The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Sun May 03, 2015 , http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in-the-United-States?detail=email

The most racist areas in the United States<http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in-the-United-States>

bySusan Grigsby<http://dailykos.com/user/Susan%20Grigsby> forDaily Kos<http://dailykos.com/blog/main>

[https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/attachment.ashx?id=RgAAAACIR4fP8%2fDSEaNAAAD4YBApBwDd9LcDLkTSEaMkAKDJ4RrzAAAA7%2f1AAACG0aK%2bn4McSrUVwdL4l7nbAFDo8iUEAAAJ&attcnt=1&attid0=EAAIhqf4v5x1SKTZJ2smsTOj]<http://images.dailykos.com/images/141407/lightbox/journal.pone.0122963.g001_copy.jpg?1430691641>

There are neighborhoods in Baltimore in which the life expectancy is 19 years less than other neighborhoods in the same city. Residents of the Downtown/Seaton Hill neighborhood have a life expectancy lower than 229 other nations, exceeded only by Yemen. According to the Washington Post<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/30/baltimores-poorest-residents-die-20-years-earlier-than-its-richest/?wpisrc=nl_wnkpm&wpmm=1>, 15 neighborhoods in Baltimore have a lower life expectancy than North Korea.

And while those figures represent some of the most dramatic disparities in the life expectancy of black Americans as opposed to whites, a recent study of the health impacts of racism in America reveals that racist attitudes may cause up to 30,000 early deaths every year.

The study, Association between an Internet-Based Measure of Area Racism and Black Mortality<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122963#pone.0122963.ref042>, has just been published in PLOS ONE and has mapped out the most racist areas in the United States. As illustrated above, they are mostly located in the rural Northeast and down along the Appalachian Mountains into the South. How they did it and what it may mean are below the fold.
We already know about the racism that led to Jim Crow, the KKK, and lynchings. We also know about the racism that has become embedded in our justice system, from cops who kill, to prosecutors who ensure that blacks receive longer prison terms than do whites. We know that those sentencing disparities lead to greater disenfranchisement of blacks.

We think we know how racism has injured and killed black Americans. But do we really? There are the obvious cases, like Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, but what about the silent killers? The hypertension and the chronic medical conditions that lead so many more blacks to an early grave than they do whites. Could racist attitudes lead to 30,000 early deaths every year?

According to the authors of the study, current research points to a variety of causes for the disparities in health between white and black Americans, many of which can be traced to racial segregation. Many blacks are restricted to high-crime neighborhoods that are lacking in outdoor recreational areas, access to healthy foods, and decent health care. Discrimination in employment leads to lower wages that further impact the ability to enjoy healthy food, exercise, and recreation.

The authors also point out that:
... racial discrimination may also directly impact health by engaging psychobiological mechanisms induced in the stress response
In other words, stress, especially chronic stress, is bad for your health. This isn't really news. Experiences of racial discrimination are often accompanied by a sense of powerlessness, of anxiety, and of anger. These stressors, especially over a lifetime, can lead to negative health impacts. Jon Stewart did not know how right he was when he said, "If racism is something you're sick of hearing about, imagine how exhausting it must be living it every day."
As a source of chronic psychosocial stress, repeated racism may result in a heightened pro-inflammatory state that can have particularly detrimental consequences for the etiology and progression of cardiovascular and other immune disorders. Studies on discrimination have found evidence for adverse consequences for hypertension, atherosclerosis, and their inflammatory mediators. A recent study found that racism-related factors may also be associated with accelerated aging at the cellular level.
Past studies have had problems quantifying racism. They can look at localized institutional racism via housing and employment, or they can rely on self-reported incidents of racism. Of course, self-reported attitudes are difficult to verify and are subject to self-censorship, especially in regard to micro-aggressions and racism without a clear perpetrator, and institutional studies don't actually reflect racist attitudes as much as their results.

The authors of this study have turned to internet searches using the "N-word" for help in finding areas of racist attitudes in America.
This measure, calculated based on Internet search queries containing the “N-word”, was strongly associated with the differential in 2008 votes for Barack Obama, the Black Democratic presidential candidate, vs. 2004 votes for John Kerry, the White Democratic presidential candidate.
The study authors used the designated market areas (DMA) as defined by the Nielsen Media Research. Residents within these DMAs generally receive their information from common television and/or radio broadcasts and newspapers, providing similar messages that influence racial attitudes. The authors make clear that not all searches for the "N-word" are due to racial bias and that not all residents in a DMA share racist attitudes, but the volume of the available data provides a high signal-to-noise ratio.

Using this information to find areas in which racism is alive and well, they then looked at black mortality rates using data from 2004–2009, collated by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). They examined four leading causes of death among blacks: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes. Unsurprisingly, they found a significant association between the racism indicated by the internet searches and an increase in black mortality.
Results from our study indicate that living in an area characterized by a one standard deviation greater proportion of racist Google searches is associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause mortality rate among Blacks. This effect estimate amounts to over 30,000 deaths among Blacks annually nationwide.

These findings indicate that area racism, as indexed by the proportion of Google searches containing the “N-word”, is significantly associated with not only the all-cause Black mortality rate, but also Black-White disparities in mortality.
Racism doesn't just kill with a bullet to the back, it also kills by a thousand cuts, silently and mostly unnoticed.

Was it only a year ago that Ta-Nehisi Coates made the Case for Reparations<http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/>? Reparations, hell, how about we stop killing black Americans first, and then discuss a way to repay them for the massive wrongs that have been done.
New York state police handcuff and shackle 'combative' five-year-old

* Officers arrived after school reported boy was disruptive and uncontrollable
* They handcuffed him for ‘his safety’ and safety of staff, spokesman says
Ed Pilkington<http://www.theguardian.com/profile/edpilkington> in New York
Monday 4 May 2015 , The Guardian (UK)
The idea that police officers should use handcuffs and leg shackles to control an unruly individual is hardly unusual in the US, where fondness for the use of metal restraints runs through the criminal justice system.
What is unusual is when the individual in question is five years old, and the arrest takes place in an elementary school.
New York state police were called last week to the primary school in Philadelphia, New York<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/new-york>, close to the Canadian border, after staff reported that a pupil, Connor Ruiz, was disruptive and uncontrollable. When officers arrived at the premises, they placed the five-year-old boy in handcuffs, carried him out to a patrol car and put his feet into shackles before taking him to a medical center for evaluation.
The child’s mother, Chelsea Ruiz, told the local Watertown Daily Times<http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/news03/fort-drum-parents-irate-after-police-handcuff-shackle-5-year-old-special-needs-student--20150502> she was shocked and angered by what had happened.
“An officer told me they had to handcuff his wrists and ankles for their safety,” she said. “I told him that was ridiculous. How could someone fear for their safety when it comes to a small, five-year-old child?”
A spokesman for the state police force, Jack Keller, justified the constraints on grounds that the child was “out of control” and “combative”, and was deemed to be a danger to himself or staff. Troopers had found him “screaming, kicking, punching and biting”.
“Our concern was his safety, of not only himself but the staff he was dealing with and the other students in the class where he was,” Keller said.
Handcuffing of young children is frequently<http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2014/12/children-handcuffed-by-police-at-katong/> reported<http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-handcuff-9-year-special-child-elementary-school/> in the US. Last December, a child aged four was handcuffed in Nathanael Greene primary school in Stanardsville, Virginia.
In 2013, the handcuffing of a nine-year-old girl in Portland<http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/10/portland_police_will_be_restri.html>, Oregon prompted a public outcry that forced the police department to revise its rules. The new procedures forbid officers from handcuffing a child under 12, unless they pose a “heightened risk to safety”.
Ruiz said that two weeks ago she had placed her son in a special-needs class, precisely to avoid the kind of incident that occurred when police were called to the school.
“We had a plan in place so they would call me to come to the school if they couldn’t calm him down,” she said, “and they didn’t do that.”
She said Connor was “terrified of going back to school”, and added that she planned to transfer him to a different school district.

