Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Conservatives Celebrate Ban on Abortion Procedure
Posted by: Matt Lewis at 5:16 PM
It's fair for the conservative movement deserves a lot of credit for today's Supreme Court decision to uphold the ban on partial birth abortion. We worked to elect a president who would make good Supreme Court picks -- and he did.
Here's what the Washington Post has to say:
The dramatic decision delivered to abortion opponents the promise of a more conservative court as reconstituted by Bush, who praised the majority's rejection of what he called an "abhorrent procedure" and suggested that he would continue working for greater restrictions on abortion.
The ruling marked the first time that the court has upheld a ban on a specific abortion procedure. It also marked a departure from the Supreme Court's past practice of requiring a "health exception" in laws governing abortion to allow the procedure when a woman's health would otherwise be at risk.
Granted, he needed our help to avoid Harriet Miers (yes, I opposed her nomination from the beginning). Of course, we cannot say, for sure, how she would have voted on upholding the partial-birth abortion ban. But I, for one, feel a lot safer with Roberts and Alito -- don't you?
And we can definitely use something positive to celebrate right now. Here's what Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council wrote today:
After three very dark days for our nation, those who cherish life rejoice in the news that the Supreme Court no longer endorses the senseless killing of innocent, partially-born babies.
In a week where the effects of violence have been so keenly felt, we applaud the U.S. Supreme Court's decision today upholding Congress's statute that ends the bloodshed of the unborn by the horrific partial-birth abortion procedure.
I've been saying for a long time now, that conservative bloggers and activists deserve credit for our current Supreme Court. Here's what a liberal blog, Save the Court, wrote back in January of '06:
In what he calls an underreported story, Matt Lewis, author of a guidebook for effectively communicating with GOP voters, writes in Human Events that “Conservative bloggers, pundits, and activists stopped the Harriet Meirs nomination,” and if Alito is confirmed “much of the credit will rightfully belong to the conservative movement.” Calling this “truly an historic accomplishment,” Lewis also claims credit for doing “the President a huge favor by saving him the embarrassment of a disastrous confirmation hearing” by opposing Harriet Miers.
Tonight, we rightly celebrate the ruling. After all, imagine what would have happened today if we hadn't worked hard to get good judges on the bench ...
Thursday, April 19, 2007
The Partial-Birth Abortion Decision
Slate
Father Knows Best. Dr. Kennedy's magic prescription for indecisive women.
By Dahlia Lithwick
The key to comprehending the Supreme Court's ruling today in Gonzales v. Carhart upholding the federal partial-birth abortion ban is a mastery not of constitutional law but of a literary type. Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion is less about the scope of abortion regulation than an announcement of an astonishing new test: Hereinafter, on the morally and legally thorny question of abortion, the proposed rule should be weighed against the gauzy sensitivities of that iconic literary creature: the Inconstant Female.
Kennedy invokes The Woman Who Changed Her Mind not once, but twice today. His opinion is a love song to all women who regret their abortions after the fact, and it is in the service of these women that he justifies upholding the ban. Today's holding is a strange reworking of Taming of the Shrew, with Kennedy playing an all-knowing Baptista to a nation of fickle Biancas.
As a matter of law, the majority opinion today should have focused exclusively on what has changed since the high court's 2000 decision in Stenberg v. Carhart. Stenberg struck down a Nebraska ban that was almost identical to the federal ban upheld today. That's why every court to review the ban found the federal law, passed in 2003, unconstitutional. What really changed in the intervening years was the composition of the court: Sandra Day O'Connor, who voted to strike down the ban in 2000, is gone. Samuel Alito, who votes today to uphold it, is here.
What hasn't changed is that Anthony Kennedy finds partial-birth abortion really disgusting. We saw that in his dissent in Stenberg. That's what animates and drives his decision. His opinion blossoms from the premise that if all women were as sensitive as he is about the fundamental awfulness of this procedure, they'd all refuse to undergo it. Since they aren't, he'll decide for them.
Kennedy halfheartedly attempts to distinguish Stenberg from Gonzales. Sparing us his usual lofty opening sonnet to freedom and liberty and truth and good lighting, he opens with the terse insistence that this case is not Stenberg: The act is both "more specific" and "more precise" than its Nebraskan precursor. The court can uphold it without revisiting Stenberg. That's nice for Kennedy, since he is one of the authors of the famous peaen to precedent in Casey that was the basis, in that 1992 case, for upholding Roe v. Wade.
Rather than admitting that his opinion today is at odds with Stenberg, Kennedy walks his reader through the horrors of the intact dilation and extraction procedure Congress has banned. This discussion goes on for five pages, and includes, for balance, an "abortion doctor's clinical description" of the abortion at issue, and that of a nurse who witnessed the procedure being "performed on a 26 1/2 week fetus." (The nurse's version: "the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head and the baby's arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he think's he's going to fall.")
Kennedy contends Congress fixed the problems with the Nebraska ban in two vital ways: by making factual findings, and by narrowing the definition of the procedure such that doctors of "ordinary intelligence" know which operations will be illegal and which will not.
And then Kennedy quickly returns to the business of grossing us out. With a stirring haiku about how "respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child," the justice interpolates himself between every one of those mothers and every child she might ever bear. Without regard for the women who feel they made the right decision in terminating a pregnancy, he frets for those who changed their minds. ("It seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.") (The "infant," not the "fetus.") As both the dissenters and my colleague Emily Bazelon have pointed out, this portrayal of a rampant epidemic of regretful women may or may not be scientifically accurate. (The American Psychological Association doesn't think so.) But even if the numbers of women who would truly choose differently if they could choose again are larger than most of the medical literature indicates, one might question whether such women should be the pole star of national abortion policy.
Nobody disputes that whether or not they decide to go through with an abortion, women face a heart-wrenching choice. But for Kennedy only those women who regret the decision to abort illuminate some deeper truth. And Kennedy's solution for these flip-flopping women is elegant. Protect them from the truth. "Any number of patients facing imminent surgical procedures would prefer not to hear all details," he concedes. "It is, however, precisely this lack of information concerning the way the fetus will be killed that is of legitimate concern to the state." In Kennedy's view, if pregnant women only knew how abhorrent the procedure was, they'd always opt to avoid it. But as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg points out in dissent, Kennedy doesn't propose giving women more information about partial-birth abortion procedures. He says it's up to the Congress and the courts to substitute their judgment and ban the procedures altogether. ("I'm sorry Bianca, there is a procedure out there that may be safer for you, but some day, you will thank me for sparing you from it.")
Then Kennedy sorrowfully returns to the Indecisive Women. "It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound, when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form."
One core proposition that's held true from Roe v. Wade to Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Stenberg was that abortion regulations, in order to be constitutional, required an exception if the mother's health was in danger. For the first time today, Kennedy determines that a court's factual determination about whether some procedure may be necessary to protect the mother's health can just evaporate in the face of "medical uncertainty." That turns both Casey and Stenberg on their heads. After today, "medical uncertainty does not foreclose the exercise of legislative power." And even where some of the building blocks of that "uncertainty" are patently untrue. Henceforth if there is uncertainty about the health consequences of the ban, the tie will go to the banners.
Kennedy devotes the remainder of his opinion to taking cover under standing doctrine. "Standing" to bring suit is the Roberts court's trapdoor to keep pesky litigants away from the courthouse. On this front, too, Kennedy turns Casey and Stenberg on their heads with nary a backward glance. His opinion pretty much unfurls a roadmap for states seeking to enact broader bans on abortion. As Ginsburg points out in her dissent, the court's rationale for upholding the ban on intact D&Es would support a ban on the (far more common) nonintact D&E as well.
It's hard to fathom why Kennedy has so much more sympathy for the women who changed their minds about abortions than for those who did not. His concern for Inconstant Females might be patronizing in any other jurist. Coming from him, it's brilliantly ironic. Kennedy is, after all, America's Hamlet. The man who famously worried that "sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own tow line," will long be remembered as the living incarnation of agony and indecision, And today he seamlessly rewrites his Stenberg dissent as a majority opinion that blasts his earlier Casey vote to its core.
I'm no psychologist but in light of today's Gonzales opinion one has to wonder: Is all of Kennedy's tender concern over those flip-flopping women really just some kind of weird misplaced justification for his flip-flopping self?
Father Knows Best. Dr. Kennedy's magic prescription for indecisive women.
By Dahlia Lithwick
The key to comprehending the Supreme Court's ruling today in Gonzales v. Carhart upholding the federal partial-birth abortion ban is a mastery not of constitutional law but of a literary type. Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion is less about the scope of abortion regulation than an announcement of an astonishing new test: Hereinafter, on the morally and legally thorny question of abortion, the proposed rule should be weighed against the gauzy sensitivities of that iconic literary creature: the Inconstant Female.
Kennedy invokes The Woman Who Changed Her Mind not once, but twice today. His opinion is a love song to all women who regret their abortions after the fact, and it is in the service of these women that he justifies upholding the ban. Today's holding is a strange reworking of Taming of the Shrew, with Kennedy playing an all-knowing Baptista to a nation of fickle Biancas.
As a matter of law, the majority opinion today should have focused exclusively on what has changed since the high court's 2000 decision in Stenberg v. Carhart. Stenberg struck down a Nebraska ban that was almost identical to the federal ban upheld today. That's why every court to review the ban found the federal law, passed in 2003, unconstitutional. What really changed in the intervening years was the composition of the court: Sandra Day O'Connor, who voted to strike down the ban in 2000, is gone. Samuel Alito, who votes today to uphold it, is here.
What hasn't changed is that Anthony Kennedy finds partial-birth abortion really disgusting. We saw that in his dissent in Stenberg. That's what animates and drives his decision. His opinion blossoms from the premise that if all women were as sensitive as he is about the fundamental awfulness of this procedure, they'd all refuse to undergo it. Since they aren't, he'll decide for them.
Kennedy halfheartedly attempts to distinguish Stenberg from Gonzales. Sparing us his usual lofty opening sonnet to freedom and liberty and truth and good lighting, he opens with the terse insistence that this case is not Stenberg: The act is both "more specific" and "more precise" than its Nebraskan precursor. The court can uphold it without revisiting Stenberg. That's nice for Kennedy, since he is one of the authors of the famous peaen to precedent in Casey that was the basis, in that 1992 case, for upholding Roe v. Wade.
Rather than admitting that his opinion today is at odds with Stenberg, Kennedy walks his reader through the horrors of the intact dilation and extraction procedure Congress has banned. This discussion goes on for five pages, and includes, for balance, an "abortion doctor's clinical description" of the abortion at issue, and that of a nurse who witnessed the procedure being "performed on a 26 1/2 week fetus." (The nurse's version: "the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head and the baby's arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he think's he's going to fall.")
Kennedy contends Congress fixed the problems with the Nebraska ban in two vital ways: by making factual findings, and by narrowing the definition of the procedure such that doctors of "ordinary intelligence" know which operations will be illegal and which will not.
And then Kennedy quickly returns to the business of grossing us out. With a stirring haiku about how "respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child," the justice interpolates himself between every one of those mothers and every child she might ever bear. Without regard for the women who feel they made the right decision in terminating a pregnancy, he frets for those who changed their minds. ("It seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.") (The "infant," not the "fetus.") As both the dissenters and my colleague Emily Bazelon have pointed out, this portrayal of a rampant epidemic of regretful women may or may not be scientifically accurate. (The American Psychological Association doesn't think so.) But even if the numbers of women who would truly choose differently if they could choose again are larger than most of the medical literature indicates, one might question whether such women should be the pole star of national abortion policy.
Nobody disputes that whether or not they decide to go through with an abortion, women face a heart-wrenching choice. But for Kennedy only those women who regret the decision to abort illuminate some deeper truth. And Kennedy's solution for these flip-flopping women is elegant. Protect them from the truth. "Any number of patients facing imminent surgical procedures would prefer not to hear all details," he concedes. "It is, however, precisely this lack of information concerning the way the fetus will be killed that is of legitimate concern to the state." In Kennedy's view, if pregnant women only knew how abhorrent the procedure was, they'd always opt to avoid it. But as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg points out in dissent, Kennedy doesn't propose giving women more information about partial-birth abortion procedures. He says it's up to the Congress and the courts to substitute their judgment and ban the procedures altogether. ("I'm sorry Bianca, there is a procedure out there that may be safer for you, but some day, you will thank me for sparing you from it.")
Then Kennedy sorrowfully returns to the Indecisive Women. "It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound, when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form."
One core proposition that's held true from Roe v. Wade to Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Stenberg was that abortion regulations, in order to be constitutional, required an exception if the mother's health was in danger. For the first time today, Kennedy determines that a court's factual determination about whether some procedure may be necessary to protect the mother's health can just evaporate in the face of "medical uncertainty." That turns both Casey and Stenberg on their heads. After today, "medical uncertainty does not foreclose the exercise of legislative power." And even where some of the building blocks of that "uncertainty" are patently untrue. Henceforth if there is uncertainty about the health consequences of the ban, the tie will go to the banners.
Kennedy devotes the remainder of his opinion to taking cover under standing doctrine. "Standing" to bring suit is the Roberts court's trapdoor to keep pesky litigants away from the courthouse. On this front, too, Kennedy turns Casey and Stenberg on their heads with nary a backward glance. His opinion pretty much unfurls a roadmap for states seeking to enact broader bans on abortion. As Ginsburg points out in her dissent, the court's rationale for upholding the ban on intact D&Es would support a ban on the (far more common) nonintact D&E as well.
It's hard to fathom why Kennedy has so much more sympathy for the women who changed their minds about abortions than for those who did not. His concern for Inconstant Females might be patronizing in any other jurist. Coming from him, it's brilliantly ironic. Kennedy is, after all, America's Hamlet. The man who famously worried that "sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own tow line," will long be remembered as the living incarnation of agony and indecision, And today he seamlessly rewrites his Stenberg dissent as a majority opinion that blasts his earlier Casey vote to its core.
I'm no psychologist but in light of today's Gonzales opinion one has to wonder: Is all of Kennedy's tender concern over those flip-flopping women really just some kind of weird misplaced justification for his flip-flopping self?
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
A Short Note On Women in the Sciences
Alex Tabarok at Marginal Revolution
The Patriarchy at Work
Many studies have shown that women are under-represented in tenured ranks in the sciences. We evaluate whether gender differences in the likelihood of obtaining a tenure track job, promotion to tenure, and promotion to full professor explain these facts using the 1973-2001 Survey of Doctorate Recipients. We find that women are less likely to take tenure track positions in science, but the gender gap is entirely explained by fertility decisions. We find that in science overall, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor after controlling for demographic, family, employer and productivity covariates and that in many cases, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor even without controlling for covariates. However, family characteristics have different impacts on women's and men's promotion probabilities. Single women do better at each stage than single men, although this might be due to selection. Children make it less likely that women in science will advance up the academic job ladder beyond their early post-doctorate years, while both marriage and children increase men's likelihood of advancing.
You can see the whole paper by clicking through Marginal Revolution
The Patriarchy at Work
Many studies have shown that women are under-represented in tenured ranks in the sciences. We evaluate whether gender differences in the likelihood of obtaining a tenure track job, promotion to tenure, and promotion to full professor explain these facts using the 1973-2001 Survey of Doctorate Recipients. We find that women are less likely to take tenure track positions in science, but the gender gap is entirely explained by fertility decisions. We find that in science overall, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor after controlling for demographic, family, employer and productivity covariates and that in many cases, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor even without controlling for covariates. However, family characteristics have different impacts on women's and men's promotion probabilities. Single women do better at each stage than single men, although this might be due to selection. Children make it less likely that women in science will advance up the academic job ladder beyond their early post-doctorate years, while both marriage and children increase men's likelihood of advancing.
You can see the whole paper by clicking through Marginal Revolution
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Jackie Robinson and the Re-Written Check
The media world is buzzing over the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first appearance in a Major League baseball game. According to Ian O'Connor of Fox Sports, Robinson's first game was "the most important event in the history of American sports."
And it was.
There is a strong argument that the two most important events in American history have been emancipation from slavery and the overturning of racial segregation. Like Brown v Board of Education, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Riders, the Poor People's March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Robinson's first game as a Dodger is tremendously significant because it was a signal event in the overcoming of racial segregation.
But why is the overturning of segregation so important to American history?
First, overcoming legal segregation made life better for millions of black people in the United States. Most fundamentally, the basic rights of African-Americans to vote, hold office, serve on juries, and exercise free speech and freedom of assembly were recognized. Likewise, black people were integrated into business, education, and civic institutions and a large black middle class came into existence. Because baseball was a prominent civic institution, the integration of baseball helped advance the cause of integration in other spheres as well.
