for diva-style tantrums and had nothing to do with her skin colour.
However, after taking took legal advice Cadbury withdrew the campaign and made a public apology on its corporate website.
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The complainants objected that the ad was racially offensive because it compared a black woman to a bar of chocolate.
However, the ASA council said that the ad was "likely to be understood to refer to Naomi Campbell's reputation for 'diva-style' behaviour rather than her race".
"On this basis the council decided that the ad was unlikely to be seen as racist or to cause serious or widespread offence," the ASA added.
A racist thug who stuffed ham into the shoes of Muslim worshippers at a mosque has escaped a jail term.
Jamie Knowlson, 30, also draped slices of the meat - which Muslims are banned from eating - on railings outside the mosque as his victims prayed inside.
He was then caught on CCTV hurling abuse at worshippers after they confronted him over his sacrilegious act.
Islam teaches its followers to avoid pig meat as it makes them impure and unclean.
Knowlson initially told police the stunt was a drunken joke but later admitted that he was fully aware of the offence his actions would cause.
He pleaded guilty to causing racially or religiously aggravated harassment and could have been jailed for up to two years.
"Racial exclusion in dating is gendered; Asian males and black females are more highly excluded than their opposite-sex counterparts"
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Women are more likely than men to state preferences for all characteristics except body type... Women tended to state preferences for many more characteristics than males (50% vs. 34%)...
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We see few racial differences in the percentages stating racial preferences. For those who state a preference, both white males and females are the least open to interracial dating within their genders – 29 percent of white males and 65 percent of white females prefer to date only whites...
White women (4%) are less likely than black women (8%), Latinas (16%), and especially, Asian women (40%) to prefer to date only outside of their respective racial group... - 4 more annotation(s)...
If a century seems like a long time for a culture of racism to persist, consider the findings of a recent study on the persistence of anti-Semitism in Germany: Communities that murdered their Jewish populations during the 14th-century Black Death pogroms were more likely to demonstrate a violent hatred of Jews nearly 600 years later. A culture of intolerance can be very persistent indeed.
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Changing any aspect of culture—the norms, attitudes, and "unwritten rules" of a group—isn't easy. Beliefs are passed down from parent to child—positions on everything from childbearing to religious beliefs to risk-taking are transmitted across generations. Newcomers, meanwhile, may be attracted by the culture of their chosen home—Europeans longing for smaller government and lower taxes choose to move to the United States, for example, while Americans looking for Big Brotherly government move in the other direction. Once they arrive, these migrants tend to take on the attitudes of those around them—American-born Italians hold more "American" views with each subsequent generation.
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"Good" cultural attitudes—like trust and tolerance—may thus be sustained across generations. But the flipside is that "bad" attitudes—mutual hatred and xenophobia—may also persist.
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the study finds that whites are least open to out-dating and that, unlike blacks, Asians and Latinos have patterns of racial exclusion similar to those of whites. Like blacks, higher earning groups including Asian Indians, Middle Easterners and Asian men are highly excluded, suggesting that economic incorporation may not mirror acceptance in intimate settings. Finally, racial exclusion in dating is gendered; Asian males and black females are more highly excluded than their opposite-sex counterparts, suggesting that existing theories of race relations need to be expanded to account for gendered racial acceptance.
an ad appeared in a newspaper, and on billboards around the country. The ad had a purple background, and, in the middle of it, lying in a pool of crystals, or something that an advertising "creative" would probably call "bling", a bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk Bliss. Above it, in white letters, were the words: "Move over, Naomi, there's a new diva in town."
Naomi Campbell is considering legal action."It's upsetting," she said, "to be described as chocolate, not just for me, but for all black women and black people. I do not," she said, "find
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We're confused because we seem to think that to be black is to be "cool". We seem to think that being black has something to do with playing sport very well, or being very handsome, or very beautiful, or very sexy. We seem to think it has something do with multi-millionaire musicians who make music that uses words like "nigger", "bitch" and "whore". We seem to think, or some people seem to think, that knowing a black person, or having had sex with a black person, is something to boast about to another black person, or even to a white person. Something that will make us look "cool".
Psychologists have long known that many people are prejudiced towards others based on group affiliations, be they racial, ethnic, religious, or even political. However, we know far less about why people are prone to prejudice in the first place. New research, using monkeys, suggests that the roots lie deep in our evolutionary past.
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Like humans, rhesus monkeys live in groups and form strong social bonds. The monkeys also tend to be wary of those they perceive as potentially threatening.
To figure out whether monkeys distinguish between insiders (i.e. those who belong to their group) and outsiders (i.e. those who don’t belong), the researchers measured the amount of time the monkeys stared at the photographed face of an insider versus outsider monkey. Across several experiments, they found that the monkeys stared longer at the faces of outsiders. This would suggest that monkeys were more wary of outsider faces. -
However, it is also possible that outsiders simply evoke more curiosity. To rule this out, the researchers took advantage of the fact that male rhesus monkeys leave their childhood groups once they reach reproductive age. This allowed the researchers to pair familiar outsider faces (monkeys that had recently left the group) with less familiar insider faces (monkeys that had recently joined the group). When presented with these pairs, the monkeys continued to stare longer at outsider faces, even though they were more familiar with them. The monkeys were clearly making distinctions based on group membership.
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A falsified theory can easily be resurrected with alternative explanations e.g. Newtonian mechanics falsified for planetary movements calculations, but there's the possibility of undiscovered planets' gravitational forces affecting the movements.
Researchers choose not to publish negative results, and even if they want to, they have to first convince the publishers that the negative results are interesting.
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