[kenneth harrow]

gloria
have you seen krugman's column in which he argues that you have to
include class in determining the debilitating effects of discrimination.
it is very compelling. basically he says, when people, white as well as
black, have become poorer, they don't live as long or as well.
here is the column he wrote a few days ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article

it shouldn't be an all or nothing argument. middle class black people
are indeed subject to maltreatment more than are whites; but the larger
picture has to include more than race to explain the factors in society
that impact people's lives.
ken

--
kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

The article by Grisby is not about the Black middle class.

It is about the large pool of
Blacks systematically excluded from the middleclass.


Gloria

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Reminds me of our discussion about Black vs White bourgeoisie.

This is not about the middle class though.

It is about the large pool of

Blacks excluded from the middleclass.

Maybe Krugman got it wrong.
I hope he is not an undercover apologist - but I have to read the article.

Gloria


-----Original Message-----
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2015 6:44 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

gloria
have you seen krugman's column in which he argues that you have to include class in determining the debilitating effects of discrimination.
it is very compelling. basically he says, when people, white as well as black, have become poorer, they don't live as long or as well.
here is the column he wrote a few days ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article

it shouldn't be an all or nothing argument. middle class black people are indeed subject to maltreatment more than are whites; but the larger picture has to include more than race to explain the factors in society
that impact people's lives.
ken


On 5/5/15 4:50 PM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) wrote:
> Sun May 03, 2015 ,
> http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in
> -the-United-States?detail=email
>
> The most racist areas in the United
> States<http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-a
> reas-in-the-United-States>
>
> bySusan Grigsby<http://dailykos.com/user/Susan%20Grigsby> forDaily
> Kos<http://dailykos.com/blog/main>
>

> [https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/attachment.ashx?id=RgAAAACIR4fP8%2fDSEaN
> AAAD4YBApBwDd9LcDLkTSEaMkAKDJ4RrzAAAA7%2f1AAACG0aK%2bn4McSrUVwdL4l7nbA
> FDo8iUEAAAJ&attcnt=1&attid0=EAAIhqf4v5x1SKTZJ2smsTOj]<http://images.da
> ilykos.com/images/141407/lightbox/journal.pone.0122963.g001_copy.jpg?1
> 430691641>
>

[kenneth harrow]

the krugman read takes 2 minutes. he says something like, as whites get
driven economically down, to the point where they are financially
comparable to poorer blacks, their life expectancy, rates of illness etc
also decline, crime goes up, etc
in other words class matters a lot in calculating sociological data on
people, not just looking at race
k

[Kwabena Akurang-Parry]

Class affects one's conditions and lived experiences within "racial" or "ethnic" categories. But in America, for example,  it is"race" that defines discrimination to the extent that marginalized whites have better opportunities than blacks located in any part of the vertical space. 
 

> Date: Tue, 5 May 2015 18:44:11 -0400
> From: har...@msu.edu

> To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)
>

[kenneth harrow]

it's not true that race always functions to the disadvantage of black people "in any part of the vertical space." i am not sure, actually, what those words mean, but if it means what they seem to mean they imply that there is no such thing as affirmative action, that efforts to create diversity in the hiring place don't exist, etc.
in academe those efforts are real, they have real effects, the majority of academics are seriously committed to notions of diversity and work hard to make them real. maybe that is true to a variable extent in the business world, but i believe it is there as well.
only it isn't simply black/white diversity that people attend to. in my university bringing women into the sciences or business as tenure track hires is also part of trying to diversify a faculty that has been largely male, white male to boot. and of course minority means more than black.

i will give an example of how i see this above claim. we recently did a dean search for my college. they hired a firm, got a pool of candidates that included racial and gender diversity, and then waited for administrative approval, which was slow in coming. by the time we got approval (arts and letters was probably the lowest priority for administration that had 16 positions to approve) we had lost the minority and female candidates who had been head-hunted elsewhere, and wound up with two while male candidates.
had the women or minority candidates still be available they would have been part of the final pool.
i oversee hiring for tenure stream faculty in my college, and there is an absolute requirement that the pools be diverse, that every effort be made to make them diverse.
i also imagine msu is not alone in this policy.

things have changed, that is the real point. when i compare what i just said above with conditions in baltimore, i believe that we can't place the opportunities for minorities who have college education in the same bag as those on the streets--the corners--of baltimore where a large percentage of young black men will wind up in prison, and not have any real possibilities for great futures. there is a class difference, and it is enormously significant in every way.
when i grew up, that black middle class did not exist. the chances for upward mobility were small or rare. that's no longer true. racism still exists, but it no longer functions as it once had, and it seems to me that the great divide between the top 3 percent and the rest of the country is far greater than ever before as well--that class difference, in this age of neoliberalism--that wealth difference, is also greater than ever before.
as a result we have not only a black president, but also a black republican candidate. but there's one thing we don't have, we don't have poor people, or, i imagine, even middle class people, with a hope of getting elected to congress. that is a millionaire's club now. and they protect their class interest pretty assiduously.
this is their net worth, which i found by googling it:
"The latest data calculated by OpenSecrets.org reports on disclosed information from 2012. The latest batch of numbers shows that the 113th Congress had a median net worth of $1,008,767. This is the first time in history that the majority of members are millionaires.^[1]"
race matters, and class matters. i'm not trying to say which one matters more--it must depend on the circumstances. but i don't think it is right to say that in all circumstances races works against candidates and trumps class differences. what kruger's article shows is that whites being pushed into the poorer categories begin to show the same negative numbers as poor black people.

ken

[kenneth harrow]

just to give the gist of the krugman editorial:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article

"The great sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago that widely-decried social changes among blacks, like the decline of traditional families, were actually caused by the disappearance of well-paying jobs in inner cities. His argument contained an implicit prediction: if other racial groups were to face a similar loss of job opportunity, their behavior would change in similar ways.

And so it has proved. Lagging wages — actually declining in real terms for half of working men — and work instability have been followed by sharp declines in marriage, rising births out of wedlock, and more.

As Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution writes: “Blacks have faced, and will continue to face, unique challenges. But when we look for the reasons why less skilled blacks are failing to marry and join the middle class, it is largely for the same reasons that marriage and a middle-class lifestyle is eluding a growing number of whites as well.”

Continue reading the main story

On 5/6/15 3:20 AM, Kwabena Akurang-Parry wrote:

[John Mbaku]

Is anyone looking at the federal government's role, especially after World War II, in perpetuating racially segregated urban centers in the United States? Of special note is the role played by the Democratic Party--liberal northern democrats and segregationist southern democrats in what has become a significant stain on American democracy. As you read, consider the fact that Richard Nixon's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development recognized this problem in the 1960s and decided to do something about it. George Romney developed a very ambitious and progressive program to address the problem of segregated urban areas. The progressive Romney's program was designed to fully address, not only racial but also economic integration. Romney and his ambitious program were undercut by Nixon and we are now seeing the fruits of short-sightedness by the Nixon administration and subsequent administrations. Romney's words were prophetic. Yes, George Romney was the father of Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate. 

For further reading, see "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing in Regional Housing Markets: The Baltimore Public Housing Desegregation Litigation," 42 Wake Forest L. Rev. 333 (2007).