Second, overcoming segregation began a long process of redeeming American society from its legacy of white supremacy. One of the important things about the celebration of Jackie Robinson's baseball career is that all Americans now identify with Robinson's triumphs over racism--against the initial rejection from some of his teammates, the taunting from baseball racists like Phillie manager Ben Chapman, and the abuse from hostile fans. In much the same way that Martin Luther King became an icon for all Americans, Jackie Robinson has become everyone's hero while his racist antagonists are seen as being so un-American that it's like they came from another country.
In his "I Have a Dream" speech, Martin Luther King claimed that:
"[W]e have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
King underestimated the significance of his actions. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence was indeed a check, but a check that guaranteed "the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" only for white men. Jefferson and Madison did not recognize inalienable rights for black people any more than Roger Taney would in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. What King and other civil rights figures did was "rewrite" the founding documents to guaranteed rights for all rather than rights for white people. In doing so, King was retrospectively redeeming the American Revolution and the Constitution from the legacy of white supremacy. King created a Constitution for us all and then pushed the country to cash in on that promise.
Jackie Robinson was one of the first figures to cash in fully on the promise of an integrated society in the African-American rewriting of the American promise. In doing so, he paved the way for all of us.
And it was.
There is a strong argument that the two most important events in American history have been emancipation from slavery and the overturning of racial segregation. Like Brown v Board of Education, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Riders, the Poor People's March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Robinson's first game as a Dodger is tremendously significant because it was a signal event in the overcoming of racial segregation.
But why is the overturning of segregation so important to American history?
First, overcoming legal segregation made life better for millions of black people in the United States. Most fundamentally, the basic rights of African-Americans to vote, hold office, serve on juries, and exercise free speech and freedom of assembly were recognized. Likewise, black people were integrated into business, education, and civic institutions and a large black middle class came into existence. Because baseball was a prominent civic institution, the integration of baseball helped advance the cause of integration in other spheres as well.
Second, overcoming segregation began a long process of redeeming American society from its legacy of white supremacy. One of the important things about the celebration of Jackie Robinson's baseball career is that all Americans now identify with Robinson's triumphs over racism--against the initial rejection from some of his teammates, the taunting from baseball racists like Phillie manager Ben Chapman, and the abuse from hostile fans. In much the same way that Martin Luther King became an icon for all Americans, Jackie Robinson has become everyone's hero while his racist antagonists are seen as being so un-American that it's like they came from another country.
In his "I Have a Dream" speech, Martin Luther King claimed that:
"[W]e have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
King underestimated the significance of his actions. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence was indeed a check, but a check that guaranteed "the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" only for white men. Jefferson and Madison did not recognize inalienable rights for black people any more than Roger Taney would in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. What King and other civil rights figures did was "rewrite" the founding documents to guaranteed rights for all rather than rights for white people. In doing so, King was retrospectively redeeming the American Revolution and the Constitution from the legacy of white supremacy. King created a Constitution for us all and then pushed the country to cash in on that promise.
Jackie Robinson was one of the first figures to cash in fully on the promise of an integrated society in the African-American rewriting of the American promise. In doing so, he paved the way for all of us.
Interracial Marriage: 40 Years After
40 years after ruling, interracial marriage flourishing
By David Crary
Associated Press
Advertisement
NEW YORK -- The charisma king of the 2008 presidential field. The world's best golfer. The captain of the New York Yankees. Besides superstardom, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter have another common bond: Each is the child of an interracial marriage.
For most of U.S. history, in most communities, such unions were taboo.
It was only 40 years ago — on June 12, 1967 — that the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down a Virginia statute barring whites from marrying nonwhites. The decision also overturned similar bans in 15 other states.
Since that landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling, the number of interracial marriages has soared; for example, black-white marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 422,000 in 2005, according to Census Bureau figures. Factoring in all racial combinations, Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld calculates that more than 7 percent of America's 59 million married couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to less than 2 percent in 1970.
Coupled with a steady flow of immigrants from all parts of the world, the surge of interracial marriages and multiracial children is producing a 21st century America more diverse than ever, with the potential to become less stratified by race.
``The racial divide in the U.S. is a fundamental divide. ... but when you have the 'other' in your own family, it's hard to think of them as 'other' anymore,'' Rosenfeld said. ``We see a blurring of the old lines, and that has to be a good thing, because the lines were artificial in the first place.''
The boundaries were still distinct in 1967, a year when the Sidney Poitier film ``Guess Who's Coming to Dinner'' — a comedy built around parents' acceptance of an interracial couple — was considered groundbreaking. The Supreme Court ruled that Virginia could not criminalize the marriage that Richard Loving, a white, and his black wife, Mildred, entered into nine years earlier in Washington, D.C.
But what once seemed so radical to many Americans is now commonplace.
Many prominent blacks — including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, civil rights leader Julian Bond and former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun — have married whites. Well-known whites who have married blacks include former Defense Secretary William Cohen and actor Robert DeNiro.
Last year, the Salvation Army installed Israel Gaither as the first black leader of its U.S. operations. He and his wife, Eva, who is white, wed in 1967 — the first interracial marriage between Salvation Army officers in the United States.
Opinion polls show overwhelming popular support, especially among younger people, for interracial marriage.
That's not to say acceptance has been universal. Interviews with interracial couples from around the country reveal varied challenges, and opposition has lingered in some quarters.
Bob Jones University in South Carolina only dropped its ban on interracial dating in 2000; a year later 40 percent of the voters objected when Alabama became the last state to remove a no-longer-enforceable ban on interracial marriages from its constitution.
Taunts and threats, including cross burnings, still occur sporadically. In Cleveland, two white men were sentenced to prison earlier this year for harassment of an interracial couple that included spreading liquid mercury around their house.
More often, though, the difficulties are more nuanced, such as those faced by Kim and Al Stamps during 13 years as an interracial couple in Jackson, Miss.
Kim, a white woman raised on Cape Cod, met Al, who is black, in 1993 after she came to Jackson's Tougaloo College to study history. Together, they run Cool Al's — a popular hamburger restaurant — while raising a 12-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter in the state with the nation's lowest percentage (0.7) of multiracial residents.
The children are homeschooled, Kim said, because Jackson's schools are largely divided along racial lines and might not be comfortable for biracial children. She said their family triggered a wave of ``white flight'' when they moved into a mostly white neighborhood four years ago — ``People were saying to my kids, 'What are you doing here?'''
``Making friends here has been really, really tough,'' Kim said. ``I'll go five years at a time with no white friends at all.''
Yet some of the worst friction has been with her black in-laws. Kim said they accused her of scheming to take over the family business, and there's been virtually no contact for more than a year.
``Everything was race,'' Kim said. ``I was called 'the white devil.'''
Her own parents in Massachusetts have been supportive, Kim said, but she credited her mother with foresight.
``She told me, 'Your life is going to be harder because of this road you've chosen — it's going to be harder for your kids,''' Kim said. ``She was absolutely right.''
Al Stamps said he is less sensitive to disapproval than his wife, and tries to be philosophical.
``I'm always cordial,'' he said. ``I'll wait to see how people react to us. If I'm not wanted, I'll move on.''
It's been easier, if not always smooth, for other couples.
Major Cox, a black Alabamian, and his white wife, Cincinnati-born Margaret Meier, have lived on the Cox family homestead in Smut Eye, Ala., for more than 20 years, building a large circle of black and white friends while encountering relatively few hassles.
``I don't feel it, I don't see it,'' said Cox, 66, when asked about racist hostility. ``I live a wonderful life as a nonracial person.''
Meier says she occasionally detects some expressions of disapproval of their marriage, ``but flagrant, in-your-face racism is pretty rare now.''
Cox — an Army veteran and former private detective who now joins his wife in raising quarter horses — longs for a day when racial lines in America break down.
``We are sitting on a powder keg of racism that's institutionalized in our attitudes, our churches and our culture,'' he said, ``that's going to destroy us if we don't undo it.''
In many cases, interracial families embody a mix of nationalities as well as races. Michelle Cadeau, born in Sweden, and her husband, James, born in Haiti, are raising their two sons as Americans in racially diverse West Orange, N.J., while teaching them about all three cultures.
``I think the children of families like ours will be able to make a difference in the world, and do things we weren't able to do,'' Michelle Cadeau said. ``It's really important to put all their cultures together, to be aware of their roots, so they grow up not just as Swedish or Haitian or American, but as global citizens.''
Meanwhile, though, there are frustrations — such as school forms for 5-year-old Justin that provide no option for him to be identified as multiracial.
``I'm aware there are going to be challenges,'' Michelle said. ``There's stuff that's been working for a very long time in this country that is not going to work anymore.''
The boom in interracial marriages forced the federal government to change its procedures for the 2000 census, allowing Americans for the first time to identify themselves by more than one racial category.
About 6.8 million described themselves as multiracial — 2.4 percent of the population — adding statistical fuel to the ongoing debate over what race really means.
Kerry Ann Rockquemore, professor of African-American studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago, is the daughter of a black father and white mother, and says she is asked almost daily how she identifies herself.
The surge in interracial marriage comes at ``a very awkward moment'' in America's long struggle with racism, she says.
``We all want deeply and sincerely to be beyond race, to live in a world where race doesn't matter, but we continue to see deep racial disparities,'' Rockquemore said. ``For interracial families, the great challenge is when the kids are going to leave home and face a world that is still very racialized.''
The stresses on interracial couples can take a toll. The National Center for Health Statistics says their chances of a breakup within 10 years are 41 percent, compared to 31 percent for a couple of the same race.
In some categories of interracial marriage, there are distinct gender-related trends. More than twice as many black men marry white women as vice versa, and about three-fourths of white-Asian marriages involve white men and Asian women.
C.N. Le, a Vietnamese-American who teaches sociology at the University of Massachusetts, says the pattern has created some friction in Asian-American communities.
``Some of the men view the women marrying whites as sellouts, and a lot of Asian women say, 'Well, we would want to date you more, but a lot of you are sexist or patriarchal,''' said Le, who attributes the friction in part to gender stereotypes of Asians that have been perpetuated by American films and TV shows.
Kelley Kenney, a professor at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, is among those who have bucked the black-white gender trend. A black woman, she has been married since 1988 to a fellow academic of Irish-Italian descent, and they have jointly offered programs for the American Counseling Association about interracial couples.
Kenney recalled some tense moments in 1993 when, soon after they moved to Kutztown, a harasser shattered their car window and placed chocolate milk cartons on their lawn. ``It was very powerful to see how the community rallied around us,'' she said.
Kenney is well aware that some blacks view interracial marriage as a potential threat to black identity, and she knows her two daughters, now 15 and 11, will face questions on how they identify themselves.
``For older folks in the black community,'' she said ``it's a feeling of not wanting people to forget where they came from.''
Yet some black intellectuals embrace the surge in interracial marriages and multiracial families; among them is Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, who addressed the topic in his latest book, ``Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption.''
``Malignant racial biases can and do reside in interracial liaisons,'' Kennedy wrote. ``But against the tragic backdrop of American history, the flowering of multiracial intimacy is a profoundly moving and encouraging development.''
By David Crary
Associated Press
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NEW YORK -- The charisma king of the 2008 presidential field. The world's best golfer. The captain of the New York Yankees. Besides superstardom, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter have another common bond: Each is the child of an interracial marriage.
For most of U.S. history, in most communities, such unions were taboo.
It was only 40 years ago — on June 12, 1967 — that the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down a Virginia statute barring whites from marrying nonwhites. The decision also overturned similar bans in 15 other states.
Since that landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling, the number of interracial marriages has soared; for example, black-white marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 422,000 in 2005, according to Census Bureau figures. Factoring in all racial combinations, Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld calculates that more than 7 percent of America's 59 million married couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to less than 2 percent in 1970.
Coupled with a steady flow of immigrants from all parts of the world, the surge of interracial marriages and multiracial children is producing a 21st century America more diverse than ever, with the potential to become less stratified by race.
``The racial divide in the U.S. is a fundamental divide. ... but when you have the 'other' in your own family, it's hard to think of them as 'other' anymore,'' Rosenfeld said. ``We see a blurring of the old lines, and that has to be a good thing, because the lines were artificial in the first place.''
The boundaries were still distinct in 1967, a year when the Sidney Poitier film ``Guess Who's Coming to Dinner'' — a comedy built around parents' acceptance of an interracial couple — was considered groundbreaking. The Supreme Court ruled that Virginia could not criminalize the marriage that Richard Loving, a white, and his black wife, Mildred, entered into nine years earlier in Washington, D.C.
But what once seemed so radical to many Americans is now commonplace.
Many prominent blacks — including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, civil rights leader Julian Bond and former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun — have married whites. Well-known whites who have married blacks include former Defense Secretary William Cohen and actor Robert DeNiro.
Last year, the Salvation Army installed Israel Gaither as the first black leader of its U.S. operations. He and his wife, Eva, who is white, wed in 1967 — the first interracial marriage between Salvation Army officers in the United States.
Opinion polls show overwhelming popular support, especially among younger people, for interracial marriage.
That's not to say acceptance has been universal. Interviews with interracial couples from around the country reveal varied challenges, and opposition has lingered in some quarters.
Bob Jones University in South Carolina only dropped its ban on interracial dating in 2000; a year later 40 percent of the voters objected when Alabama became the last state to remove a no-longer-enforceable ban on interracial marriages from its constitution.
Taunts and threats, including cross burnings, still occur sporadically. In Cleveland, two white men were sentenced to prison earlier this year for harassment of an interracial couple that included spreading liquid mercury around their house.
More often, though, the difficulties are more nuanced, such as those faced by Kim and Al Stamps during 13 years as an interracial couple in Jackson, Miss.
Kim, a white woman raised on Cape Cod, met Al, who is black, in 1993 after she came to Jackson's Tougaloo College to study history. Together, they run Cool Al's — a popular hamburger restaurant — while raising a 12-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter in the state with the nation's lowest percentage (0.7) of multiracial residents.
The children are homeschooled, Kim said, because Jackson's schools are largely divided along racial lines and might not be comfortable for biracial children. She said their family triggered a wave of ``white flight'' when they moved into a mostly white neighborhood four years ago — ``People were saying to my kids, 'What are you doing here?'''
``Making friends here has been really, really tough,'' Kim said. ``I'll go five years at a time with no white friends at all.''
Yet some of the worst friction has been with her black in-laws. Kim said they accused her of scheming to take over the family business, and there's been virtually no contact for more than a year.
``Everything was race,'' Kim said. ``I was called 'the white devil.'''
Her own parents in Massachusetts have been supportive, Kim said, but she credited her mother with foresight.
``She told me, 'Your life is going to be harder because of this road you've chosen — it's going to be harder for your kids,''' Kim said. ``She was absolutely right.''
Al Stamps said he is less sensitive to disapproval than his wife, and tries to be philosophical.
``I'm always cordial,'' he said. ``I'll wait to see how people react to us. If I'm not wanted, I'll move on.''
It's been easier, if not always smooth, for other couples.
Major Cox, a black Alabamian, and his white wife, Cincinnati-born Margaret Meier, have lived on the Cox family homestead in Smut Eye, Ala., for more than 20 years, building a large circle of black and white friends while encountering relatively few hassles.
``I don't feel it, I don't see it,'' said Cox, 66, when asked about racist hostility. ``I live a wonderful life as a nonracial person.''
Meier says she occasionally detects some expressions of disapproval of their marriage, ``but flagrant, in-your-face racism is pretty rare now.''
Cox — an Army veteran and former private detective who now joins his wife in raising quarter horses — longs for a day when racial lines in America break down.
``We are sitting on a powder keg of racism that's institutionalized in our attitudes, our churches and our culture,'' he said, ``that's going to destroy us if we don't undo it.''
In many cases, interracial families embody a mix of nationalities as well as races. Michelle Cadeau, born in Sweden, and her husband, James, born in Haiti, are raising their two sons as Americans in racially diverse West Orange, N.J., while teaching them about all three cultures.
``I think the children of families like ours will be able to make a difference in the world, and do things we weren't able to do,'' Michelle Cadeau said. ``It's really important to put all their cultures together, to be aware of their roots, so they grow up not just as Swedish or Haitian or American, but as global citizens.''
Meanwhile, though, there are frustrations — such as school forms for 5-year-old Justin that provide no option for him to be identified as multiracial.
``I'm aware there are going to be challenges,'' Michelle said. ``There's stuff that's been working for a very long time in this country that is not going to work anymore.''
The boom in interracial marriages forced the federal government to change its procedures for the 2000 census, allowing Americans for the first time to identify themselves by more than one racial category.