JOHN MUKUM MBAKU, ESQ.
J.D. (Law), Ph.D. (Economics)
Graduate Certificate in Environmental and Natural Resources Law
Nonresident Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
Attorney & Counselor at Law (Licensed in Utah)
Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor of Economics & Willard L. Eccles Professor of Economics and John S. Hinckley Fellow
Department of Economics
Weber State University
1337 Edvalson Street, Dept. 3807
Ogden, UT 84408-3807, USA
(801) 626-7442 Phone
(801) 626-7423 Fax

[Kwabena Akurang-Parry]

As we Ghanaians say "tweaa" you sure know what "those words mean" else there would be no need to respond to it in a short campaign essay that seeks to convince others. If you are discussing class, social mobility, and discrimination, you should be able to understand and contextualize "in any part of the vertical space." Who said that in the academy "those efforts [at equity and inclusion]" are real?" They are as miragic as a sea in the Saharan region! They are just cosmetic additions to perpetualizing the disempowerment of the Other. Talk to many immigrant professors and you would know that you are just transposing your own comfortable lived experiences as a non-immigrant onto others who lack your "racial classification" of whiteness and homegrown privileges. Equity, diversity, equal opportunity, non-discrimination, etc. trumpeted in the American academy are biddable constructs subjected to different frames and reference as well as multiple renderings and applications. 
Kwabena 

---

Date: Wed, 6 May 2015 09:14:23 -0400

[Anunoby, Ogugua]

Race in the United States mostly functions to the disadvantage of black people-so often I might add, that “always” may not overstate the reality.

If it was not for the reason of racism, affirmative action (AA) would have been unnecessary. AA policies and programs are law based prescriptions whose implementation is intended to reduce the injustices of racism. It cannot therefore function to the advantage of black people. Policy implementation that seeks to redress not eliminate past injustice(s) cannot be considered to confer advantage to victims of centuries’ old injustices and their descendants. Redress does confer an advantage to a victim.

Take AA as it affects higher education for example. If a supreme court justice is on record as stating that he opposes affirmative action because it denies achieving black people due credit for their personal accomplishments, and this is not an incorrect statement in my view, how has AA functioned to his advantage? Some Obama critics have stated publicly that president Obama could not have made it to Ivy League universities if Obama was not black which he actually is not. Only one of his parents is black. Many Obama critics have argued that Obama was elected president because he is black and ran for office at the right time- after a disastrous Bush presidency and a weak democratic party field of candidates. They do not give the man due credit for his prescience on the Iraq war, superior articulation of and judgment on policy matters, raised the most money, and a superior campaign organization and management among others, twice not once. He executed a near perfect plan each time.  

The tragedy of AA is that there are many on the “other side” who believe it is a favor to black people by them. It is not. It is a debt that is owed black people. It is doubtful that this debt could ever be paid in full.

I do not know that things have change. What I know is that things are changing and sometimes it is not clear in what direction they are changing. That race is still the great divisive and polarizing issue it is in the U.S.A. leaves one with no more to say.

 

oa

[John Mbaku]

Samuel:

Can you please provide more information and I will see if I get you the materials? Thanks. John

[kenneth harrow]

On 5/6/15 12:19 PM, Anunoby, Ogugua wrote:

"The tragedy of AA is that there are many on the “other side” who believe it is a favor to black people by them. It is not. It is a debt that is owed black people. It is doubtful that this debt could ever be paid in full."

There are different ways now to think about affirmative action and racism. We can't really use "affirmation action" in our university as a policy term since the state of michigan voted against it, although it is still operant in federal grants, and is still legal on the federal level.
but it is a policy that has a range of determinants and readings, and effects.
i am opposed to thinking of it either as a favor or a right, as a debt. both positions are debilitating, to both black and to white people. the whole approach to race through guilt and repayment represents a weakened attempt at progressive politics.
i don't want to try to think it through too finely now, but in my university the language that has become widely accepted is that diversity enhances the quality of the university at all levels. we pretty much agree on that. a diverse faculty is a better faculty. in my signature is included my title "faculty excellent advocate," which in another university would be called "faculty diversity officer." the provost who set this program in action believed that excellence came from greater diversity. a diverse student population, a diverse faculty, a set of practices that made diverse faculty feel welcomed, all this made for a better university.

this is a plus side to attempts to deal with racism now. to be sure, one day we won't be using this language, these practices, since we will recognize that we are all "diverse." but i am very glad that we push for this here, in contrast to places like france where such notions are not in practice since the french claim that all citizens are subject to "republican" values, i.e., are equal.

why am i bothering to write these self-evident things? it is in response to a few of the postings that claim that the racism is unremitting, that there is nothing else to the story, that this is no different from the worst of times in the past.
these are what kinds of claims? rhetorical perhaps? political in a sense.
i am speaking here more personally as a fellow academic, who grew up in the 40s and 50s, came to college in the 60s, and saw a radically radically different world of racial relations in those days compared with now.
i don't see what good is done by taking the approach that things are no better in the higher economic and intellectual circles than in the streets of baltimore. i can see the bitterness, and understand it, but not imagine that it is what will help move us in a progressive direction.
ken

[kenneth harrow]

interesting!
you are talking about george romney, the former governor of my state, michigan, who was gov when i came. he was one in a line of moderate republican governors--one of the few good things i can say about republicans nowadays. we still have a half-decent republican governor today, snyder, who is something of a bulwark against the far right republican tea party types in the legislature.
ken

[kenneth harrow]

kwabena
i am speaking out of the experience, that's all. if you had a different experience, you can also testify. you go too far, in my view, in speaking for all faculty of color everywhere in your claims. i know it is not as you describe it at michigan state university, and in speaking with friends elsewhere, also i had impressions that do not fit your description. and when i refer to those friends/colleagues, etc., it is by a large minority people of color since we all work in african studies.

that's as far as i can go. it's not my area of research; i am just reporting my own experiences and impressions.
you want to disqualify them because you don't like my color. well, that doesn't really merit much of a response.
ken

[Samuel Zalanga]

And the preceding point makes this point relevant:

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America Paperback – August 17, 2006

by Ira Katznelson (Author)

--

Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

Samuel Zalanga
Department of Anthropology, Sociology & Reconciliation Studies
Bethel University, 3900 Bethel Drive #24
Saint Paul, MN 55112.
Office Phone: 651-638-6023

[Abidogun, Jamaine M]

In my experience and with the lived reality of growing up in America (urban and rural) and working in academia; I would say we have a long way to go before anything is an “advantage” in terms of being black in America.  What I hear between the lines is that  - if you make it through the gauntlet, as an African American or other underrepresented group, then you are likely to find a job in academia. Then the question is asked: why are you being hired. Well hopefully because they see your credentials and want to hire the best and the brightest.  Unfortunately, even if that is why you are hired, you will still be counted somewhere by someone as meeting a diversity criteria  for accreditation and once again those in power see you as the OTHER. Because those in power remain predominately white and male – yes there are sprinklings of the rest. 

 

But it is the gauntlet that higher education should be addressing if they are sincere about ending racism, classism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, etc. in America.  That gauntlet has been described over and over again on this list serv – who makes it and who doesn’t and why.  We are a racist country and to think that a few diversity initiatives in our own house will change that is naïve.  That is a start, but will not change our future on its own. What will help change it is forcing our administrators and faculty to look at their education programs that train our PK-12 teachers and administrators.  Racism is as alive today as it was during slavery in America; its form is radicalized in some ways (e.g. skinheads and police assaults) and in other ways increased microaggressions (e.g. higher suspension and convictions rates for African Americans, poor people, etc.).  Don’t fool yourself – it only takes being stopped by or running into a racist, bigoted person one time to taint the rest of your existence in this country and being in academics won’t save you from that reality.  Being white and male will save you from the reality and particularly white, male, and middle to upper class.  I don’t think Kwabena is saying he hates whites; he is stating a fact white privilege exists.  It exists whether Ken or any of the rest of us want it to exist.  It is good that the academy recognizes that it needs fixing, but by the time people reach the mountain (i.e. higher ed) they have lost most of their brothers and sisters along the way and we sit around and pat ourselves on the back that we, as academics, are inclusive.

 

I pray and fight for us all.  As a social scientist and teacher educator, I teach multicultural education and African and American cultural history and studies.  The white backlash regarding Ferguson and Baltimore is palatable in my classrooms.  These students will become teachers and will influence our society exponentially.  Hopefully the educational training they are receiving will result in their being a part of the solution, but racism is power and whether they are prepared to give up that power or any other form of power, sexism, classism, etc… is yet to be seen on a wide scale.

 

On another level I am a university level “diversity fellow” as Ken mentioned and my experience with higher administration is that they don’t want to deal with these long term, long range issues head on.  They are not prepared to make a sustainable difference.  Especially when it comes to investing in creating a stronger pipeline to get diverse students into higher education and more importantly support them through to graduation.

 

With Peace,

Jamaine Abidogun

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

 

 

“what kruger's article shows is that whites being pushed into the poorer categories begin

to show the same negative numbers as poor black people.”

 

Nebulous, fuzzy, quasi-tautological  conclusion signifying little.

He is probably an apologist after all.

 

My mother’s soup is tastier than that of everyone else…. Or maybe Michigan

State is probably the exception.

 

I thought that it was common knowledge that the revolving door is  still very much in operation for those

Black faculty who managed to get in initially. With the help of jaundiced evaluation reports they are

often pushed out. (That is a whole big story for another day.) Hiring is one thing.

Retention is another.

 

Black faculty are more likely to be part time associate professors

than white, regardless of qualification.

 

So the  administrative response  was slow in coming and you lost the female and minority candidates?

Well , unknown to you, that was probably  part of the plan. They know how to shuffle the pack for a

pre-determined outcome - and when. I may be wrong.

 

But Kwabena is quite accurate in his analysis. In fact he has given  us  a quotable quote:

 

Efforts at inclusion  are “ as miragic as a sea in the Saharan region! They are just cosmetic additions to

perpetualizing the disempowerment of the Other……  Equity, diversity, equal opportunity,

non-discrimination, etc. trumpeted in the American academy are biddable constructs

subjected to different frames and reference as well as multiple renderings and applications.” 

 

Gloria Emeagwali

www.africahistory.net

[Kwabena Akurang-Parry]

Ken we are all retailing lived experiences and perceptions and embedded in such social architectural frameworks are individual and broadly defined collective ones. Thus yours is as much an opinion as mine. If you are not speaking on behalf of any group, neither do I presume to speak to any collective experiences of all faculty of color. Even if my take was based on a personal storm, what you call a different experience, it mirrors racialization of society in America. Note that I am not discounting the efforts to end discrimination against people of African descent in America. That said, my unstated perspective is that race and racism still privilege "whiteness" and disadvantages "blackness" in the American academy. One does not need carefully manicured diplomatic and missionary words to write about the American academic plantation.  I did not go to far Ken! I am a blunt-talking academic and my opinions are not tempered by plantation courtesy!
 

---

Date: Wed, 6 May 2015 13:21:48 -0400

[Bode]

Ken,

I have always wondered what that meant "faculty excellence advocate” but never got to asking you. The idea that "excellence came from greater diversity” is a very visionary and progressive one that stands the argument by those who resent diversity on its head, those who suggest that diversity is the opposite of excellence.  

Bode 

--

[kenneth harrow]

kwabena's quote is great. i just don't agree with it; i don't really believe it is true. and i do believe is it disenabling. that's the point of my intervention: there are ways to think about racism and the society that are more enabling, more empowering. i don't think the tact he is taking will move us is a positive direction. i feel i am on thin ice in making these claims. after all, who am i to speak out?
but msu is not an exception, i am sure. in the end, what started this was the question of how much class plays in the politics of race; i cited kruger to make that point. but the larger point here is how one is to attack the issue of racism. i really do not believe we move it forward with assertions like the one below, "Black faculty are more likely to be part time associate professors than white, regardless of qualification."
and my thin ice lies in this: i believe firmly that the attitude that subscribes to this is disenabling. i also do not believe it is true.

one might say, as kwabena basically did, that i have no right to such an opinion, that i am among the privileged, and know nothing. that's where i move from thin ice to thick ice: i have no doubt as much grounds to make claims of my views of race going back a long time, not to say i can speak directly of suffering the experience of racism, but of knowing what racial politics look like in the u.s., or especially in the circles in which i've lived and traveled.
i feel we all belong to a political universe where our experiences and knowledge really demand we speak out, without being a member of the race, religion, gender, etc. that's what i'm doing: criticizing an attitude toward race that does the opposite of advancing our situation.

ken

[Kwabena Akurang-Parry]

Ken:
Thank you. I think our respective points are well made.
Kwabena.
 

---

Date: Wed, 6 May 2015 16:47:24 -0400

[kenneth harrow]

ok kwabena
i can agree with this. it is well put
i can also bring up a lot of the larger unpleasantness and worse black faculty and students have experienced on my campus, and in east lansing. very familiar stories to everyone on this list, such as a colleague of mine, a black man of about 50 years, being stopped by a policeman on campus and questioned. he was a black-riding-a-bike. it was incredibly insulting. a few years ago a black grad student was also questioned about a crime, in the library, and the officer pulled a gun when the student reached for his id!!
these were horrendous. stories of black faculty and students being followed by police cars, pulled over, etc. endless such stories.
i agree this is the society we have today; i also know the blow-back these events occasioned, and they were considerable. the police woman who pulled the gun was placed on leave, and training sessions involving black faculty and the police were held. i do believe their attitudes were much affected.

i am speaking not about a situation which has become remedied; but one which is being addressed. as i spend summers usually in france i know they are not addressed there, by and large. the importance of moving a society so that it can recognize a problem, and see it as a problem, mobilize people to change, that matters a lot.

finally, if we were to discuss your proposition, maybe the key one, that whiteness is privileged in the academy and blackness disadvantaged, the only place i would know to begin is to consider my own experiences, and those of others. i've been on lots of tenure and promotion committees, and seen the way they've worked. that counts just as much as your own experiences, and nothing more. but i'd ask my friends, say at conferences, and get their experiences before i'd try to formulate any solid claims. it is true i imagine much of academe is like msu, since i think we are an ordinary big ten land-grant school. and my experiences here don't really bear out that claim. at the same time, the pressures on black faculty can be enormous and debilitating; but not so much because of racism again them. they might be called to serve on more committees so as to give "diversity" to the committees. there are social circumstances that can be stressful. i've heard that as well.

 i don't know how it works in other colleges. east lansing is not new york, after all.
if we offer these experiences up to the list, it is so that other voices might share their own experiences, and that would make any real claims more valid than just our own.
ken

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

 

 

Jamaine , thanks  for your illuminating piece.

 

About conviction rates:

 

 

Just a recap -

 

India has a population of 1.2 billion persons and has 332,000 prisoners.

 

China has a population of about 1.3 billion persons with 1.5 million prisoners.

 

The USA has a population of about 318 million persons with 2.1 million prisoners.

 

Blacks are about 13 % of the population but are about 40% of convicts,  at over a million plus.

So the million dollar question is this:

 

Given what we know about racial profiling,  differential convictions for

drug- related offenses, speeding etc-  are Blacks  in the dungeon because of their class-

 or because of their race?