About 6.8 million described themselves as multiracial — 2.4 percent of the population — adding statistical fuel to the ongoing debate over what race really means.
Kerry Ann Rockquemore, professor of African-American studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago, is the daughter of a black father and white mother, and says she is asked almost daily how she identifies herself.
The surge in interracial marriage comes at ``a very awkward moment'' in America's long struggle with racism, she says.
``We all want deeply and sincerely to be beyond race, to live in a world where race doesn't matter, but we continue to see deep racial disparities,'' Rockquemore said. ``For interracial families, the great challenge is when the kids are going to leave home and face a world that is still very racialized.''
The stresses on interracial couples can take a toll. The National Center for Health Statistics says their chances of a breakup within 10 years are 41 percent, compared to 31 percent for a couple of the same race.
In some categories of interracial marriage, there are distinct gender-related trends. More than twice as many black men marry white women as vice versa, and about three-fourths of white-Asian marriages involve white men and Asian women.
C.N. Le, a Vietnamese-American who teaches sociology at the University of Massachusetts, says the pattern has created some friction in Asian-American communities.
``Some of the men view the women marrying whites as sellouts, and a lot of Asian women say, 'Well, we would want to date you more, but a lot of you are sexist or patriarchal,''' said Le, who attributes the friction in part to gender stereotypes of Asians that have been perpetuated by American films and TV shows.
Kelley Kenney, a professor at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, is among those who have bucked the black-white gender trend. A black woman, she has been married since 1988 to a fellow academic of Irish-Italian descent, and they have jointly offered programs for the American Counseling Association about interracial couples.
Kenney recalled some tense moments in 1993 when, soon after they moved to Kutztown, a harasser shattered their car window and placed chocolate milk cartons on their lawn. ``It was very powerful to see how the community rallied around us,'' she said.
Kenney is well aware that some blacks view interracial marriage as a potential threat to black identity, and she knows her two daughters, now 15 and 11, will face questions on how they identify themselves.
``For older folks in the black community,'' she said ``it's a feeling of not wanting people to forget where they came from.''
Yet some black intellectuals embrace the surge in interracial marriages and multiracial families; among them is Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, who addressed the topic in his latest book, ``Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption.''
``Malignant racial biases can and do reside in interracial liaisons,'' Kennedy wrote. ``But against the tragic backdrop of American history, the flowering of multiracial intimacy is a profoundly moving and encouraging development.''
Thursday, April 12, 2007
The Specter of Violence for Feminist Bloggers
In order to argue effectively against the blogger code of conduct, it’s imperative to say that bitches are crazy
Published by Amanda Marcotte April 12th, 2007 in Interblog
Markos doesn’t think death threats are real. Granted, they are a lot less common in my experience than rape threats, but I don’t imagine he thinks those are real, either.
Noteworthy: Markos is not a woman.
When I first started blogging here, I had a hell of a time running around deleting my home address out of the comments of the blog here. That is a death/rape threat. Very rarely do people threaten to kill you outright, but they simply imply it. Your address in your comments=”I know where you live.” My boyfriend at the time certainly picked up on the implied threat that other people would pretend they don’t get and talked about getting a large dog. He didn’t have an interest, I guess, in pushing the idea that women who complain about sexism online are just being hysterical.
But I suppose a woman’s word is not proof, of course, or even evidence. And hey, maybe it’s rare! Or it was just that one time.
I dunno, we deleted this one from comments yesterday, aimed at a blogger that isn’t me but is, as you can imagine, female:
I am a regular reader of this blog, and would like to float a question by you and your readers. We are toying with the Idea of offering rape insurance here at Allstate in Cananda. We offer home owners insuracnce that covers other crimes, we are thinking of exanding Our home owners along with indidual rape policies.
Do you think this would be something that might interest any of you?
He signed it Thomas J. Wilson, who is the president of All State, but that’s clearly not who he is. His IP is 199.158.161.187. I suppose that’s not “proof” or even evidence, since we deleted the comment, but what can I say? I don’t let dickwads threaten my friends in comments. I suppose you could say that it’s not a threat to suggest that someone get insured against rape. Which is basically why men like this threaten like this, through implication, with a coat of plausible deniability. But the message is there and it is received by its intended audience for what it is. Surely liberal bloggers who know all about dog whistles in politics can admit they are there in other communications. And sliding in, harassing a woman, and sliding out is SOP for sexist pigs—you pinch when no one’s looking, because you know she won’t be believed if she complains. You scream at the woman from the car driving by so that she can’t catch your face and know who you are. You make sure at all times to take advantage of the “bitches are crazy and flatter themselves” stereotype.
You could say that Kathy Sierra is overreacting, and you might have a case there. I tend to assume that the vast majority of asswipes won’t follow through on their unhinged emails that either are threatening or mostly just the clear products of the minds of men who probably would rape if they had a chance. No telling. I don’t know the whole story, but she may have reason to think the threats are real. She does work in a male-dominated industry, and attempts to harass and assault women until they give up is pretty standard in these situations. But she might be overreacting. If you’re under an onslaught of abuse from threatened men, it can sometimes be a tad overwhelming and makes it hard for you to see that most of them are basement dwellers too scared to leave the house to follow you.
Even assuming that 99% of the wacked-out misogynists spilling violent fantasies at real women online don’t have the wherewithal to follow through, there’s always that 1%. Once glance at the statistics involving terrorism against doctors who perform abortions should put to rest doubts that some men are so invested in preserving male dominance they’ll gladly resort to terrorism. It does well to remember that for a lot of men, hating women is all they have.
The truth of the matter is that law enforcement does have reason to believe that these kinds of guys can turn dangerous. It does well to remember that John Hinckley was obsessed like this and did manage to go so far as to shoot the President. Not that I blame Jodie Foster or anyone for that, but once in awhile men with these obsessions do go off the deep end and it isn’t always easy to tell who it’s going to be.
I and several feminists were harassed and threatened by a man from England a few years ago. This man had sent me a death threat via e-mail. He said he was going to “slit my fucking throat”. He also annoyed me with his repeated messages that he thought were anonymous, but I was able to track down his real identity with a few Google searches. I never felt threatened by him because I live in Massachusetts and he lived in London. Plus I get annoying and sometimes harassing comments on my blog and in e-mail all the time. I have a high tolerance for tripe. However, other feminists who were at the receiving end of his messages did feel threatened. He had also posted anonymously to comments on my blog and on other feminist’s blogs. Several feminists who felt threatened reported him to Scotland Yard. I was contacted by Scotland Yard to inform detectives of what this man had sent to me. It turned out that he was about 18 years old and lived with his mother. He had a history of mental problems. I know he was convicted of communications harassment, but I don’t remember how he was sentenced.
Not to say that the criticism about the blogger code of conduct is wrong, of course. I think that it’s naive to think that’s going to work, but again, the tech blogging crowd may be old hat at this. But you can engage in a criticism of that without trotting out the tired stereotype that women are hysterical and paranoid.
Published by Amanda Marcotte April 12th, 2007 in Interblog
Markos doesn’t think death threats are real. Granted, they are a lot less common in my experience than rape threats, but I don’t imagine he thinks those are real, either.
Noteworthy: Markos is not a woman.
When I first started blogging here, I had a hell of a time running around deleting my home address out of the comments of the blog here. That is a death/rape threat. Very rarely do people threaten to kill you outright, but they simply imply it. Your address in your comments=”I know where you live.” My boyfriend at the time certainly picked up on the implied threat that other people would pretend they don’t get and talked about getting a large dog. He didn’t have an interest, I guess, in pushing the idea that women who complain about sexism online are just being hysterical.
But I suppose a woman’s word is not proof, of course, or even evidence. And hey, maybe it’s rare! Or it was just that one time.
I dunno, we deleted this one from comments yesterday, aimed at a blogger that isn’t me but is, as you can imagine, female:
I am a regular reader of this blog, and would like to float a question by you and your readers. We are toying with the Idea of offering rape insurance here at Allstate in Cananda. We offer home owners insuracnce that covers other crimes, we are thinking of exanding Our home owners along with indidual rape policies.
Do you think this would be something that might interest any of you?
He signed it Thomas J. Wilson, who is the president of All State, but that’s clearly not who he is. His IP is 199.158.161.187. I suppose that’s not “proof” or even evidence, since we deleted the comment, but what can I say? I don’t let dickwads threaten my friends in comments. I suppose you could say that it’s not a threat to suggest that someone get insured against rape. Which is basically why men like this threaten like this, through implication, with a coat of plausible deniability. But the message is there and it is received by its intended audience for what it is. Surely liberal bloggers who know all about dog whistles in politics can admit they are there in other communications. And sliding in, harassing a woman, and sliding out is SOP for sexist pigs—you pinch when no one’s looking, because you know she won’t be believed if she complains. You scream at the woman from the car driving by so that she can’t catch your face and know who you are. You make sure at all times to take advantage of the “bitches are crazy and flatter themselves” stereotype.
You could say that Kathy Sierra is overreacting, and you might have a case there. I tend to assume that the vast majority of asswipes won’t follow through on their unhinged emails that either are threatening or mostly just the clear products of the minds of men who probably would rape if they had a chance. No telling. I don’t know the whole story, but she may have reason to think the threats are real. She does work in a male-dominated industry, and attempts to harass and assault women until they give up is pretty standard in these situations. But she might be overreacting. If you’re under an onslaught of abuse from threatened men, it can sometimes be a tad overwhelming and makes it hard for you to see that most of them are basement dwellers too scared to leave the house to follow you.
Even assuming that 99% of the wacked-out misogynists spilling violent fantasies at real women online don’t have the wherewithal to follow through, there’s always that 1%. Once glance at the statistics involving terrorism against doctors who perform abortions should put to rest doubts that some men are so invested in preserving male dominance they’ll gladly resort to terrorism. It does well to remember that for a lot of men, hating women is all they have.
The truth of the matter is that law enforcement does have reason to believe that these kinds of guys can turn dangerous. It does well to remember that John Hinckley was obsessed like this and did manage to go so far as to shoot the President. Not that I blame Jodie Foster or anyone for that, but once in awhile men with these obsessions do go off the deep end and it isn’t always easy to tell who it’s going to be.
I and several feminists were harassed and threatened by a man from England a few years ago. This man had sent me a death threat via e-mail. He said he was going to “slit my fucking throat”. He also annoyed me with his repeated messages that he thought were anonymous, but I was able to track down his real identity with a few Google searches. I never felt threatened by him because I live in Massachusetts and he lived in London. Plus I get annoying and sometimes harassing comments on my blog and in e-mail all the time. I have a high tolerance for tripe. However, other feminists who were at the receiving end of his messages did feel threatened. He had also posted anonymously to comments on my blog and on other feminist’s blogs. Several feminists who felt threatened reported him to Scotland Yard. I was contacted by Scotland Yard to inform detectives of what this man had sent to me. It turned out that he was about 18 years old and lived with his mother. He had a history of mental problems. I know he was convicted of communications harassment, but I don’t remember how he was sentenced.
Not to say that the criticism about the blogger code of conduct is wrong, of course. I think that it’s naive to think that’s going to work, but again, the tech blogging crowd may be old hat at this. But you can engage in a criticism of that without trotting out the tired stereotype that women are hysterical and paranoid.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
More on Imus
The Wit and Wisdom of Don ImusA guide for Washington's power crowd.
By Timothy Noah
Don Imus' long-standing acceptance by the political establishment is a contemporary illustration of 1940s socialite Perle Mesta's famous advice about how to draw Washington's power set to a soiree: "Hang a lamb chop in the window." Politicians like John McCain and Barack Obama, and famous TV journalists like Tim Russert and Cokie Roberts, are no more standoffish than their predecessors; the only difference is that the lamb chop has been replaced by a microphone. For some years now, the broadcast industry has conducted, via talk radio and reality TV, a series of experiments to gauge precisely how much personal humiliation the species Homo sapiens will consent to endure. The most surprising finding is that even people with constant access to the media will make themselves available to interviewer-comedians like Sacha Baron "Ali G." Cohen or Steven Colbert—performers whose sole aim is to get laughs at these celebrities' expense. If there's an outer boundary to what a famous journalist or politician will put up with, science has yet to find it.
In the direct-humiliation department, Imus falls well short of Colbert or Ali G. Imus in the Morning is a variation on the experiment, wherein the belittling is indirect. Here, the research question is how long respectable journalists and politicians will associate themselves with a radio host who spews continual invective based on race, ethnicity, and religion. Without exception, every political and journalistic celebrity who appears on Imus' show is diminished. Yet they keep coming back. Is it because they don't know what Imus says when they aren't around? That's what they tend to claim. "I don't listen to the show," McCain told journalist Philip Nobile in June 2000. In an April 9 appearance, Tom Oliphant told Imus, "Solidarity forever," but later covered his ass by saying, "I don't know beans about hip-hop culture or trash-talking or, what do you call those things where you run on forever? Riffs." One person who can't claim ignorance about Imus is Evan Thomas, who on April 9 told the New York Times' David Carr that it would be "posturing" for him to refuse to go on Imus' show after Imus got dinged for calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos." Thomas puffed Imus in a 1999 Newsweek cover profile ("The Ringmaster"). "With his quick takes and sense of the absurd," he wrote, "Imus is the perfect voice for an age that prizes irony over solemnity." The Newsweek piece made only glancing reference to Imus' penchant for uttering racial and ethnic slurs on the air, overlooking, for instance, the shock jock's admission the previous year on CBS News' 60 Minutes that he'd once told a colleague he hired producer Bernard McGuirk to tell "nigger" jokes. ("That was an off-the-record conversation," Imus protested to Mike Wallace.)
In the unlikely event that McCain, Oliphant, and others don't know who they're dealing with, let's review some of Imus' remarks (if you prefer, riffs) from the past. This stuff isn't hard to find. Many thanks to the Web sites Media Matters for America, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, and TomPaine.com (where Nobile tracked Imus' show) for the quotes that appear below.
On blacks:
"William Cohen, the Mandingo deal." (Former Defense Secretary Cohen's wife is African-American.)
"Wasn't in a woodpile, was he?" (Responding to news that former black militant H. Rap Brown, subsequently known as Abdullah Al-Amin, was found hiding in a shed in Alabama after exchanging gunfire with police. Imus is here alluding to the expression "nigger in the woodpile.")
"Knuckle-dragging moron." (Description of basketball player Patrick Ewing.)
"We all have 12-inch penises." (After being asked what he has in common with Nat Turner, Malcolm X, Minister Louis Farrakhan, Latrell Sprewell from the New York Knicks, and Al Sharpton.)
"Chest-thumping pimps." (Description of the New York Knicks.)
"A cleaning lady." (Reference to journalist Gwen Ifill, possibly out of pique that she wouldn't appear on his show. "I certainly don't know any black journalists who will," she wrote in the April 10 New York Times. The Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page used to appear, but after he made Imus pledge not to make offensive comments in the future, he was never asked back.)
On Jews:
"I remember when I first had [the Blind Boys of Alabama] on a few years ago, how the Jewish management at whatever, whoever we work for, CBS, or whatever it is, were bitching at me about it. […] I tried to put it in terms that these money-grubbing bastards could understand."
"Boner-nosed … beanie-wearing Jewboy." (Description of Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, a frequent guest.)
On women:
"That buck-tooth witch Satan, Hillary Clinton." […] "I never admitted it when I went down there and got in all that big jam, insulting Bill Clinton and his fat ugly wife, Satan. Did I? Did I ever say I was sorry for that?"
On Native Americans:
"The guy from F-Troop, Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell." (This is a reference to the zany Indian characters on the 1960s TV sitcom F-Troop. They had names like "Roaring Chicken," "Crazy Cat," and "Chief Wild Eagle.")
On Japanese:
"Old Kabuki's in a coma and the market's going up. […] How old is the boy? The battery's running down on that boy." (Reference to Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, who died the following week.)
On gays:
"I didn't know that Allan Bloom was coming in from the back end." (The homosexuality of the author of The Closing of the American Mind became widely known when Saul Bellow published Ravelstein, a novel whose protagonist was based on Bloom, who by then was deceased.)
"The enormously attractive [NBC political correspondent] Chip Reid, I can say without being accused of being some limp-wristed 'mo."
On the handicapped:
"Janet Reno's having a press conference. Ms. Reno, of course, has Parkinson's disease, has a noticeable tremor. […] I don't know how she gets that lipstick on (laughter) looking like a rodeo clown."
Every one of these statements came directly out of Imus' mouth on his program. That's striking because Imus usually leaves it to other show regulars (especially McGuirk, the aforementioned point man on "nigger" jokes) to say the most offensive stuff, with Imus feeding them straight lines. It's safer that way.