 

Once convicted what are the chances of upward mobility to that

elusive middle class?

 

The  real issue is not about the middle class but those excluded from getting there.

 

Gloria

 

www. africahistory.net

[kenneth harrow]

gloria
i didn't deny racism exists. but i'd want to ask another question in relation to your statistics. if blacks constitute 40% of the convicts, what is the class of the remaining 60%? you and i know it is not for white collar crimes.
class counts too. you wrote, is it because of their race or their class. it is both.
if you want to say, not equally, then i'd agree. race adds to class; but to prove my point, what percentage of the black prisoners are middle class? upper class? compared with poor, working class.
ken

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Brother Ken,

There are two flaws in Wilson's work (and most other mainstream scholars): 1) he takes white middle class "behavior" as normative. So, for example, white America's general refusal to acknowledge white privilege is, in my view, a sort of anti-black violence. 2) State sanctioned violence (local police, National Guard, Armed Forces) is unmarked and un-analyzed as violence (like Wall Street theft is rarely criminalized). Thus Wilson winds up with just another tired variant of the cultural deficit model.

In other words, poverty doesnt predict crime and violence, it predicts certain types of crime and violence. This is important. The consequence is that we wind up analyzing certain sorts of violence that are associated with poverty while virtually ignoring the sorts of crimes/violence that is more likely to be perpetuated by the mostly white upper class. But beyond that I think you exaggerate the influence of class on the quality of life of African Americans. I also think you overstate the degree to which American society has changed.

There is lots of data out there suggesting that not much has changed and, indeed, in some ways we have gone backwards (Indeed, Harold Cruse argues in Crisis of the Negro Intellectual that integration was a disaster for Black progress and self-determination). A few examples come to mind: You seem to suggest that hiring white women at your university is equivalent with, say, a black female hire. But white women have made substantial gains from affirmative action legislation even as a subset of white women are on the front lines in the effort to dismantle AA.

We should bear in mind that AA was originally a racial redress for centuries of white power. It was watered down and morphed into "diversity" in the 70s after the Bakke decision. White women, as members of white nuclear families, have benefited from and supported white supremacy which was the law of the land for most of America's existence. This is why the work of Black feminist on intersectionality is so crucial.

There is research showing that college educated blacks are less likely to get a call back than whites with education; there remains a vast wealth gap between white and blacks; the black middle-class in chronically susceptible to downward mobility; black males. On and on. The indignities of being black in America are endless. Obama has only made feel a little better about our oppression.

kzs

[kenneth harrow]

kwame,
all good points. for me these claims have to be relativized, that's the only thought i have.
and no matter how much we redefine white middle class behavior as normative, it seems obvious to me that richer people have less incentive to steal than poor people, less need to steal, etc.
if we move up a notch, as you are doing, to associate their normative behavior as theft, as in the marxist notion that property is theft--which is it from the perspective of a collectivity instead of individuals and their rights, then your point can hold. so i am not reading this out along marxist lines, which changes things a bit.

it seems nonetheless, that no matter how you measure it the structure of the black community overall has changed. there is no comparison to the past when almost none, or no black students were making their way into the professions. if you say,  ok, this is the first black oral surgeon in the community, and then 50 years later there are 100 black oral surgeons, you can't deny that the med schools opened up, that jobs became available. it flies in the face of reason to deny the enormous changes. i don't want to get into describing what it was like in the 50s, when i grew up in mount vernon, but we could call them the pre-Denzel Washington days.
i have to work hard to swing around to your perspective, and can't move all the way over to say it is the same, not when i know the professoriate was mostly devoid of black people, except in hbcus. now we are fighting for proportional hiring, for equal pay, for just admissions, for adequate support to students, for black studies programs, for curricula changes, for greater numbers of minorities in the administration, for all those things that were unheard of 60 years ago. unimaginable 60 years ago.
all the things you are saying about black feminist are wonderful; no one said them in past years, so we have to ask, when did the change begin to happen, how did it happen, where are we now.
i can;t believe it does any good to disparage the enormous changes that have been made. i will cite just one, and quit. i came to msu in 1966. at that time no blacks were allowed to own homes in east lansing. so when we hired a black man the next year, he had to rent in a trailer park on the outskirts of east lansing, in what's called meridian township. the following year the color line was  broken, through the efforts of a few smart decent people who outwitted the real estate companies with their silent agreements. at the same time, students began agitating for black studies.

you know we could write books about that struggle, alongside the books about angela davis and her struggle at that time.(shola lynch has a great movie now, Angel Davis).
 it seems to me you are writing off not only the efforts of so many people, but the accomplishments, to say nothing has changed.

of course lots of inequalities remain; of course far too many black men are in prison. but that's only half the story, half the population you are talking about. white privilege means ignoring the role of black people in making those changes; or rather, not needing to acknowledge that role. but there is another kind of privilege, some kind of ideological privilege, that entails seeing things so absolutely that the relative accomplishments, and the struggle for them, get discounted.
making things normative drives all of our thinking, and it is hard to see ideology when we are in ideology. your pushing helps me try to resquint my thinking. but as you can see, i can only get so far before the image gets distorted.
good work kwame. i'll work at it some more
ken

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Hi Ken,

I concede that my wording was a bit too strong. Yes, you are absolutely correct. There have been some significant changes. In fact, I am always careful to tell my students that 2015 is not 1965. There are, however, lots of caveats and counterpoints to be raised. Its easy to document that we have also lost ground and continue to lose ground on important gains made in the 60s. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act, for example.

So what exactly has changed? Overwhelming brute violence was defeated. We did that. However, as the "Black Lives Matter" movement has highlighted, police brutality is still a major problem. And while we have done away with Jim Crow laws, we haven't come close to rooting out institutional racism in our schools, our jurisprudence system, healthcare, labor. Furthermore, taking your point about class, integration mostly advantaged black elites on some level. But blacks across class have been negatively impacted by the decimation of Black communities post-Civil Rights and the instability of Black middle-class status (as I noted in my previous post on downward mobility).

I have talked to many elders about Jim Crow, including my mom. They report that the black family structure was weakened by the single-minded integrationist approach of the (Jewish-controlled) NAACP. Back around 2003, I put the question to the legendary historian John Hope Franklin. He cautioned me against romanticizing about Jim Crow Black communities, but he conceded that far too many African Americans remain, in his words "bottom stuck." And I have talked to a good number of freedom fighters from the 1960s who say that Black youth are worse off in some ways today. They site mass surveillance, weakened family structures, and mass incarceration as acute problems. I seem to recall Angela Davis has also highlighted these issues in public lectures as instances of being worse off.

To borrow Malcolm X's metaphor, if America has been stabbing us in our collective backs for centuries, then pulling the knife halfway out of our backs is not progress. Progress cant happen until the knife is pulled out and someone attends to the damage caused by the knife. That might mean, say, the psychic damage caused by centuries of white terror. I insist that it necessitates a massive (not just monetary) reparations project. But how do we get there when large swaths of white Americans today won't even admit that there is a problem, much less do something to address the problems? So I dont think its enough to say that there has been progress and we have much work to do. The reality is that the majority of white Americans have never taken redress seriously. In fact they have stubbornly resisted it.

kzs

...

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Ken you have inadvertently changed the argument and also lowered the bar.

From the intricacies of race and class we have now moved to a slightly
different discussion about whether or not
Black people can now buy a house, go to medical school or teach in the academy.

Unfortunately I misplaced my favorite book on argumentation and fallacies by Fisher
so I don't know what to call this one.

Now that you have lowered the bar, though,
I would say that I agree with you.

It is true. Black people can now rent and buy houses
and teach in universities, too. Gee whiz.

On the question of the class identity of Black prisoners, let me
point out that even if you entered prison as a middle class
achiever, chances are that you may find yourself in a downward spiral,
with a shorter life span, when or if you leave. Getting a job to sustain youself
becomes a challenge since employers don't like to hire ex-cons.
Before you know it you may be back in the dungeon.

But let the criminologists comment on this one.


Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department
CCSU. New Britain. CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on
Africa and the African Diaspora

________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow [har...@msu.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2015 9:55 PM

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

kwame,
all good points. for me these claims have to be relativized, that's the only thought i have.
and no matter how much we redefine white middle class behavior as normative, it seems obvious to me that richer people have less incentive to steal than poor people, less need to steal, etc.
if we move up a notch, as you are doing, to associate their normative behavior as theft, as in the marxist notion that property is theft--which is it from the perspective of a collectivity instead of individuals and their rights, then your point can hold. so i am not reading this out along marxist lines, which changes things a bit.

it seems nonetheless, that no matter how you measure it the structure of the black community overall has changed. there is no comparison to the past when almost none, or no black students were making their way into the professions. if you say, ok, this is the first black oral surgeon in the community, and then 50 years later there are 100 black oral surgeons, you can't deny that the med schools opened up, that jobs became available. it flies in the face of reason to deny the enormous changes. i don't want to get into describing what it was like in the 50s, when i grew up in mount vernon, but we could call them the pre-Denzel Washington days.
i have to work hard to swing around to your perspective, and can't move all the way over to say it is the same, not when i know the professoriate was mostly devoid of black people, except in hbcus. now we are fighting for proportional hiring, for equal pay, for just admissions, for adequate support to students, for black studies programs, for curricula changes, for greater numbers of minorities in the administration, for all those things that were unheard of 60 years ago. unimaginable 60 years ago.
all the things you are saying about black feminist are wonderful; no one said them in past years, so we have to ask, when did the change begin to happen, how did it happen, where are we now.
i can;t believe it does any good to disparage the enormous changes that have been made. i will cite just one, and quit. i came to msu in 1966. at that time no blacks were allowed to own homes in east lansing. so when we hired a black man the next year, he had to rent in a trailer park on the outskirts of east lansing, in what's called meridian township. the following year the color line was broken, through the efforts of a few smart decent people who outwitted the real estate companies with their silent agreements. at the same time, students began agitating for black studies.

you know we could write books about that struggle, alongside the books about angela davis and her struggle at that time.(shola lynch has a great movie now, Angel Davis).
it seems to me you are writing off not only the efforts of so many people, but the accomplishments, to say nothing has changed.

of course lots of inequalities remain; of course far too many black men are in prison. but that's only half the story, half the population you are talking about. white privilege means ignoring the role of black people in making those changes; or rather, not needing to acknowledge that role. but there is another kind of privilege, some kind of ideological privilege, that entails seeing things so absolutely that the relative accomplishments, and the struggle for them, get discounted.
making things normative drives all of our thinking, and it is hard to see ideology when we are in ideology. your pushing helps me try to resquint my thinking. but as you can see, i can only get so far before the image gets distorted.
good work kwame. i'll work at it some more
ken

On 5/6/15 8:02 PM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:
Brother Ken,

There are two flaws in Wilson's work (and most other mainstream scholars): 1) he takes white middle class "behavior" as normative. So, for example, white America's general refusal to acknowledge white privilege is, in my view, a sort of anti-black violence. 2) State sanctioned violence (local police, National Guard, Armed Forces) is unmarked and un-analyzed as violence (like Wall Street theft is rarely criminalized). Thus Wilson winds up with just another tired variant of the cultural deficit model.

In other words, poverty doesnt predict crime and violence, it predicts certain types of crime and violence. This is important. The consequence is that we wind up analyzing certain sorts of violence that are associated with poverty while virtually ignoring the sorts of crimes/violence that is more likely to be perpetuated by the mostly white upper class. But beyond that I think you exaggerate the influence of class on the quality of life of African Americans. I also think you overstate the degree to which American society has changed.

There is lots of data out there suggesting that not much has changed and, indeed, in some ways we have gone backwards (Indeed, Harold Cruse argues in Crisis of the Negro Intellectual that integration was a disaster for Black progress and self-determination). A few examples come to mind: You seem to suggest that hiring white women at your university is equivalent with, say, a black female hire. But white women have made substantial gains from affirmative action legislation even as a subset of white women are on the front lines in the effort to dismantle AA.

We should bear in mind that AA was originally a racial redress for centuries of white power. It was watered down and morphed into "diversity" in the 70s after the Bakke decision. White women, as members of white nuclear families, have benefited from and supported white supremacy which was the law of the land for most of America's existence. This is why the work of Black feminist on intersectionality is so crucial.

There is research showing that college educated blacks are less likely<http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/black-men-need-more-education-to-get-the-same-jobs/375770/> to get a call back than whites with education; there remains a vast wealth gap<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gap_n_6317202.html> between white and blacks; the black middle-class in chronically susceptible to downward mobility<http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/01/24/the-american-dream-shatters-in-prince-georges-county/>; black males. On and on. The indignities of being black in America are endless. Obama has only made feel a little better about our oppression.

kzs

On Wednesday, May 6, 2015 at 9:22:14 AM UTC-5, Kenneth Harrow wrote:
just to give the gist of the krugman editorial:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article

"The great sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago that widely-decried social changes among blacks, like the decline of traditional families, were actually caused by the disappearance of well-paying jobs in inner cities. His argument contained an implicit prediction: if other racial groups were to face a similar loss of job opportunity, their behavior would change in similar ways.

And so it has proved. Lagging wages — actually declining in real terms for half of working men — and work instability have been followed by sharp declines in marriage, rising births out of wedlock, and more.

As Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution writes: “Blacks have faced, and will continue to face, unique challenges. But when we look for the reasons why less skilled blacks are failing to marry and join the middle class, it is largely for the same reasons that marriage and a middle-class lifestyle is eluding a growing number of whites as well.”

Continue reading the main story<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article#story-continues-5>

On 5/6/15 3:20 AM, Kwabena Akurang-Parry wrote:
Class affects one's conditions and lived experiences within "racial" or "ethnic" categories. But in America, for example, it is"race" that defines discrimination to the extent that marginalized whites have better opportunities than blacks located in any part of the vertical space.

> Date: Tue, 5 May 2015 18:44:11 -0400

> From: har...@msu.edu<https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>
> To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>

> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)
>
> gloria
> have you seen krugman's column in which he argues that you have to
> include class in determining the debilitating effects of discrimination.
> it is very compelling. basically he says, when people, white as well as
> black, have become poorer, they don't live as long or as well.
> here is the column he wrote a few days ago:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article
>
> it shouldn't be an all or nothing argument. middle class black people
> are indeed subject to maltreatment more than are whites; but the larger
> picture has to include more than race to explain the factors in society
> that impact people's lives.
> ken
>
>
> On 5/5/15 4:50 PM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) wrote:
> > Sun May 03, 2015 , http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in-the-United-States?detail=email
> >

> > The most racist areas in the United States<http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in-the-United-States><http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in-the-United-States>
> >
> > bySusan Grigsby<http://dailykos.com/user/Susan%20Grigsby><http://dailykos.com/user/Susan%20Grigsby> forDaily Kos<http://dailykos.com/blog/main><http://dailykos.com/blog/main>
> >
> > [https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/attachment.ashx?id=RgAAAACIR4fP8%2fDSEaNAAAD4YBApBwDd9LcDLkTSEaMkAKDJ4RrzAAAA7%2f1AAACG0aK%2bn4McSrUVwdL4l7nbAFDo8iUEAAAJ&attcnt=1&attid0=EAAIhqf4v5x1SKTZJ2smsTOj]<http://images.dailykos.com/images/141407/lightbox/journal.pone.0122963.g001_copy.jpg?1430691641><http://images.dailykos.com/images/141407/lightbox/journal.pone.0122963.g001_copy.jpg?1430691641>
> >
> > There are neighborhoods in Baltimore in which the life expectancy is 19 years less than other neighborhoods in the same city. Residents of the Downtown/Seaton Hill neighborhood have a life expectancy lower than 229 other nations, exceeded only by Yemen. According to the Washington Post<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/30/baltimores-poorest-residents-die-20-years-earlier-than-its-richest/?wpisrc=nl_wnkpm&wpmm=1><http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/30/baltimores-poorest-residents-die-20-years-earlier-than-its-richest/?wpisrc=nl_wnkpm&wpmm=1>, 15 neighborhoods in Baltimore have a lower life expectancy than North Korea.