By Timothy Noah
Don Imus' long-standing acceptance by the political establishment is a contemporary illustration of 1940s socialite Perle Mesta's famous advice about how to draw Washington's power set to a soiree: "Hang a lamb chop in the window." Politicians like John McCain and Barack Obama, and famous TV journalists like Tim Russert and Cokie Roberts, are no more standoffish than their predecessors; the only difference is that the lamb chop has been replaced by a microphone. For some years now, the broadcast industry has conducted, via talk radio and reality TV, a series of experiments to gauge precisely how much personal humiliation the species Homo sapiens will consent to endure. The most surprising finding is that even people with constant access to the media will make themselves available to interviewer-comedians like Sacha Baron "Ali G." Cohen or Steven Colbert—performers whose sole aim is to get laughs at these celebrities' expense. If there's an outer boundary to what a famous journalist or politician will put up with, science has yet to find it.
In the direct-humiliation department, Imus falls well short of Colbert or Ali G. Imus in the Morning is a variation on the experiment, wherein the belittling is indirect. Here, the research question is how long respectable journalists and politicians will associate themselves with a radio host who spews continual invective based on race, ethnicity, and religion. Without exception, every political and journalistic celebrity who appears on Imus' show is diminished. Yet they keep coming back. Is it because they don't know what Imus says when they aren't around? That's what they tend to claim. "I don't listen to the show," McCain told journalist Philip Nobile in June 2000. In an April 9 appearance, Tom Oliphant told Imus, "Solidarity forever," but later covered his ass by saying, "I don't know beans about hip-hop culture or trash-talking or, what do you call those things where you run on forever? Riffs." One person who can't claim ignorance about Imus is Evan Thomas, who on April 9 told the New York Times' David Carr that it would be "posturing" for him to refuse to go on Imus' show after Imus got dinged for calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos." Thomas puffed Imus in a 1999 Newsweek cover profile ("The Ringmaster"). "With his quick takes and sense of the absurd," he wrote, "Imus is the perfect voice for an age that prizes irony over solemnity." The Newsweek piece made only glancing reference to Imus' penchant for uttering racial and ethnic slurs on the air, overlooking, for instance, the shock jock's admission the previous year on CBS News' 60 Minutes that he'd once told a colleague he hired producer Bernard McGuirk to tell "nigger" jokes. ("That was an off-the-record conversation," Imus protested to Mike Wallace.)
In the unlikely event that McCain, Oliphant, and others don't know who they're dealing with, let's review some of Imus' remarks (if you prefer, riffs) from the past. This stuff isn't hard to find. Many thanks to the Web sites Media Matters for America, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, and TomPaine.com (where Nobile tracked Imus' show) for the quotes that appear below.
On blacks:
"William Cohen, the Mandingo deal." (Former Defense Secretary Cohen's wife is African-American.)
"Wasn't in a woodpile, was he?" (Responding to news that former black militant H. Rap Brown, subsequently known as Abdullah Al-Amin, was found hiding in a shed in Alabama after exchanging gunfire with police. Imus is here alluding to the expression "nigger in the woodpile.")
"Knuckle-dragging moron." (Description of basketball player Patrick Ewing.)
"We all have 12-inch penises." (After being asked what he has in common with Nat Turner, Malcolm X, Minister Louis Farrakhan, Latrell Sprewell from the New York Knicks, and Al Sharpton.)
"Chest-thumping pimps." (Description of the New York Knicks.)
"A cleaning lady." (Reference to journalist Gwen Ifill, possibly out of pique that she wouldn't appear on his show. "I certainly don't know any black journalists who will," she wrote in the April 10 New York Times. The Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page used to appear, but after he made Imus pledge not to make offensive comments in the future, he was never asked back.)
On Jews:
"I remember when I first had [the Blind Boys of Alabama] on a few years ago, how the Jewish management at whatever, whoever we work for, CBS, or whatever it is, were bitching at me about it. […] I tried to put it in terms that these money-grubbing bastards could understand."
"Boner-nosed … beanie-wearing Jewboy." (Description of Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, a frequent guest.)
On women:
"That buck-tooth witch Satan, Hillary Clinton." […] "I never admitted it when I went down there and got in all that big jam, insulting Bill Clinton and his fat ugly wife, Satan. Did I? Did I ever say I was sorry for that?"
On Native Americans:
"The guy from F-Troop, Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell." (This is a reference to the zany Indian characters on the 1960s TV sitcom F-Troop. They had names like "Roaring Chicken," "Crazy Cat," and "Chief Wild Eagle.")
On Japanese:
"Old Kabuki's in a coma and the market's going up. […] How old is the boy? The battery's running down on that boy." (Reference to Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, who died the following week.)
On gays:
"I didn't know that Allan Bloom was coming in from the back end." (The homosexuality of the author of The Closing of the American Mind became widely known when Saul Bellow published Ravelstein, a novel whose protagonist was based on Bloom, who by then was deceased.)
"The enormously attractive [NBC political correspondent] Chip Reid, I can say without being accused of being some limp-wristed 'mo."
On the handicapped:
"Janet Reno's having a press conference. Ms. Reno, of course, has Parkinson's disease, has a noticeable tremor. […] I don't know how she gets that lipstick on (laughter) looking like a rodeo clown."
Every one of these statements came directly out of Imus' mouth on his program. That's striking because Imus usually leaves it to other show regulars (especially McGuirk, the aforementioned point man on "nigger" jokes) to say the most offensive stuff, with Imus feeding them straight lines. It's safer that way.
Monday, April 09, 2007
Don Imus and Racial Stereotypes
MSNBC drops Imus for 2 weeks amid Rutgers flap
NEW YORK -- MSNBC will suspend its television simulcast of radio shock-jock Don Imus' morning talk show for two weeks after the host called members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team "a bunch of nappy-headed hos," the network announced Monday.
Despite apologies from Imus on Friday and Monday, the suspension will start April 16, the network said in a written statement.
"Don Imus has expressed profound regret and embarrassment and has made a commitment to listen to all of those who have raised legitimate expressions of outrage," it said.
"In addition, his dedication -- in his words -- to change the discourse on his program moving forward, has confirmed for us that this action is appropriate. Our future relationship with Imus is contingent on his ability to live up to his word."
Two of the nation's biggest media companies -- CBS Corp. and NBC Universal -- will ultimately decide the fate of Imus' daily program.
After a career of cranky insults, Imus was fighting for his job following one joke that by his own admission went "way too far."
Imus apologized Monday, both on his show and on a syndicated radio program hosted by the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is among several black leaders demanding his ouster.
Imus could be in real danger if the outcry causes advertisers to shy away from him, said Tom Taylor, editor of the trade publication Inside Radio.
"Everyone is on tenterhooks waiting to see whether it grows and whether the protest gets picked up more broadly," Taylor said.
Imus isn't the most popular radio talk show host -- the trade publication Talkers ranks him the 14th most influential -- but his audience is heavy on the political and media elite that advertisers pay a premium to reach. Authors, journalists and politicians are frequent guests -- and targets for insults.
He has urged critics to recognize that his show is a comedy that spreads insults broadly. Imus or his cast have called Colin Powell a "sniffling weasel," New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson a "fat sissy" and referred to Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, an American Indian, as "the guy from `F Troop."' He and his colleagues also called the New York Knicks a group of "chest-thumping pimps."
Imus: We went way too far
On Sharpton's program Monday, Imus said that "our agenda is to be funny and sometimes we go too far. And this time we went way too far."
The Rutgers comment has struck a chord, in part, because it was aimed at a group of young women at the pinnacle of athletic success. It also came in a different public atmosphere following the Michael Richards and Mel Gibson incidents, said Eric Deggans, columnist for the St. Petersburg Times and chairman of the media monitoring committee of the National Association of Black Journalists, which also wants Imus canned.
"This may be the first time where he's done something like this in the YouTube era," Deggans said. Viewers can quickly see clips of Imus' remarks, not allowing him to redefine their context, he said.
On his show Monday, Imus called himself "a good person" who made a bad mistake.
"Here's what I've learned: that you can't make fun of everybody, because some people don't deserve it," he said. "And because the climate on this program has been what it's been for 30 years doesn't mean that it has to be that way for the next five years or whatever because that has to change, and I understand that."
Imus' radio show originates from WFAN in New York City and is syndicated nationally by Westwood One, both of which are managed by CBS. CBS Radio just replaced chief executive Joel Hollander with Dan Mason. With Imus' radio show reaching an estimated 2.5 million people a week, his future could conceivably be decided by CBS chief Leslie Moonves.
CBS has denounced Imus' remarks and said it will monitor his show for content.
The show is simulcast daily on MSNBC, where it reached an estimated 361,000 viewers in the first three months of the year, up 39 percent from last year.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson and about 50 people marched Monday outside Chicago's NBC tower to protest Imus' comments. He said MSNBC should abandon Imus and MSNBC should hire more black pundits.
Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP board of directors, said it is "past time his employers took him off the air."
"As long as an audience is attracted to his bigotry and politicians and pundits tolerate his racism and chauvinism to promote themselves, Don Imus will continue to be a serial apologist for prejudice," Bond said.
Imus was mostly contrite in his appearance with Sharpton, although the activist did not change his opinion that Imus should lose his job. At one point Imus seemed incredulous at Sharpton's suggestion that he might walk away from the incident unscathed.
"Unscathed?" Imus said. "How do you think I'm unscathed by this? Don't you think I'm humiliated?"
Copyright 2007 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Singing Black
Over at the L.A. Times, the great music critic Ann Powers has written an interesting examination of the ways that Joss Stone has been criticized for her "black" style of singing. For those of you who don't know, Stone was born in Dover, England, is 19, white, and sings like the second coming of Gladys Knight. After two albums of slavishly faithful attempts to re-create the sound and vibe of classic soul, Stone's new album, "Introducing Joss Stone," was meant to herald the arrival of "the real" Joss Stone, as she took a more hands-on approach to writing and recording the music. The so-so album sounds a lot like her older work (a funny thing to say about someone so young), but it's already on the verge of being deemed a failure in England due to it's low chart placing. As the always insightful Powers explains, part of the album's problem is the way that, even on an album designed to represent her, Stone seems incapable of transcending the soul tradition she's so strongly influenced by: "If there's one fault on 'Introducing,'" writes Powers, "it's that Stone's comfort level with that tradition remains too high. Throughout the album, she sings in a voice she learned from those soul albums; the lilt of coastal England never surfaces."
Powers goes on to write that Stone's "refusal to see [her] identity as artificial" has singled her out for criticism regarding the "right to sing in a black style." It's a great point: Stone's unwillingness to pay fealty to the idea that she's some sort of cultural culprit makes her a target for certain critics -- some of whom have even gone so far as to label her a "freakshow." But isn't the argument that only certain types of people have the "right" to sing certain types of music hopelessly reductive? Should only poor white people play punk music? Do Northern-born blacks have less purchase on the blues than those born in the South? Can someone from California honestly play bluegrass? The truth may be distasteful, but scholars and critics like Nick Tosches, Eric Lott and Greil Marcus have shown that, for better or worse (and I firmly say it's the former), popular culture is one long story of cultural alchemy. Call it exchange, call it theft, call it what you will, but without the interplay between cultures, our world would be radically different.
This kind of cultural appropriation conversation gets kicked up every couple of years -- Eminem and "The White Rapper Show" being recent examples -- but it never seems to come closer to a resolution. As Powers points out, the facts of white privilege and the unequal economy of cultural exchange will always render Stone's blatantly appropriative style of music-making an intellectually and emotionally fraught proposition. I'm just not sure how the right-to-sing conversation can ever be resolved in a constructive or satisfactory way. Am I being too glib or pessimistic? Let me know your take on Stone specifically and cultural appropriation more generally. Post your answers in the comments section.
-- David Marchese
Powers goes on to write that Stone's "refusal to see [her] identity as artificial" has singled her out for criticism regarding the "right to sing in a black style." It's a great point: Stone's unwillingness to pay fealty to the idea that she's some sort of cultural culprit makes her a target for certain critics -- some of whom have even gone so far as to label her a "freakshow." But isn't the argument that only certain types of people have the "right" to sing certain types of music hopelessly reductive? Should only poor white people play punk music? Do Northern-born blacks have less purchase on the blues than those born in the South? Can someone from California honestly play bluegrass? The truth may be distasteful, but scholars and critics like Nick Tosches, Eric Lott and Greil Marcus have shown that, for better or worse (and I firmly say it's the former), popular culture is one long story of cultural alchemy. Call it exchange, call it theft, call it what you will, but without the interplay between cultures, our world would be radically different.
This kind of cultural appropriation conversation gets kicked up every couple of years -- Eminem and "The White Rapper Show" being recent examples -- but it never seems to come closer to a resolution. As Powers points out, the facts of white privilege and the unequal economy of cultural exchange will always render Stone's blatantly appropriative style of music-making an intellectually and emotionally fraught proposition. I'm just not sure how the right-to-sing conversation can ever be resolved in a constructive or satisfactory way. Am I being too glib or pessimistic? Let me know your take on Stone specifically and cultural appropriation more generally. Post your answers in the comments section.
-- David Marchese
Saturday, March 03, 2007
The Soul of Popular Conservativism
TPM's Greg Sargent wonders "Why, Why, Why" conservatives would be so eager to hear Ann Coulter at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference. In fact, the depth of Ann Coulter's appeal to the right-wing is hard for people on the left to understand.
So, I'm going to take my shot at explaining Coulter's appeal here.
In fact, Ann Coulter is the soul of popular conservatism. To understand Coulter's appeal, it is important to emphasize that right-wingers think they're morally and intellectually superior to white liberals and minority advocates. Conservatives believe that their morality of taboo breaking on race, gender, and sexuality is superior to liberal "goodness" on these issues. Right-wingers also think they're smarter, more rational (as opposed to emotional), and tougher than liberals. This is why Ann Coulter is idolized by the right. She represents the superiority of conservativism in the minds of conservatives.
Coulter gained this status because she is the grand priestess of a particular right-wing rhetorical game in relation to "political correctness." From the right-wing point of view, making racist, sexist, and homophobic statements is a demonstration of moral and intellectual superior. The idea of bigoted talk about "lawn jockeys," "ragheads," "faggots," etc., is to defy norms of political correctness and then laugh at the "outrage" with which liberals respond. Dick Cheney was playing this kind of rhetorical game when he told John Kerry to "fuck yourself." In this context, the "morality" is in the defiance of social convention while the "intelligence" is in manipulating liberal emotions. The right-wing short-hand for this rhetorical game is "driving liberals crazy" and right-wingers derive enormous satisfaction from playing it.
Now, it should be obvious where Ann Coulter fits. Having surpassed Limbaugh as a high-wire artist of calculated bigotry, fencing "outraged" liberals, and laughing all the way to the bank, Coulter is fervently admired because she captures the core of right-wing morality in a way that's extremely pleasing to conservatives. If Martin Luther King was the lens through which Americans were able to see the ugliness of segregation and racism, Coulter is the lens through which conservatives can view their bigotries as a sign of their intellectual and moral goodness.
From the conservative point of view, that's invaluable.
So, I'm going to take my shot at explaining Coulter's appeal here.
In fact, Ann Coulter is the soul of popular conservatism. To understand Coulter's appeal, it is important to emphasize that right-wingers think they're morally and intellectually superior to white liberals and minority advocates. Conservatives believe that their morality of taboo breaking on race, gender, and sexuality is superior to liberal "goodness" on these issues. Right-wingers also think they're smarter, more rational (as opposed to emotional), and tougher than liberals. This is why Ann Coulter is idolized by the right. She represents the superiority of conservativism in the minds of conservatives.
Coulter gained this status because she is the grand priestess of a particular right-wing rhetorical game in relation to "political correctness." From the right-wing point of view, making racist, sexist, and homophobic statements is a demonstration of moral and intellectual superior. The idea of bigoted talk about "lawn jockeys," "ragheads," "faggots," etc., is to defy norms of political correctness and then laugh at the "outrage" with which liberals respond. Dick Cheney was playing this kind of rhetorical game when he told John Kerry to "fuck yourself." In this context, the "morality" is in the defiance of social convention while the "intelligence" is in manipulating liberal emotions. The right-wing short-hand for this rhetorical game is "driving liberals crazy" and right-wingers derive enormous satisfaction from playing it.
Now, it should be obvious where Ann Coulter fits. Having surpassed Limbaugh as a high-wire artist of calculated bigotry, fencing "outraged" liberals, and laughing all the way to the bank, Coulter is fervently admired because she captures the core of right-wing morality in a way that's extremely pleasing to conservatives. If Martin Luther King was the lens through which Americans were able to see the ugliness of segregation and racism, Coulter is the lens through which conservatives can view their bigotries as a sign of their intellectual and moral goodness.
From the conservative point of view, that's invaluable.
The Double Shift
Single women 'do less housework'
By Clare Davidson Business reporter, BBC News
Women do more housework than men even when both workLiving alone can be tediously predictable, especially as far as housework is concerned.
If you haven't cleaned the bath, then the chance of someone else unexpectedly doing so is close to nil.
But if you assume that moving in with a loved one will improve this, then think again - especially if you are female.
A new study has found that employed women living with their employed partner actually spend more time doing housework than single women.
HOURS OF HOUSEWORK
Single women in Britain spend 10 hours on average a week
Single men in Britain spend 7 hours on average a week
Women living in a couple spend 15 hours on chores
Men living in a couple spend 5 hours on chores
The men, on the other hand see the hours they commit to housework decline once they begin living as a couple.
The findings come from analysis by labour economist Helene Couprie of Toulouse University.
Her research, based on data from the British Household Panel Survey looked at working women - single or living with a partner, both with and without children.
Much as we might like to legislate against men for not doing housework, it is not an option
Ruth Lister, social policy professor, Loughborough University
And by examining information on more than 2,000 people, she concluded that on average, an employed woman does 15 hours a week of housework when she lives with her employed partner, up from 10 hours when single.
Lazy men
Meanwhile the men, who do seven hours while living alone, do only five when they co-habit.
The findings are partly, Ms Couprie suggests, due to influences that people have grown up with - where traditionally women have taken on the lion's share of domestic tasks.
She says that as long as children see their parents stick to certain tasks, such trends become hard to change.
Ultimately, she adds, "it is the work of social evolution".
And evolution takes time, she insists - perhaps another 20 years for the situation to really
change in terms of the division of labour.
Man Yee Kan, a sociologist at Oxford University's Time Use Research Unit says the reason men are doing a greater proportion than they did, is largely because women spend more time in paid work, therefore a smaller proportion of time doing housework.
Meanwhile Ruth Lister, a professor in social policy at Loughborough University says that whatever the reason for the stark differences, things must change.
"As much as we might like to legislate against men for not doing housework, it is not an option," laughs Ms Lister, adding that cultural expectations die hard.
Equality at work
Ms Couprie says that her findings of inequality in the home reflected those in the workplace.
While the wage gap is shrinking, it is still pronounced.
In 1970, women earned on average 29% less per hour than men.
According to the Equal Opportunities Commission, in 2006 the differential was 17%.
And women are still largely absent in the top jobs at UK firms, the commission recently found. Only 10% of directors of the UK's top FTSE 100 firms were female.
Ms Couprie concludes that that gender inequalities at home have a "significant influence on gender inequalities in the workplace - and vice versa", reinforcing other findings on the topic.
"The quickest way to improve the situation at home would be for women to gain equality at work in terms of pay and opportunities," she says.
"We need to get more women into the same types of jobs as men, as well as get pay parity between sectors," says Ms Couprie.
While Ms Couprie's focus is on economic measures, she admits equal pay - though crucial - is only one step to ensure a fairer division of labour at home.
"Cultural changes are far harder to overcome than the pure economic wage gap," she says.
By Clare Davidson Business reporter, BBC News
Women do more housework than men even when both workLiving alone can be tediously predictable, especially as far as housework is concerned.
If you haven't cleaned the bath, then the chance of someone else unexpectedly doing so is close to nil.
But if you assume that moving in with a loved one will improve this, then think again - especially if you are female.
A new study has found that employed women living with their employed partner actually spend more time doing housework than single women.
HOURS OF HOUSEWORK
Single women in Britain spend 10 hours on average a week
Single men in Britain spend 7 hours on average a week
Women living in a couple spend 15 hours on chores
Men living in a couple spend 5 hours on chores
The men, on the other hand see the hours they commit to housework decline once they begin living as a couple.
The findings come from analysis by labour economist Helene Couprie of Toulouse University.
Her research, based on data from the British Household Panel Survey looked at working women - single or living with a partner, both with and without children.
Much as we might like to legislate against men for not doing housework, it is not an option
Ruth Lister, social policy professor, Loughborough University
And by examining information on more than 2,000 people, she concluded that on average, an employed woman does 15 hours a week of housework when she lives with her employed partner, up from 10 hours when single.
Lazy men
Meanwhile the men, who do seven hours while living alone, do only five when they co-habit.
The findings are partly, Ms Couprie suggests, due to influences that people have grown up with - where traditionally women have taken on the lion's share of domestic tasks.
She says that as long as children see their parents stick to certain tasks, such trends become hard to change.
Ultimately, she adds, "it is the work of social evolution".
And evolution takes time, she insists - perhaps another 20 years for the situation to really
change in terms of the division of labour.
Man Yee Kan, a sociologist at Oxford University's Time Use Research Unit says the reason men are doing a greater proportion than they did, is largely because women spend more time in paid work, therefore a smaller proportion of time doing housework.
Meanwhile Ruth Lister, a professor in social policy at Loughborough University says that whatever the reason for the stark differences, things must change.
"As much as we might like to legislate against men for not doing housework, it is not an option," laughs Ms Lister, adding that cultural expectations die hard.
Equality at work
Ms Couprie says that her findings of inequality in the home reflected those in the workplace.
While the wage gap is shrinking, it is still pronounced.
In 1970, women earned on average 29% less per hour than men.
According to the Equal Opportunities Commission, in 2006 the differential was 17%.
And women are still largely absent in the top jobs at UK firms, the commission recently found. Only 10% of directors of the UK's top FTSE 100 firms were female.
Ms Couprie concludes that that gender inequalities at home have a "significant influence on gender inequalities in the workplace - and vice versa", reinforcing other findings on the topic.
"The quickest way to improve the situation at home would be for women to gain equality at work in terms of pay and opportunities," she says.
"We need to get more women into the same types of jobs as men, as well as get pay parity between sectors," says Ms Couprie.
While Ms Couprie's focus is on economic measures, she admits equal pay - though crucial - is only one step to ensure a fairer division of labour at home.
"Cultural changes are far harder to overcome than the pure economic wage gap," she says.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Obama's Slippery Blackness
Obama's Identity: Where Do We Start?
By Patricia Williams, The Nation.
Posted February 16, 2007.
Barack Obama's pursuit of the presidency has caused the media to obsess over exactly how black he is, bringing into debate America's slippery notions of race, culture and ethnicity.
I mean, you got the first sort of mainstream African-American who's articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man. -- Senator Joseph Biden, in faint but unfettered praise of Senator Barack Obama
Recently the New-York Historical Society and the Studio Museum of Harlem curated "Legacies," a fascinating show at N-YHS in which contemporary artists reflected on slavery. One of the commissioned pieces that accompanied the display was a short film by artists Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry. It featured McCallum, who is white, and Tarry, who is black, configured as a "twinning doll" -- a nineteenth-century toy that has two heads, one at each end of a common torso. At the doll's waist is attached a long skirt or a cloak. Held vertically, the skirt falls and obscures one head. Flipped one way, it becomes a white doll. Turned upside down, the skirt falls the other way and suddenly it's a black doll.
In the film, McCallum and Tarry, joined at the waist by some feat of pixilated trickery and dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, flip head over head down a long dark marble corridor, first a white head, then a black head, first a white man, then a black woman, first a Thomas Jefferson, then a Sally Hemings. As they describe it, "the races are joined head to toe ... continuously revealing and concealing one another." Such an interesting metaphor for the state of our union.
When I inquired further, McCallum told me that there was an old children's song about the dolls: "Turn you up/Turn you back./First you're white/Then you're black." I tried Googling those words in hopes of finding a recording. Instead I turned up a satirical piece by rocker Lou Reed, "I Wanna Be Black," in which a (presumably hypothetical) "I" desires "to be black" as an escape from a neurosis of whiteness. Actually, the word "white" is never used in the song. It's alluded to in the chorus -- obliquely but with crystal clarity nonetheless: "I don't wanna be a fucked-up middle-class college student any more." According to these lyrics, whiteness is a dull preserve defined by respectable class status, college education and world-class angst; black people have ever so much more fun, what with having "natural rhythm," "a big prick," a "stable of foxy whores" and "get myself shot in the spring" "like Martin Luther King."
The jolly entertainment of switching identity from white to black and back again is not the exclusive province of frat boys slumming around as pretenders to ghetto life. "Jungle parties" are still good clean fun at country clubs, at Halloween parties down at the precinct and in the unfortunate confusion that is Kevin Federline. The inverse -- switching from black to white and black again -- is more freighted. Blacks who present themselves as clean and articulate and sober and important risk being viewed as false, elitist or duplicitous. "Acting white" has all these connotations. Whites "acting black," on the other hand -- i.e., any coded masquerade of down and dirty -- tend to be read as cool or maybe disaffected or, at worst, stuck in some stage of rebellious adolescence.
Frankly, what I found most unforgivable about Senator Biden's recent remarks was his utter failure to learn from a past in which he was intimately implicated. He was, after all, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee when our spectacularly inarticulate President's father nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. As every last minority graduate of Yale -- whew, ten or fifteen at least -- came forward to weigh in about whether Thomas or Anita Hill was more believable, media forces expressed shock and awe that there were -- gasp -- just so many black people who could string a whole sentence together! Astonishing sequences of subject-verb-object! A few years later, it was Colin Powell who was perceived as shockingly articulate; then Condoleezza Rice.
The persistence of this narrative is not limited to Biden. On MSNBC's Chris Matthews Show, Matthews hosted a discussion of Obama's decision to run for President. "No history of Jim Crow, no history of anger, no history of slavery," Matthews opined. "All the bad stuff in our history ain't there with this guy." Not true, I thought. The "bad stuff in our history" rests heavily upon each and every one of us. It shapes us all, whether me, Matthews, Obama, Biden -- or Amadou Diallo, the decent, hard-working Guinean immigrant without any American racial "history," who died in a hail of bullets fired by New York City police officers because he looked like what the officers, groaning with racial "baggage," imagined to be a criminal. Some parts of our racial experience are nothing more or less than particular to our accidental location in the geography of a culture.
If, for example, I migrated to South Africa and were greeted as an exciting, exotic black American prophet (we "articulate" blacks are inescapably "exotic" when we travel abroad), I'd be no less implicated in the complexities of that country's racial struggles -- even if I were entirely ignorant of those struggles. At a more complex level, however, American identity is defined by the experience of the willing diaspora, the break by choice that is the heart of the immigrant myth. It is that narrative of chosen migration that has exiled most African-Americans from a substantial part of the American narrative -- and it is precisely his place in that narrative that makes Obama so attractive, so intriguing and yet so strange.
Obama's family history is an assemblage of elements of the American dream. His late father migrated from Kenya to the United States; his mother was from Kansas. Before him, the archetypal narrative of immigrant odyssey had been an almost exclusively white and European one. I suspect that Obama's aura stems not just from a Tiger Woods-ishly fashionable taste for "biracialism" but from the fact that he's managed to fuse the immigrant myth of meteoric upward mobility onto the figure of a black man.
Back on Chris Matthews, Cynthia Tucker, a black woman who writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, responded, "He truly does seem to transcend race because his mother, after all, let's not forget, was white." Matthews agreed: "His grandmother he went to visit in Hawaii is white. Yeah." This, to me, was a baffling exchange. Obama's mother's being white is supposedly what allows him to transcend this thing called race? He looks black but he really isn't? Is blackness really only defined by Jim Crow, anger and slavery? If American-ness, at least in this equation, is defined by patronymic immigrant hope, is racial transcendence then to be defined by maternity, relation to whiteness, biology? "Transcendence" implies rising above something, cutting through, being liberated from. What would it reveal about the hidden valuations of race if one were to invert the equation by positing that Barack Obama "transcended" whiteness because his father was black?
Senator Obama has many attractive attributes -- he's smart, a great writer and speaker, a skilled tactician, full of fresh vision, youthful, with a good-looking Kennedy-esque appeal. Yet there are many people to whom his appeal rests not on what he is but on what they imagine he isn't. He's not a whiner; he's not angry. He doesn't hate white people. He doesn't wear his hair like Al Sharpton. He is not the whole list of negatives that people like Chris Matthews or Joe Biden or a whole generation of fucked-up middle-class college students identify as "blackness." Indeed, part of the reason I am anxious about the trustworthiness of Obama's widespread appeal is this unacknowledged value placed on his ability to perform "unexpected" aspects of both whiteness (as in, proud immigrant stock) and blackness (as in, his remarkable ability to discern that the sterling fish knife is not a shoe horn).
This is not just about the dualism of black and white, of course. Obama's family raised him in diverse locales -- Hawaii, Indonesia, the world. Does the perception of his identity change if we think of him as our first Hawaiian presidential candidate? To paraphrase, is he the first mainstream Hawaiian-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy who wouldn't be caught dead in a grass skirt holding a ukulele? Or the first mainstream Indonesian-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy who had the interesting experience of going to a Roman Catholic school in a largely Muslim country, which might provide lots of useful cultural insights for a President to have in this time and place? No, unfortunately, as there are those at Fox News who can't tell a Roman Catholic school from a madrassa.
Worse yet, a lot of the analysis of Biden's comment has skimmed over his patronizing of Obama's substance. Rather, it has focused on whether the comments destroyed Biden's chances to run for President. Who, after all, even knew Biden had his hat in the ring?
But back to Senator Obama, a presidential candidate of profound decency, extraordinary smarts and great eloquence. He was president of the Harvard Law Review, a position that requires not just the highest grades in the entire universe but also the unanimous acclaim of a band of viciously competitive students and a famously divided faculty. Those who make Law Review are immediate stars, and fabulously fast-tracked. Those who have served on the Law Review include a stunning and stellar array of familiar names: Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, Stephen Breyer and Chief Justice John Roberts; Dean Acheson, Alger Hiss, Archibald MacLeish, Judge Richard Posner, Michael Chertoff and New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. It is, in the secretly assigned world of global power, an even better ticket to the top than being sealed in a coffin at Skull and Bones. It was acknowledged as such when Jews first joined the Law Review, when Democratic political pundit Susan Estrich became the first woman president of the Law Review in 1976 and when Obama became its first black president. It is a position whose credentializing power has never been questioned as far as anyone knows -- at least till a few weeks ago, when the New York Times published an article in which Ron Klain, informal adviser to Biden's presidential bid, wondered if being president of the Law Review really and truly required the same skill set as being President of the United States. As a cabdriver recently expressed it to me: "Maybe the mirage in the desert is no more than a benchmark constantly being moved out of reach." (He too was articulate, and quite poetic, that cabbie. Made me wonder what benchmarks had been moved beyond his reach to leave him ferrying me around at midnight.)
Of course, the crown of the Law Review presidency is not the only aspect of Senator Obama's "authenticity" that's being refigured as a mess of thorns. If no one doubts his blackness when it comes to the uniqueness of his accomplishments while on the Law Review, he's apparently not "black enough" in other contexts. In another article in the Times, perpetual contrarians like Stanley Crouch, Debra Dickerson and Carol Swain were quoted as questioning whether he truly was a brother beneath the skin. It is surely ironic that Obama -- one of the very few Americans of any stripe who has actual first-degree relatives in Africa -- is being figured in some quarters as an imposter of African-American-ness.
At the same time, Obama's identity reveals the complex blindness and slipperiness of American conceptions of race, culture and ethnicity. There's a lovely quote from Saidiya Hartman's remarkable new book Lose Your Mother: As she wends her way through Ghana on a Fulbright Fellowship, she notes, "I was the stranger in the village, a wandering seed bereft of the possibility of taking root. Behind my back people whispered, dua ho mmire: a mushroom that grows on the tree has no deep soil. Everyone avoided the word 'slave,' but we all knew who was who. As a 'slave baby,' I represented what most chose to avoid: the catastrophe that was our past ... and what was forbidden to discuss: the matter of someone's origins."
As I read Hartman's words, I wondered how familiar that sentiment felt to me, or to the many African-Americans -- whether they've never left our shores or traveled the world -- so relentlessly in search of "home." I wondered how familiar that passage must feel to recent arrivals to our peculiarly dubbed "homeland." Just today I met a Swedish woman who is phenotypically "Asian." When she was a student at the University of California, she went to the hospital with stomach pains -- and was almost committed as insane before she ever got to see a doctor, because the administrative gatekeepers simply could not reconcile her appearance with her assertion that she was a Swedish citizen.