> >
> > And while those figures represent some of the most dramatic disparities in the life expectancy of black Americans as opposed to whites, a recent study of the health impacts of racism in America reveals that racist attitudes may cause up to 30,000 early deaths every year.
> >

> > The study, Association between an Internet-Based Measure of Area Racism and Black Mortality<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122963#pone.0122963.ref042><http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122963#pone.0122963.ref042>, has just been published in PLOS ONE and has mapped out the most racist areas in the United States. As illustrated above, they are mostly located in the rural Northeast and down along the Appalachian Mountains into the South. How they did it and what it may mean are below the fold.

> > We already know about the racism that led to Jim Crow, the KKK, and lynchings. We also know about the racism that has become embedded in our justice system, from cops who kill, to prosecutors who ensure that blacks receive longer prison terms than do whites. We know that those sentencing disparities lead to greater disenfranchisement of blacks.
> >
> > We think we know how racism has injured and killed black Americans. But do we really? There are the obvious cases, like Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, but what about the silent killers? The hypertension and the chronic medical conditions that lead so many more blacks to an early grave than they do whites. Could racist attitudes lead to 30,000 early deaths every year?
> >
> > According to the authors of the study, current research points to a variety of causes for the disparities in health between white and black Americans, many of which can be traced to racial segregation. Many blacks are restricted to high-crime neighborhoods that are lacking in outdoor recreational areas, access to healthy foods, and decent health care. Discrimination in employment leads to lower wages that further impact the ability to enjoy healthy food, exercise, and recreation.
> >
> > The authors also point out that:
> > ... racial discrimination may also directly impact health by engaging psychobiological mechanisms induced in the stress response
> > In other words, stress, especially chronic stress, is bad for your health. This isn't really news. Experiences of racial discrimination are often accompanied by a sense of powerlessness, of anxiety, and of anger. These stressors, especially over a lifetime, can lead to negative health impacts. Jon Stewart did not know how right he was when he said, "If racism is something you're sick of hearing about, imagine how exhausting it must be living it every day."
> > As a source of chronic psychosocial stress, repeated racism may result in a heightened pro-inflammatory state that can have particularly detrimental consequences for the etiology and progression of cardiovascular and other immune disorders. Studies on discrimination have found evidence for adverse consequences for hypertension, atherosclerosis, and their inflammatory mediators. A recent study found that racism-related factors may also be associated with accelerated aging at the cellular level.
> > Past studies have had problems quantifying racism. They can look at localized institutional racism via housing and employment, or they can rely on self-reported incidents of racism. Of course, self-reported attitudes are difficult to verify and are subject to self-censorship, especially in regard to micro-aggressions and racism without a clear perpetrator, and institutional studies don't actually reflect racist attitudes as much as their results.
> >
> > The authors of this study have turned to internet searches using the "N-word" for help in finding areas of racist attitudes in America.
> > This measure, calculated based on Internet search queries containing the “N-word”, was strongly associated with the differential in 2008 votes for Barack Obama, the Black Democratic presidential candidate, vs. 2004 votes for John Kerry, the White Democratic presidential candidate.
> > The study authors used the designated market areas (DMA) as defined by the Nielsen Media Research. Residents within these DMAs generally receive their information from common television and/or radio broadcasts and newspapers, providing similar messages that influence racial attitudes. The authors make clear that not all searches for the "N-word" are due to racial bias and that not all residents in a DMA share racist attitudes, but the volume of the available data provides a high signal-to-noise ratio.
> >
> > Using this information to find areas in which racism is alive and well, they then looked at black mortality rates using data from 2004–2009, collated by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). They examined four leading causes of death among blacks: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes. Unsurprisingly, they found a significant association between the racism indicated by the internet searches and an increase in black mortality.
> > Results from our study indicate that living in an area characterized by a one standard deviation greater proportion of racist Google searches is associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause mortality rate among Blacks. This effect estimate amounts to over 30,000 deaths among Blacks annually nationwide.
> >
> > These findings indicate that area racism, as indexed by the proportion of Google searches containing the “N-word”, is significantly associated with not only the all-cause Black mortality rate, but also Black-White disparities in mortality.
> > Racism doesn't just kill with a bullet to the back, it also kills by a thousand cuts, silently and mostly unnoticed.
> >

> > Was it only a year ago that Ta-Nehisi Coates made the Case for Reparations<http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/><http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/>? Reparations, hell, how about we stop killing black Americans first, and then discuss a way to repay them for the massive wrongs that have been done.

> > New York state police handcuff and shackle 'combative' five-year-old
> >
> > * Officers arrived after school reported boy was disruptive and uncontrollable
> > * They handcuffed him for ‘his safety’ and safety of staff, spokesman says

> > Ed Pilkington<http://www.theguardian.com/profile/edpilkington><http://www.theguardian.com/profile/edpilkington> in New York

> > Monday 4 May 2015 , The Guardian (UK)
> > The idea that police officers should use handcuffs and leg shackles to control an unruly individual is hardly unusual in the US, where fondness for the use of metal restraints runs through the criminal justice system.
> > What is unusual is when the individual in question is five years old, and the arrest takes place in an elementary school.

> > New York state police were called last week to the primary school in Philadelphia, New York<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/new-york><http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/new-york>, close to the Canadian border, after staff reported that a pupil, Connor Ruiz, was disruptive and uncontrollable. When officers arrived at the premises, they placed the five-year-old boy in handcuffs, carried him out to a patrol car and put his feet into shackles before taking him to a medical center for evaluation.
> > The child’s mother, Chelsea Ruiz, told the local Watertown Daily Times<http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/news03/fort-drum-parents-irate-after-police-handcuff-shackle-5-year-old-special-needs-student--20150502><http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/news03/fort-drum-parents-irate-after-police-handcuff-shackle-5-year-old-special-needs-student--20150502> she was shocked and angered by what had happened.

> > “An officer told me they had to handcuff his wrists and ankles for their safety,” she said. “I told him that was ridiculous. How could someone fear for their safety when it comes to a small, five-year-old child?”
> > A spokesman for the state police force, Jack Keller, justified the constraints on grounds that the child was “out of control” and “combative”, and was deemed to be a danger to himself or staff. Troopers had found him “screaming, kicking, punching and biting”.
> > “Our concern was his safety, of not only himself but the staff he was dealing with and the other students in the class where he was,” Keller said.