And in this moment of unprecedented diaspora, I wonder how familiar all these sentiments must feel to Barack Obama just now. Flipped endlessly down a hall of mirrored images of blackness and whiteness, he is no less celebrated than Frederick Douglass was as one whose entire identity is mired in the exhausted exceptionalism of the "surprisingly" hyperarticulate African phenotype; yet simultaneously embraced as one who has transcended the embodiment of a troublesome past and emerged on the other side -- bright as a newly minted coin, "cleansed" of baggage, of roots, of the unacknowledged rupture that is, paradoxically, our greatest national bond.
Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University and a member of the State Bar of California, writes The Nation column "Diary of a Mad Law Professor."
By Patricia Williams, The Nation.
Posted February 16, 2007.
Barack Obama's pursuit of the presidency has caused the media to obsess over exactly how black he is, bringing into debate America's slippery notions of race, culture and ethnicity.
I mean, you got the first sort of mainstream African-American who's articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man. -- Senator Joseph Biden, in faint but unfettered praise of Senator Barack Obama
Recently the New-York Historical Society and the Studio Museum of Harlem curated "Legacies," a fascinating show at N-YHS in which contemporary artists reflected on slavery. One of the commissioned pieces that accompanied the display was a short film by artists Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry. It featured McCallum, who is white, and Tarry, who is black, configured as a "twinning doll" -- a nineteenth-century toy that has two heads, one at each end of a common torso. At the doll's waist is attached a long skirt or a cloak. Held vertically, the skirt falls and obscures one head. Flipped one way, it becomes a white doll. Turned upside down, the skirt falls the other way and suddenly it's a black doll.
In the film, McCallum and Tarry, joined at the waist by some feat of pixilated trickery and dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, flip head over head down a long dark marble corridor, first a white head, then a black head, first a white man, then a black woman, first a Thomas Jefferson, then a Sally Hemings. As they describe it, "the races are joined head to toe ... continuously revealing and concealing one another." Such an interesting metaphor for the state of our union.
When I inquired further, McCallum told me that there was an old children's song about the dolls: "Turn you up/Turn you back./First you're white/Then you're black." I tried Googling those words in hopes of finding a recording. Instead I turned up a satirical piece by rocker Lou Reed, "I Wanna Be Black," in which a (presumably hypothetical) "I" desires "to be black" as an escape from a neurosis of whiteness. Actually, the word "white" is never used in the song. It's alluded to in the chorus -- obliquely but with crystal clarity nonetheless: "I don't wanna be a fucked-up middle-class college student any more." According to these lyrics, whiteness is a dull preserve defined by respectable class status, college education and world-class angst; black people have ever so much more fun, what with having "natural rhythm," "a big prick," a "stable of foxy whores" and "get myself shot in the spring" "like Martin Luther King."
The jolly entertainment of switching identity from white to black and back again is not the exclusive province of frat boys slumming around as pretenders to ghetto life. "Jungle parties" are still good clean fun at country clubs, at Halloween parties down at the precinct and in the unfortunate confusion that is Kevin Federline. The inverse -- switching from black to white and black again -- is more freighted. Blacks who present themselves as clean and articulate and sober and important risk being viewed as false, elitist or duplicitous. "Acting white" has all these connotations. Whites "acting black," on the other hand -- i.e., any coded masquerade of down and dirty -- tend to be read as cool or maybe disaffected or, at worst, stuck in some stage of rebellious adolescence.
Frankly, what I found most unforgivable about Senator Biden's recent remarks was his utter failure to learn from a past in which he was intimately implicated. He was, after all, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee when our spectacularly inarticulate President's father nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. As every last minority graduate of Yale -- whew, ten or fifteen at least -- came forward to weigh in about whether Thomas or Anita Hill was more believable, media forces expressed shock and awe that there were -- gasp -- just so many black people who could string a whole sentence together! Astonishing sequences of subject-verb-object! A few years later, it was Colin Powell who was perceived as shockingly articulate; then Condoleezza Rice.
The persistence of this narrative is not limited to Biden. On MSNBC's Chris Matthews Show, Matthews hosted a discussion of Obama's decision to run for President. "No history of Jim Crow, no history of anger, no history of slavery," Matthews opined. "All the bad stuff in our history ain't there with this guy." Not true, I thought. The "bad stuff in our history" rests heavily upon each and every one of us. It shapes us all, whether me, Matthews, Obama, Biden -- or Amadou Diallo, the decent, hard-working Guinean immigrant without any American racial "history," who died in a hail of bullets fired by New York City police officers because he looked like what the officers, groaning with racial "baggage," imagined to be a criminal. Some parts of our racial experience are nothing more or less than particular to our accidental location in the geography of a culture.
If, for example, I migrated to South Africa and were greeted as an exciting, exotic black American prophet (we "articulate" blacks are inescapably "exotic" when we travel abroad), I'd be no less implicated in the complexities of that country's racial struggles -- even if I were entirely ignorant of those struggles. At a more complex level, however, American identity is defined by the experience of the willing diaspora, the break by choice that is the heart of the immigrant myth. It is that narrative of chosen migration that has exiled most African-Americans from a substantial part of the American narrative -- and it is precisely his place in that narrative that makes Obama so attractive, so intriguing and yet so strange.
Obama's family history is an assemblage of elements of the American dream. His late father migrated from Kenya to the United States; his mother was from Kansas. Before him, the archetypal narrative of immigrant odyssey had been an almost exclusively white and European one. I suspect that Obama's aura stems not just from a Tiger Woods-ishly fashionable taste for "biracialism" but from the fact that he's managed to fuse the immigrant myth of meteoric upward mobility onto the figure of a black man.
Back on Chris Matthews, Cynthia Tucker, a black woman who writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, responded, "He truly does seem to transcend race because his mother, after all, let's not forget, was white." Matthews agreed: "His grandmother he went to visit in Hawaii is white. Yeah." This, to me, was a baffling exchange. Obama's mother's being white is supposedly what allows him to transcend this thing called race? He looks black but he really isn't? Is blackness really only defined by Jim Crow, anger and slavery? If American-ness, at least in this equation, is defined by patronymic immigrant hope, is racial transcendence then to be defined by maternity, relation to whiteness, biology? "Transcendence" implies rising above something, cutting through, being liberated from. What would it reveal about the hidden valuations of race if one were to invert the equation by positing that Barack Obama "transcended" whiteness because his father was black?
Senator Obama has many attractive attributes -- he's smart, a great writer and speaker, a skilled tactician, full of fresh vision, youthful, with a good-looking Kennedy-esque appeal. Yet there are many people to whom his appeal rests not on what he is but on what they imagine he isn't. He's not a whiner; he's not angry. He doesn't hate white people. He doesn't wear his hair like Al Sharpton. He is not the whole list of negatives that people like Chris Matthews or Joe Biden or a whole generation of fucked-up middle-class college students identify as "blackness." Indeed, part of the reason I am anxious about the trustworthiness of Obama's widespread appeal is this unacknowledged value placed on his ability to perform "unexpected" aspects of both whiteness (as in, proud immigrant stock) and blackness (as in, his remarkable ability to discern that the sterling fish knife is not a shoe horn).
This is not just about the dualism of black and white, of course. Obama's family raised him in diverse locales -- Hawaii, Indonesia, the world. Does the perception of his identity change if we think of him as our first Hawaiian presidential candidate? To paraphrase, is he the first mainstream Hawaiian-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy who wouldn't be caught dead in a grass skirt holding a ukulele? Or the first mainstream Indonesian-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy who had the interesting experience of going to a Roman Catholic school in a largely Muslim country, which might provide lots of useful cultural insights for a President to have in this time and place? No, unfortunately, as there are those at Fox News who can't tell a Roman Catholic school from a madrassa.
Worse yet, a lot of the analysis of Biden's comment has skimmed over his patronizing of Obama's substance. Rather, it has focused on whether the comments destroyed Biden's chances to run for President. Who, after all, even knew Biden had his hat in the ring?
But back to Senator Obama, a presidential candidate of profound decency, extraordinary smarts and great eloquence. He was president of the Harvard Law Review, a position that requires not just the highest grades in the entire universe but also the unanimous acclaim of a band of viciously competitive students and a famously divided faculty. Those who make Law Review are immediate stars, and fabulously fast-tracked. Those who have served on the Law Review include a stunning and stellar array of familiar names: Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, Stephen Breyer and Chief Justice John Roberts; Dean Acheson, Alger Hiss, Archibald MacLeish, Judge Richard Posner, Michael Chertoff and New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. It is, in the secretly assigned world of global power, an even better ticket to the top than being sealed in a coffin at Skull and Bones. It was acknowledged as such when Jews first joined the Law Review, when Democratic political pundit Susan Estrich became the first woman president of the Law Review in 1976 and when Obama became its first black president. It is a position whose credentializing power has never been questioned as far as anyone knows -- at least till a few weeks ago, when the New York Times published an article in which Ron Klain, informal adviser to Biden's presidential bid, wondered if being president of the Law Review really and truly required the same skill set as being President of the United States. As a cabdriver recently expressed it to me: "Maybe the mirage in the desert is no more than a benchmark constantly being moved out of reach." (He too was articulate, and quite poetic, that cabbie. Made me wonder what benchmarks had been moved beyond his reach to leave him ferrying me around at midnight.)
Of course, the crown of the Law Review presidency is not the only aspect of Senator Obama's "authenticity" that's being refigured as a mess of thorns. If no one doubts his blackness when it comes to the uniqueness of his accomplishments while on the Law Review, he's apparently not "black enough" in other contexts. In another article in the Times, perpetual contrarians like Stanley Crouch, Debra Dickerson and Carol Swain were quoted as questioning whether he truly was a brother beneath the skin. It is surely ironic that Obama -- one of the very few Americans of any stripe who has actual first-degree relatives in Africa -- is being figured in some quarters as an imposter of African-American-ness.
At the same time, Obama's identity reveals the complex blindness and slipperiness of American conceptions of race, culture and ethnicity. There's a lovely quote from Saidiya Hartman's remarkable new book Lose Your Mother: As she wends her way through Ghana on a Fulbright Fellowship, she notes, "I was the stranger in the village, a wandering seed bereft of the possibility of taking root. Behind my back people whispered, dua ho mmire: a mushroom that grows on the tree has no deep soil. Everyone avoided the word 'slave,' but we all knew who was who. As a 'slave baby,' I represented what most chose to avoid: the catastrophe that was our past ... and what was forbidden to discuss: the matter of someone's origins."
As I read Hartman's words, I wondered how familiar that sentiment felt to me, or to the many African-Americans -- whether they've never left our shores or traveled the world -- so relentlessly in search of "home." I wondered how familiar that passage must feel to recent arrivals to our peculiarly dubbed "homeland." Just today I met a Swedish woman who is phenotypically "Asian." When she was a student at the University of California, she went to the hospital with stomach pains -- and was almost committed as insane before she ever got to see a doctor, because the administrative gatekeepers simply could not reconcile her appearance with her assertion that she was a Swedish citizen.
And in this moment of unprecedented diaspora, I wonder how familiar all these sentiments must feel to Barack Obama just now. Flipped endlessly down a hall of mirrored images of blackness and whiteness, he is no less celebrated than Frederick Douglass was as one whose entire identity is mired in the exhausted exceptionalism of the "surprisingly" hyperarticulate African phenotype; yet simultaneously embraced as one who has transcended the embodiment of a troublesome past and emerged on the other side -- bright as a newly minted coin, "cleansed" of baggage, of roots, of the unacknowledged rupture that is, paradoxically, our greatest national bond.
Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University and a member of the State Bar of California, writes The Nation column "Diary of a Mad Law Professor."
Sorority Committed to Old-Time Femininity
Sorority Evictions Raise Messy Issue of Looks and Bias
New York Times
'The national officers of the Delta Zeta sorority told 23 members at DePauw University to leave, including every woman who was overweight.');
By SAM DILLON
Published: February 25, 2007
GREENCASTLE, Ind. — When a psychology professor at DePauw University here surveyed students, they described one sorority as a group of “daddy’s little princesses” and another as “offbeat hippies.” The sisters of Delta Zeta were seen as “socially awkward.”
Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.
The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.
“Virtually everyone who didn’t fit a certain sorority member archetype was told to leave,” said Kate Holloway, a senior who withdrew from the chapter during its reorganization.“I sensed the disrespect with which this was to be carried out and got fed up,” Ms. Holloway added. “I didn’t have room in my life for these women to come in and tell my sisters of three years that they weren’t needed.”
Ms. Holloway is not the only angry one. The reorganization has left a messy aftermath of recrimination and tears on this rural campus of 2,400 students, 50 miles southwest of Indianapolis.The mass eviction battered the self-esteem of many of the former sorority members, and some withdrew from classes in depression. There have been student protests, outraged letters from alumni and parents, and a faculty petition calling the sorority’s action unethical.
DePauw’s president, Robert G. Bottoms, issued a two-page letter of reprimand to the sorority.
In an interview in his office, Dr. Bottoms said he had been stunned by the sorority’s insensitivity.“I had no hint they were going to disrupt the chapter with a membership reduction of this proportion in the middle of the year,” he said. “It’s been very upsetting.”
The president of Delta Zeta, which has its headquarters in Oxford, Ohio, and its other national officers declined to be interviewed. Responding by e-mail to questions, Cynthia Winslow Menges, the executive director, said the sorority had not evicted the 23 women, even though the national officers sent those women form letters that said: “The membership review team has recommended you for alumna status. Chapter members receiving alumnae status should plan to relocate from the chapter house no later than Jan. 29, 2007.”
Ms. Menges asserted that the women themselves had, in effect, made their own decisions to leave by demonstrating a lack of commitment to meet recruitment goals. The sorority paid each woman who left $300 to cover the difference between sorority and campus housing.The sorority “is saddened that the isolated incident at DePauw has been mischaracterized,” Ms. Menges wrote. Asked for clarification, the sorority’s public relations representative e-mailed a statement saying its actions were aimed at the “enrichment of student life at DePauw.”
This is not the first time that the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta has stirred controversy. In 1982, it attracted national attention when a black student was not allowed to join, provoking accusations of racial discrimination.Earlier this month, an Alabama lawyer and several other DePauw alumni who graduated in 1970 described in a letter to The DePauw, the student newspaper, how Delta Zeta’s national leadership had tried unsuccessfully to block a young woman with a black father and a white mother from joining its DePauw chapter in 1967.
Despite those incidents, the chapter appears to have been home to a diverse community over the years, partly because it has attracted brainy women, including many science and math majors, as well as talented disabled women, without focusing as exclusively as some sororities on potential recruits’ sex appeal, former sorority members said.“I had a sister I could go to a bar with if I had boy problems,” said Erin Swisshelm, a junior biochemistry major who withdrew from the sorority in October. “I had a sister I could talk about religion with. I had a sister I could be nerdy about science with. That’s why I liked Delta Zeta, because I had all these amazing women around me.”
But over the years DePauw students had attached a negative stereotype to the chapter, as evidenced by the survey that Pam Propsom, a psychology professor, conducts each year in her class. That image had hurt recruitment, and the national officers had repeatedly warned the chapter that unless its membership increased, the chapter could close.
At the start of the fall term the national office was especially determined to raise recruitment because 2009 is the 100th anniversary of the DePauw chapter’s founding. In September, Ms. Menges and Kathi Heatherly, a national vice president of the sorority, visited the chapter to announce a reorganization plan they said would include an interview with each woman about her commitment. The women were urged to look their best for the interviews.T
he tone left four women so unsettled that they withdrew from the chapter almost immediately.
Robin Lamkin, a junior who is an editor at The DePauw and was one of the 23 women evicted, said many of her sisters bought new outfits and modeled them for each other before the interviews. Many women declared their willingness to recruit diligently, Ms. Lamkin said.
A few days after the interviews, national representatives took over the house to hold a recruiting event. They asked most members to stay upstairs in their rooms. To welcome freshmen downstairs, they assembled a team that included several of the women eventually asked to stay in the sorority, along with some slender women invited from the sorority’s chapter at Indiana University, Ms. Holloway said.“They had these unassuming freshman girls downstairs with these plastic women from Indiana University, and 25 of my sisters hiding upstairs,” she said. “It was so fake, so completely dehumanized. I said, ‘This calls for a little joke.’ ”Ms. Holloway put on a wig and some John Lennon rose-colored glasses, burst through the front door and skipped around singing, “Ooooh! Delta Zeta!” and other chants.
The face of one of the national representatives, she recalled, “was like I’d run over her puppy with my car.”The national representatives announced their decisions in the form letters, delivered on Dec. 2, which said that Delta Zeta intended to increase membership to 95 by the 2009 anniversary, and that it would recruit using a “core group of women.”Elizabeth Haneline, a senior computer science major who was among those evicted, returned to the house that afternoon and found some women in tears. Even the chapter’s president had been kicked out, Ms. Haneline said, while “other women who had done almost nothing for the chapter were asked to stay.”
Six of the 12 women who were asked to stay left the sorority, including Joanna Kieschnick, a sophomore majoring in English literature. “They said, ‘You’re not good enough’ to so many people who have put their heart and soul into this chapter that I can’t stay,” she said.
In the months since, Cynthia Babington, DePauw’s dean of students, has fielded angry calls from parents, she said. Robert Hershberger, chairman of the modern languages department, circulated the faculty petition; 55 professors signed it.“We were especially troubled that the women they expelled were less about image and more about academic achievement and social service,” Dr. Hershberger said.
During rush activities this month, 11 first-year students accepted invitations to join Delta Zeta, but only three have sought membership.
On Feb. 2, Rachel Pappas, a junior who is the chapter’s former secretary, printed 200 posters calling on students to gather that afternoon at the student union. About 50 students showed up and heard Ms. Pappas say the sorority’s national leaders had misrepresented the truth when they asserted they had evicted women for lack of commitment.“The injustice of the lies,” she said, “is contemptible.”
New York Times
'The national officers of the Delta Zeta sorority told 23 members at DePauw University to leave, including every woman who was overweight.');
By SAM DILLON
Published: February 25, 2007
GREENCASTLE, Ind. — When a psychology professor at DePauw University here surveyed students, they described one sorority as a group of “daddy’s little princesses” and another as “offbeat hippies.” The sisters of Delta Zeta were seen as “socially awkward.”
Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.
The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.
“Virtually everyone who didn’t fit a certain sorority member archetype was told to leave,” said Kate Holloway, a senior who withdrew from the chapter during its reorganization.“I sensed the disrespect with which this was to be carried out and got fed up,” Ms. Holloway added. “I didn’t have room in my life for these women to come in and tell my sisters of three years that they weren’t needed.”
Ms. Holloway is not the only angry one. The reorganization has left a messy aftermath of recrimination and tears on this rural campus of 2,400 students, 50 miles southwest of Indianapolis.The mass eviction battered the self-esteem of many of the former sorority members, and some withdrew from classes in depression. There have been student protests, outraged letters from alumni and parents, and a faculty petition calling the sorority’s action unethical.
DePauw’s president, Robert G. Bottoms, issued a two-page letter of reprimand to the sorority.
In an interview in his office, Dr. Bottoms said he had been stunned by the sorority’s insensitivity.“I had no hint they were going to disrupt the chapter with a membership reduction of this proportion in the middle of the year,” he said. “It’s been very upsetting.”
The president of Delta Zeta, which has its headquarters in Oxford, Ohio, and its other national officers declined to be interviewed. Responding by e-mail to questions, Cynthia Winslow Menges, the executive director, said the sorority had not evicted the 23 women, even though the national officers sent those women form letters that said: “The membership review team has recommended you for alumna status. Chapter members receiving alumnae status should plan to relocate from the chapter house no later than Jan. 29, 2007.”
Ms. Menges asserted that the women themselves had, in effect, made their own decisions to leave by demonstrating a lack of commitment to meet recruitment goals. The sorority paid each woman who left $300 to cover the difference between sorority and campus housing.The sorority “is saddened that the isolated incident at DePauw has been mischaracterized,” Ms. Menges wrote. Asked for clarification, the sorority’s public relations representative e-mailed a statement saying its actions were aimed at the “enrichment of student life at DePauw.”
This is not the first time that the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta has stirred controversy. In 1982, it attracted national attention when a black student was not allowed to join, provoking accusations of racial discrimination.Earlier this month, an Alabama lawyer and several other DePauw alumni who graduated in 1970 described in a letter to The DePauw, the student newspaper, how Delta Zeta’s national leadership had tried unsuccessfully to block a young woman with a black father and a white mother from joining its DePauw chapter in 1967.
Despite those incidents, the chapter appears to have been home to a diverse community over the years, partly because it has attracted brainy women, including many science and math majors, as well as talented disabled women, without focusing as exclusively as some sororities on potential recruits’ sex appeal, former sorority members said.“I had a sister I could go to a bar with if I had boy problems,” said Erin Swisshelm, a junior biochemistry major who withdrew from the sorority in October. “I had a sister I could talk about religion with. I had a sister I could be nerdy about science with. That’s why I liked Delta Zeta, because I had all these amazing women around me.”
But over the years DePauw students had attached a negative stereotype to the chapter, as evidenced by the survey that Pam Propsom, a psychology professor, conducts each year in her class. That image had hurt recruitment, and the national officers had repeatedly warned the chapter that unless its membership increased, the chapter could close.
At the start of the fall term the national office was especially determined to raise recruitment because 2009 is the 100th anniversary of the DePauw chapter’s founding. In September, Ms. Menges and Kathi Heatherly, a national vice president of the sorority, visited the chapter to announce a reorganization plan they said would include an interview with each woman about her commitment. The women were urged to look their best for the interviews.T
he tone left four women so unsettled that they withdrew from the chapter almost immediately.
Robin Lamkin, a junior who is an editor at The DePauw and was one of the 23 women evicted, said many of her sisters bought new outfits and modeled them for each other before the interviews. Many women declared their willingness to recruit diligently, Ms. Lamkin said.
A few days after the interviews, national representatives took over the house to hold a recruiting event. They asked most members to stay upstairs in their rooms. To welcome freshmen downstairs, they assembled a team that included several of the women eventually asked to stay in the sorority, along with some slender women invited from the sorority’s chapter at Indiana University, Ms. Holloway said.“They had these unassuming freshman girls downstairs with these plastic women from Indiana University, and 25 of my sisters hiding upstairs,” she said. “It was so fake, so completely dehumanized. I said, ‘This calls for a little joke.’ ”Ms. Holloway put on a wig and some John Lennon rose-colored glasses, burst through the front door and skipped around singing, “Ooooh! Delta Zeta!” and other chants.
The face of one of the national representatives, she recalled, “was like I’d run over her puppy with my car.”The national representatives announced their decisions in the form letters, delivered on Dec. 2, which said that Delta Zeta intended to increase membership to 95 by the 2009 anniversary, and that it would recruit using a “core group of women.”Elizabeth Haneline, a senior computer science major who was among those evicted, returned to the house that afternoon and found some women in tears. Even the chapter’s president had been kicked out, Ms. Haneline said, while “other women who had done almost nothing for the chapter were asked to stay.”
Six of the 12 women who were asked to stay left the sorority, including Joanna Kieschnick, a sophomore majoring in English literature. “They said, ‘You’re not good enough’ to so many people who have put their heart and soul into this chapter that I can’t stay,” she said.
In the months since, Cynthia Babington, DePauw’s dean of students, has fielded angry calls from parents, she said. Robert Hershberger, chairman of the modern languages department, circulated the faculty petition; 55 professors signed it.“We were especially troubled that the women they expelled were less about image and more about academic achievement and social service,” Dr. Hershberger said.
During rush activities this month, 11 first-year students accepted invitations to join Delta Zeta, but only three have sought membership.
On Feb. 2, Rachel Pappas, a junior who is the chapter’s former secretary, printed 200 posters calling on students to gather that afternoon at the student union. About 50 students showed up and heard Ms. Pappas say the sorority’s national leaders had misrepresented the truth when they asserted they had evicted women for lack of commitment.“The injustice of the lies,” she said, “is contemptible.”
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Chastity Belts for Malaysian Women?
Khaleej Times Online >> News >> THE WORLD
Women should wear chastity belts to prevent sex crimes
(AP)
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Women should wear chastity belts to prevent rape, incest and other sex crimes, a prominent Islamic cleric in northern Malaysia was quoted as saying Friday.
Abu Hassan Din Al Hafiz, speaking in the northern state of Terengganu, said chastity belts could protect women from a growing number of sex crimes in Malaysia, The Star newspaper reported.
The best way to avert sex perpetrators is to wear protection,’ Abu Hassan told a crowd of followers. My intention is not to offend women but to safeguard them from sex maniacs.’
The cleric said sex crimes had increased in the region of late. We have even come across a number of unusual sex cases where even senior citizens and children are not spared,’ he said.
Figures on sexual assaults in the northern state were not immediately available.
Religious leaders in Malaysia’s conservative north have in the past blamed sexual attacks on women wearing provocative clothing and make up. Local Islamic women’s groups and other organizations have routinely criticized those views.
Abu Hassan was not immediately reachable for comment.
Muslims make up about 60 percent of Malaysia’s population. The remaining 40 percent are Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and a small minority of indigenous people who practice animism.
Women should wear chastity belts to prevent sex crimes
(AP)
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Women should wear chastity belts to prevent rape, incest and other sex crimes, a prominent Islamic cleric in northern Malaysia was quoted as saying Friday.
Abu Hassan Din Al Hafiz, speaking in the northern state of Terengganu, said chastity belts could protect women from a growing number of sex crimes in Malaysia, The Star newspaper reported.
The best way to avert sex perpetrators is to wear protection,’ Abu Hassan told a crowd of followers. My intention is not to offend women but to safeguard them from sex maniacs.’
The cleric said sex crimes had increased in the region of late. We have even come across a number of unusual sex cases where even senior citizens and children are not spared,’ he said.
Figures on sexual assaults in the northern state were not immediately available.
Religious leaders in Malaysia’s conservative north have in the past blamed sexual attacks on women wearing provocative clothing and make up. Local Islamic women’s groups and other organizations have routinely criticized those views.
Abu Hassan was not immediately reachable for comment.
Muslims make up about 60 percent of Malaysia’s population. The remaining 40 percent are Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and a small minority of indigenous people who practice animism.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Gayness vs Homoerotic Heterosexuality
Slate Magazine
The Loneliness of the Gay Basketball Player. John Amaechi's Man in the Middle, the memoir of an NBA misfit.
By Kevin Arnovitz
NBA journeyman John Amaechi's coming out has already spawned hundreds of rote conversations about homophobia and sports. Beat writers have probed players about how they'd deal with a gay teammate, producing few revelations other than that Shavlik Randolph probably hasn't attended many LGBT barbecues. Whether it's a mark of progress or the triumph of collective cynicism, Amaechi's confession has mostly been seen as either an attempt to sell his memoir, Man in the Middle, or an irrelevant, self-indulgent gesture. Brian Schmitz of the Orlando Sentinel, for one, squawked that Amaechi's coming out was "so '90s"—a response that might've been appropriate if a former NBA player had proclaimed his love for MTV's Real World-Road Rules tandem. Then, on Wednesday, former NBA star Tim Hardaway finally cut to the chase. "I hate gay people," he told radio host Dan Le Betard. "I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States."
Amaechi responded by calling Hardaway's rant bigoted. "But it is honest," he continued. "And it illustrates the problem better than any of the fuzzy language other people have used so far." Hardaway's loud-and-proud prejudice is also a reminder that beat writers needn't bother asking straight players how they'd respond to a gay teammate. The more interesting question, and the one Man in the Middle tries to answer, is: How would a gay man react to a teammate like Hardaway?
Most of the time, Man in the Middle reads like a conventional sports memoir. An awkward, fat, working-class kid finds refuge in basketball. After learning the fundamentals, he emerges from his shell. With the encouragement of his courageous single mother, Amaechi makes it big and sees the world.
In the latter half of the book, Amaechi tentatively delves into his own sexuality. Early in his career, the closest he comes to announcing he's gay is introducing his Orlando teammates to the wonders of Earl Grey tea. Little by little, he affords himself allowances in, of all places, Salt Lake City. During his final season with the Jazz, he invites queeny friends to the family room at the Delta Center and starts hanging out in the town's gay enclave. This leads to one of the book's most affirming moments, when young Jazz forward Andrei Kirilenko urges Amaechi to attend a party at his home: "You are welcome to bring your partner, if you have one, someone special to you."
Amaechi doesn't soft-pedal the NBA's homophobia, but he believes it's more "a convention of a particular brand of masculinity than a genuine prejudice." A team bus ride past a billboard reading "SOMEONE YOU KNOW IS GAY," for example, launches a "cacophony of shock and horror." Rather than rant about his teammates, Amaechi points out the locker room's sexual ironies. "They checked out each other's cocks. They primped in front of the mirror. … They tried on each other's $10,000 suits and shoes. … And I'm the gay one. Hah!" While cocks were being checked out, Amaechi says, he "stood in the corner in baggy clothes or wrapped in an oversized towel."
That scene—Amaechi, standing alone, as his hetero teammates engage in homosocial behavior—is the book's lasting image. Unlike, say, Juiced—Jose Canseco's homoerotic steroids homage—Man in the Middle doesn't revel in titillating erotica. Other than a few anonymous encounters with a volleyballer in the locker room at Penn State and a short relationship when he played in the British Basketball League, he seems to have led one of the most celibate existences of any athlete since A.C. Green. (Amaechi self-deprecatingly ascribes this to personal incompetence as much as intolerance.)
Amaechi doesn't speculate what percentage of the league is gay, and he doesn't name any names. One gets the sense that this is partly by design—innuendo just isn't his style—and partly a consequence of the distance he keeps from his fellow jocks. Amaechi's alientation from the culture of the NBA was not merely sexual. Surprisingly, his disaffection seems to be as much a product of his literacy as of his homosexuality. In Man in the Middle, Amaechi comes out as an intellectual—a creature almost as alien in the NBA as a gay man. He frequents art galleries on his off days, loves poetry, and is one of the first pro athletes to author a blog. The guy is smart enough that he can make something as dull as a fondness for Twinkies—"I loved their spongy richness and I devoured them by the dozen"—into a thoughtful disquisition.
Twinkies are just one of many things that Amaechi loves more than basketball. He writes with the most zeal—and at the most length—about mentoring, a passion that culminated in his official adoption of two teenagers in Orlando. (In passing, he reminds us that it's illegal for gays and lesbians to adopt in the state of Florida.) The more involved he gets with his off-court charity work, the less he cares about hoops. "Nobody could make me love something I picked up more or less because I was tall," he says.
The most interesting revelation in Man in the Middle has nothing to do with homosexuality. The profoundly isolated Amaechi says he finds common cause with other players on at least one matter: seeing sports as a means to an end. He writes that the pros play the game for a lot of reasons—money, fame, groupies, self-esteem—but that very few NBA players love basketball.
"The fan sitting at home … wants us to love the game like he does," he writes. "If he knew why we really play the game, for the most part, he might not love the game. He might not even watch it." The average fan, gay or straight, will probably find that contention more troubling than a former player's homosexuality.
The Loneliness of the Gay Basketball Player. John Amaechi's Man in the Middle, the memoir of an NBA misfit.
By Kevin Arnovitz
NBA journeyman John Amaechi's coming out has already spawned hundreds of rote conversations about homophobia and sports. Beat writers have probed players about how they'd deal with a gay teammate, producing few revelations other than that Shavlik Randolph probably hasn't attended many LGBT barbecues. Whether it's a mark of progress or the triumph of collective cynicism, Amaechi's confession has mostly been seen as either an attempt to sell his memoir, Man in the Middle, or an irrelevant, self-indulgent gesture. Brian Schmitz of the Orlando Sentinel, for one, squawked that Amaechi's coming out was "so '90s"—a response that might've been appropriate if a former NBA player had proclaimed his love for MTV's Real World-Road Rules tandem. Then, on Wednesday, former NBA star Tim Hardaway finally cut to the chase. "I hate gay people," he told radio host Dan Le Betard. "I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States."
Amaechi responded by calling Hardaway's rant bigoted. "But it is honest," he continued. "And it illustrates the problem better than any of the fuzzy language other people have used so far." Hardaway's loud-and-proud prejudice is also a reminder that beat writers needn't bother asking straight players how they'd respond to a gay teammate. The more interesting question, and the one Man in the Middle tries to answer, is: How would a gay man react to a teammate like Hardaway?
Most of the time, Man in the Middle reads like a conventional sports memoir. An awkward, fat, working-class kid finds refuge in basketball. After learning the fundamentals, he emerges from his shell. With the encouragement of his courageous single mother, Amaechi makes it big and sees the world.
In the latter half of the book, Amaechi tentatively delves into his own sexuality. Early in his career, the closest he comes to announcing he's gay is introducing his Orlando teammates to the wonders of Earl Grey tea. Little by little, he affords himself allowances in, of all places, Salt Lake City. During his final season with the Jazz, he invites queeny friends to the family room at the Delta Center and starts hanging out in the town's gay enclave. This leads to one of the book's most affirming moments, when young Jazz forward Andrei Kirilenko urges Amaechi to attend a party at his home: "You are welcome to bring your partner, if you have one, someone special to you."
Amaechi doesn't soft-pedal the NBA's homophobia, but he believes it's more "a convention of a particular brand of masculinity than a genuine prejudice." A team bus ride past a billboard reading "SOMEONE YOU KNOW IS GAY," for example, launches a "cacophony of shock and horror." Rather than rant about his teammates, Amaechi points out the locker room's sexual ironies. "They checked out each other's cocks. They primped in front of the mirror. … They tried on each other's $10,000 suits and shoes. … And I'm the gay one. Hah!" While cocks were being checked out, Amaechi says, he "stood in the corner in baggy clothes or wrapped in an oversized towel."
That scene—Amaechi, standing alone, as his hetero teammates engage in homosocial behavior—is the book's lasting image. Unlike, say, Juiced—Jose Canseco's homoerotic steroids homage—Man in the Middle doesn't revel in titillating erotica. Other than a few anonymous encounters with a volleyballer in the locker room at Penn State and a short relationship when he played in the British Basketball League, he seems to have led one of the most celibate existences of any athlete since A.C. Green. (Amaechi self-deprecatingly ascribes this to personal incompetence as much as intolerance.)
Amaechi doesn't speculate what percentage of the league is gay, and he doesn't name any names. One gets the sense that this is partly by design—innuendo just isn't his style—and partly a consequence of the distance he keeps from his fellow jocks. Amaechi's alientation from the culture of the NBA was not merely sexual. Surprisingly, his disaffection seems to be as much a product of his literacy as of his homosexuality. In Man in the Middle, Amaechi comes out as an intellectual—a creature almost as alien in the NBA as a gay man. He frequents art galleries on his off days, loves poetry, and is one of the first pro athletes to author a blog. The guy is smart enough that he can make something as dull as a fondness for Twinkies—"I loved their spongy richness and I devoured them by the dozen"—into a thoughtful disquisition.
Twinkies are just one of many things that Amaechi loves more than basketball. He writes with the most zeal—and at the most length—about mentoring, a passion that culminated in his official adoption of two teenagers in Orlando. (In passing, he reminds us that it's illegal for gays and lesbians to adopt in the state of Florida.) The more involved he gets with his off-court charity work, the less he cares about hoops. "Nobody could make me love something I picked up more or less because I was tall," he says.
The most interesting revelation in Man in the Middle has nothing to do with homosexuality. The profoundly isolated Amaechi says he finds common cause with other players on at least one matter: seeing sports as a means to an end. He writes that the pros play the game for a lot of reasons—money, fame, groupies, self-esteem—but that very few NBA players love basketball.
"The fan sitting at home … wants us to love the game like he does," he writes. "If he knew why we really play the game, for the most part, he might not love the game. He might not even watch it." The average fan, gay or straight, will probably find that contention more troubling than a former player's homosexuality.
Blood on the Tracks?
Is this Village Voice cover illustration racist?
by Carmen Van Kerckhove
What do you think of this image? (for image click this link)
It’s supposed to be Bob Dylan mowing down Kyp Malone from the band TV on the Radio. Martín Perna, who’s associated with the band, wrote a long letter to the Voice criticizing the image.
Reactions to the letter that I’ve seen on other blogs are typical:
This is bullshit… if that was a picture of Dylan running over a member of the Artic Monkeys or some other white band no one would give a shit, they would be raving on how witty it was.
and my favorite:
Only a Rascist would find that Rascist!
But here’s Perna’s letter. Interesting parallel he draws to the ghetto party phenomenon:
Looking at this week’s cover of the Voice, I see a caricature of Bob Dylan in an electric mobility scooter, running over Kyp Malone, guitarist/vocalist of the band TV on the Radio. The drawing, I imagine, was supposed to comically illustrate Dylan’s new record edging out TVOTR’s “Return to Cookie Mountain,” in the paper’s 34th Annual Pazz & Jop poll [February 7–13]. This drawing is racist, unfunny, mean-spirited, and inaccurate.
Even in the post-Chappelle era of it being hip and edgy to discuss and portray ideas about race, there are still wrong, tasteless ways and this was one of them. Nowhere in the consciousness of Voice editors or illustrator David O’Keefe can we find memories of James Byrd, a black man who was dragged behind a truck to his death by white racists in Jasper, Texas, in 1998, or Arthur “J.R.” Warren, who was run over four times and killed for being black and gay in West Virginia in 2000, and all the other lynchings that happened in the U.S. before and since. These events are still fresh in the minds of black people, as well as in the hearts and minds of the rest of us who may not be directly victimized by these particular lynchings but who are nonetheless endangered by racism and committed to social justice and healing America of its sick racist condition.
O’Keefe and his colleagues may not have meant to intentionally be racist. They probably meant to be funny, like the University of Texas law students, Clemson University undergrads, or white college students nationwide who plan and publicize their blackface or “ghetto parties,” then act surprised that people find their actions offensive and unacceptable. That this picture could be drawn and not questioned or vetoed by any of the people who saw it prior to publication shows the level of ignorance and racism that persists in leftist institutions like the Voice that continue to posture as hip and progressive. It reveals that among decision-makers at the paper there is not one single person with any sort of racial consciousness or sensitivity who had the power or courage to send that picture back to the drawing board.
Racism aside, the drawing is snarky and simpleminded. Where is the love? Why such a nasty way to portray two fantastic musical entities who made award-winning records last year? Why only portray Kyp, when TV on the Radio is composed of four other equally talented core members plus a small army of extended family (including myself) who have contributed to the indescribably ecstatic sound of TVOTR onstage and on record. We struggle defiantly to collaborate and work in non-hierarchical, positive environments and this portrayal of one of our people strikes a blow against our collective dignity.
Every time our likenesses are used outside of our control—especially in stupid ways like this—it fosters false perceptions of who we are. We struggle on a daily basis (those of us with high media exposure much more than others) to be our true selves and not what the media creates of us. Inevitably, Kyp will have to respond to an endless stream of questions about this cover from scores of journalists over the next week when he’d probably rather be doing something else.
Intentionally or not, this cover sends the all-too-familiar message to people of color: Make something too unique, make something outside of your assigned place-role, and get run over by a white man. I could go on about it, about how wrong it is to create false competition between musicians; the headline “Blood on the Tracks!” gives the very false impression that there is serious beef with Dylan and TVOTR. I could complain about how you drew Kyp outfitted like the Nutty Professor rather than his true fly stylish self. All other criticism, however, would draw attention away from the more serious and sinister latent racism present that makes this cover possible to begin with. I pray that you will wise up and check yourself and get some people with some sense and sensitivity among your editorial staff.
Martín Perna
Baritone saxophone, flutes
Antibalas/TV on the Radio
Austin, Texas, and Brooklyn
by Carmen Van Kerckhove
What do you think of this image? (for image click this link)
It’s supposed to be Bob Dylan mowing down Kyp Malone from the band TV on the Radio. Martín Perna, who’s associated with the band, wrote a long letter to the Voice criticizing the image.
Reactions to the letter that I’ve seen on other blogs are typical:
This is bullshit… if that was a picture of Dylan running over a member of the Artic Monkeys or some other white band no one would give a shit, they would be raving on how witty it was.
and my favorite:
Only a Rascist would find that Rascist!
But here’s Perna’s letter. Interesting parallel he draws to the ghetto party phenomenon:
Looking at this week’s cover of the Voice, I see a caricature of Bob Dylan in an electric mobility scooter, running over Kyp Malone, guitarist/vocalist of the band TV on the Radio. The drawing, I imagine, was supposed to comically illustrate Dylan’s new record edging out TVOTR’s “Return to Cookie Mountain,” in the paper’s 34th Annual Pazz & Jop poll [February 7–13]. This drawing is racist, unfunny, mean-spirited, and inaccurate.
Even in the post-Chappelle era of it being hip and edgy to discuss and portray ideas about race, there are still wrong, tasteless ways and this was one of them. Nowhere in the consciousness of Voice editors or illustrator David O’Keefe can we find memories of James Byrd, a black man who was dragged behind a truck to his death by white racists in Jasper, Texas, in 1998, or Arthur “J.R.” Warren, who was run over four times and killed for being black and gay in West Virginia in 2000, and all the other lynchings that happened in the U.S. before and since. These events are still fresh in the minds of black people, as well as in the hearts and minds of the rest of us who may not be directly victimized by these particular lynchings but who are nonetheless endangered by racism and committed to social justice and healing America of its sick racist condition.
O’Keefe and his colleagues may not have meant to intentionally be racist. They probably meant to be funny, like the University of Texas law students, Clemson University undergrads, or white college students nationwide who plan and publicize their blackface or “ghetto parties,” then act surprised that people find their actions offensive and unacceptable. That this picture could be drawn and not questioned or vetoed by any of the people who saw it prior to publication shows the level of ignorance and racism that persists in leftist institutions like the Voice that continue to posture as hip and progressive. It reveals that among decision-makers at the paper there is not one single person with any sort of racial consciousness or sensitivity who had the power or courage to send that picture back to the drawing board.
Racism aside, the drawing is snarky and simpleminded. Where is the love? Why such a nasty way to portray two fantastic musical entities who made award-winning records last year? Why only portray Kyp, when TV on the Radio is composed of four other equally talented core members plus a small army of extended family (including myself) who have contributed to the indescribably ecstatic sound of TVOTR onstage and on record. We struggle defiantly to collaborate and work in non-hierarchical, positive environments and this portrayal of one of our people strikes a blow against our collective dignity.
Every time our likenesses are used outside of our control—especially in stupid ways like this—it fosters false perceptions of who we are. We struggle on a daily basis (those of us with high media exposure much more than others) to be our true selves and not what the media creates of us. Inevitably, Kyp will have to respond to an endless stream of questions about this cover from scores of journalists over the next week when he’d probably rather be doing something else.
Intentionally or not, this cover sends the all-too-familiar message to people of color: Make something too unique, make something outside of your assigned place-role, and get run over by a white man. I could go on about it, about how wrong it is to create false competition between musicians; the headline “Blood on the Tracks!” gives the very false impression that there is serious beef with Dylan and TVOTR. I could complain about how you drew Kyp outfitted like the Nutty Professor rather than his true fly stylish self. All other criticism, however, would draw attention away from the more serious and sinister latent racism present that makes this cover possible to begin with. I pray that you will wise up and check yourself and get some people with some sense and sensitivity among your editorial staff.
Martín Perna
Baritone saxophone, flutes
Antibalas/TV on the Radio
Austin, Texas, and Brooklyn
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Fifty Ways to Be a Racist
Fifty Ways to Be a Racist
Ric Caric (Re-Posted from Red State Impressions blog)
The debate doesn't quite rage over whether Sen. George Allen is a racist? For John Dickerson of Slate, Allen is more of a boob; according to Rich Lowry of National Review Online, Allen just has a mean streak. There's also an undercurrent that Allen isn't all that bright even though Allen graduated near the top of his law school class at UVA.
Generally, the mainstream media isn't sure whether you're a racist or not unless you're a Klan member, or are a white guy using the n-word all the time. That's part of the reason why the media needs to get out of the Beltway more.
Here in Kentucky, there are plenty of signs that someone is a racist--There's always the threatening letter to the black people who just moved into your county, neighborhood, school or dorm threatening to kill, bomb, or burn them out;
Add Confederate flags on your bumper sticker, Confederate flag hats, Confederate flag shirts, and Confederate flags in the back yard. Guys get into Confederate flag paraphernalia as a way to announce that they "don't give a shit about what people think," are proud to be "rednecks," "hillbillies," or "crackers," or think it's a funny way to be an asshole. They do it as a way to stick it to their parents, their teachers, church, and town elite as well as city people and the North. Oh yeah, and black people too;
Thinking that every black male you see in a city is going to rob you or not going to the cities because there are too many blacks; not going to State U because there are too many blacks or because you might be assigned a black roommate;
Dismissing hip hop, rock, jazz, and other musical styles as "n--music," dismissing Beethoven because he was a mulatto;
Loving NASCAR because it's all-white, worshipping the screaming white coach of your State U basketball team and assuming that the players need to be screamed at; disparaging State U's opponents in racial terms; disparaging professional sports in general and the NBA in particular as too black;
Telling blacks to "get over it," that "everybody is oppressed" and that "stereotypes (about blacks) are real;"
Bragging about how Southerner whites know blacks better than anybody else or how well everybody in the South got along before the "outside agitators" or "activist judges" came in or the "turmoil" of the Civil Rights Movement got started.
Claiming that Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Denzel Washington, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and other blacks you like aren't "really" black; really hating Spike Lee and other race conscious blacks because they're "so" black.
Arguing that anybody who complains about racism is a "racist" and that blacks who complain about racism are worst racists than the whites of the segregation era.
Special Contributions from Prof. N'Diaye
You have ever dismissed the wholesale slaughter, torture, and cultural decimation of an entire race of people as "the slavery thing; "
Said that those left to perish after Hurricane Katrina should have just"gotten out" before the storm hit;
Clutch your wallet or purse in a elevator when an african american (male or female)enters
Defend the country's founders and their institutionalization and justification of enslavement as "just products of their time;"
Believe the struggle for civil rights began and ended with Martin LutherKing, Jr.
You think it merely coincidental that blacks (especially black males) are incarcerated at rates nearly nine times higher than that of whites (or worse, that you think all blacks in prison are there because the committed crimes and 'deserve' to be there);
Justify gentrification as community improvement while people who've lived in a neighborhood their entire lives suddenly cannot afford to live there any more.
Ric Caric (Re-Posted from Red State Impressions blog)
The debate doesn't quite rage over whether Sen. George Allen is a racist? For John Dickerson of Slate, Allen is more of a boob; according to Rich Lowry of National Review Online, Allen just has a mean streak. There's also an undercurrent that Allen isn't all that bright even though Allen graduated near the top of his law school class at UVA.
Generally, the mainstream media isn't sure whether you're a racist or not unless you're a Klan member, or are a white guy using the n-word all the time. That's part of the reason why the media needs to get out of the Beltway more.
Here in Kentucky, there are plenty of signs that someone is a racist--There's always the threatening letter to the black people who just moved into your county, neighborhood, school or dorm threatening to kill, bomb, or burn them out;
Add Confederate flags on your bumper sticker, Confederate flag hats, Confederate flag shirts, and Confederate flags in the back yard. Guys get into Confederate flag paraphernalia as a way to announce that they "don't give a shit about what people think," are proud to be "rednecks," "hillbillies," or "crackers," or think it's a funny way to be an asshole. They do it as a way to stick it to their parents, their teachers, church, and town elite as well as city people and the North. Oh yeah, and black people too;
Thinking that every black male you see in a city is going to rob you or not going to the cities because there are too many blacks; not going to State U because there are too many blacks or because you might be assigned a black roommate;
Dismissing hip hop, rock, jazz, and other musical styles as "n--music," dismissing Beethoven because he was a mulatto;
Loving NASCAR because it's all-white, worshipping the screaming white coach of your State U basketball team and assuming that the players need to be screamed at; disparaging State U's opponents in racial terms; disparaging professional sports in general and the NBA in particular as too black;
Telling blacks to "get over it," that "everybody is oppressed" and that "stereotypes (about blacks) are real;"
Bragging about how Southerner whites know blacks better than anybody else or how well everybody in the South got along before the "outside agitators" or "activist judges" came in or the "turmoil" of the Civil Rights Movement got started.
Claiming that Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Denzel Washington, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and other blacks you like aren't "really" black; really hating Spike Lee and other race conscious blacks because they're "so" black.
Arguing that anybody who complains about racism is a "racist" and that blacks who complain about racism are worst racists than the whites of the segregation era.
Special Contributions from Prof. N'Diaye
You have ever dismissed the wholesale slaughter, torture, and cultural decimation of an entire race of people as "the slavery thing; "
Said that those left to perish after Hurricane Katrina should have just"gotten out" before the storm hit;
Clutch your wallet or purse in a elevator when an african american (male or female)enters
Defend the country's founders and their institutionalization and justification of enslavement as "just products of their time;"
Believe the struggle for civil rights began and ended with Martin LutherKing, Jr.
You think it merely coincidental that blacks (especially black males) are incarcerated at rates nearly nine times higher than that of whites (or worse, that you think all blacks in prison are there because the committed crimes and 'deserve' to be there);
Justify gentrification as community improvement while people who've lived in a neighborhood their entire lives suddenly cannot afford to live there any more.
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