> > Handcuffing of young children is frequently<http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2014/12/children-handcuffed-by-police-at-katong/><http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2014/12/children-handcuffed-by-police-at-katong/> reported<http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-handcuff-9-year-special-child-elementary-school/><http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-handcuff-9-year-special-child-elementary-school/> in the US. Last December, a child aged four was handcuffed in Nathanael Greene primary school in Stanardsville, Virginia.
> > In 2013, the handcuffing of a nine-year-old girl in Portland<http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/10/portland_police_will_be_restri.html><http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/10/portland_police_will_be_restri.html>, Oregon prompted a public outcry that forced the police department to revise its rules. The new procedures forbid officers from handcuffing a child under 12, unless they pose a “heightened risk to safety”.

> > Ruiz said that two weeks ago she had placed her son in a special-needs class, precisely to avoid the kind of incident that occurred when police were called to the school.
> > “We had a plan in place so they would call me to come to the school if they couldn’t calm him down,” she said, “and they didn’t do that.”
> > She said Connor was “terrified of going back to school”, and added that she planned to transfer him to a different school district.
> >
>
> --
> kenneth w. harrow
> faculty excellence advocate
> professor of english
> michigan state university
> department of english
> 619 red cedar road
> room C-614 wells hall
> east lansing, mi 48824
> ph. 517 803 8839

> har...@msu.edu<https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>

>
> --
> Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin

> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>
> To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com<https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>

> Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>.

> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin

To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com<https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>

Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


--
kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839

har...@msu.edu<https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin

To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com>

Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


--
kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839

har...@msu.edu<mailto:har...@msu.edu>

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

[kenneth harrow]

dear kwame
just had a long discussion with a young colleague, a woman of color, and she was much more in agreement with you than with me!
(old dogs learn slowly)

ken

On 5/6/15 8:02 PM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

[Anunoby, Ogugua]

Ken,

 

What does “woman of color” mean?

Why in good conscience, would anyone, describe another, especially a colleague they just had an intelligent conversation with, a “person of color”? Was it inevitable that this colleague be so described? Taken literarily, every person is a person of color. That characterization is a discriminatory slur- a relic of America’s racist past that will not go away for the reason it was used below- skin color for some, is a difference that sets apart the members of the human race more than anything else. It should be unacceptable, roundly rejected, and condemned by all. It is neither comfort nor defense that some themselves are so characterized, use it about themselves.

I must state categorically that I am disappointed, very disappointed, the term has been used by choice, by a much respected member of this forum, from whom I believe many forum members including me, have learned a lot. I am sorry Ken. I am truly disappointed.

“Old dogs learn slowly” but not all learning should be slow.

 

oa

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Hi Ken,

I appreciate your candor. I'm a younger dog; we are all slowly learning.

It took many centuries to get us to this point. In time, if we continue to work it out, we can leave things a bit better for future generations.

Forward ever,

kzs

...

[Bode]

OA:

That is a question of personal preference. There are certain terms that may have originated in the past with certain connotations but whose usage have changed. A colleague teaches the course below, certainly not intended as a slur. If you reject the term color, there are many others who embrace it. I consider it cheap shot, actually. Black is another term we tried to consign to the past but remains with us: black and proud!

350:387 Women in Worlds of Color

Explores writings and other visual and musical art forms by women of color from around the world in relationship to questions of gender and sexual identity, the representation of the female body, and the expression of female voice.

 

As to the argument about whether things have gotten better or whether they have remained the same. It is a false dichotomy because better and worse are always relative. Better in many ways, and static or worse in other ways. I find Ken’s argument as compelling as Zulu’s. We have to accept the paradox or fall into despair or delusion. Class trumps race or race trumps class? It will always depend on the individual and the circumstances.

Bode  

[Chambi Chachage]

Kwame, it seems you are 'disillusioned' by your 'old dog' Harvard Professor. There is this 'younger dog' who has joined the faculty there. What do you think of his works on the same subject? Below is an introduction to his book.

Renegade Dreams

LIVING THROUGH INJURY IN GANGLAND CHICAGO

Read an excerpt "Nostalgia, or the Stories a Gang Tells about Itself".

LAURENCE RALPH

256 pages | 1 halftone | 6 x 9 | © 2014

Every morning Chicagoans wake up to the same stark headlines that read like some macabre score: “13 shot, 4 dead overnight across the city,” and nearly every morning the same elision occurs: what of the nine other victims? As with war, much of our focus on inner-city violence is on the death toll, but the reality is that far more victims live to see another day and must cope with their injuries—both physical and psychological—for the rest of their lives. Renegade Dreams is their story. Walking the streets of one of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods—where the local gang has been active for more than fifty years—Laurence Ralph talks with people whose lives are irrecoverably damaged, seeking to understand how they cope and how they can be better helped.

           

Going deep into a West Side neighborhood most Chicagoans only know from news reports—a place where children have been shot just for crossing the wrong street—Ralph unearths the fragile humanity that fights to stay alive there, to thrive, against all odds. He talks to mothers, grandmothers, and pastors, to activists and gang leaders, to the maimed and the hopeful, to aspiring rappers, athletes, or those who simply want safe passage to school or a steady job. Gangland Chicago, he shows, is as complicated as ever. It’s not just a warzone but a community, a place where people’s dreams are projected against the backdrop of unemployment, dilapidated housing, incarceration, addiction, and disease, the many hallmarks of urban poverty that harden like so many scars in their lives. Recounting their stories, he wrestles with what it means to be an outsider in a place like this, whether or not his attempt to understand, to help, might not in fact inflict its own damage. Ultimately he shows that the many injuries these people carry—like dreams—are a crucial form of resilience, and that we should all think about the ghetto differently, not as an abandoned island of unmitigated violence and its helpless victims but as a neighborhood, full of homes, as a part of the larger society in which we all live, together, among one another.

Renegade Dreams

				Renegade Dreams Every morning Chicagoans wake up to the same stark headlines that read like some macabre score: “13 shot, 4 dead overnight across the city,” and nearly every mornin...
				View on press.uchicago.edu	Preview by Yahoo

 

---

From: kwame zulu shabazz <kwames...@gmail.com>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thursday, May 7, 2015 10:32 PM

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

dear kwame

> > There are neighborhoods in Baltimore in which the life expectancy is 19 years less than other neighborhoods in the same city. Residents of the Downtown/Seaton Hill neighborhood have a life expectancy lower than 229 other nations, exceeded only by Yemen. According to the Washington Post<http://www. washingtonpost.com/blogs/ wonkblog/wp/2015/04/30/ baltimores-poorest-residents- die-20-years-earlier-than-its- richest/?wpisrc=nl_wnkpm&wpmm= 1>, 15 neighborhoods in Baltimore have a lower life expectancy than North Korea.

> >
> > And while those figures represent some of the most dramatic disparities in the life expectancy of black Americans as opposed to whites, a recent study of the health impacts of racism in America reveals that racist attitudes may cause up to 30,000 early deaths every year.
> >

> > The study, Association between an Internet-Based Measure of Area Racism and Black Mortality<http://journals. plos.org/plosone/article?id= 10.1371/journal.pone.0122963# pone.0122963.ref042>, has just been published in PLOS ONE and has mapped out the most racist areas in the United States. As illustrated above, they are mostly located in the rural Northeast and down along the Appalachian Mountains into the South. How they did it and what it may mean are below the fold.

> > We already know about the racism that led to Jim Crow, the KKK, and lynchings. We also know about the racism that has become embedded in our justice system, from cops who kill, to prosecutors who ensure that blacks receive longer prison terms than do whites. We know that those sentencing disparities lead to greater disenfranchisement of blacks.
> >
> > We think we know how racism has injured and killed black Americans. But do we really? There are the obvious cases, like Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, but what about the silent killers? The hypertension and the chronic medical conditions that lead so many more blacks to an early grave than they do whites. Could racist attitudes lead to 30,000 early deaths every year?
> >
> > According to the authors of the study, current research points to a variety of causes for the disparities in health between white and black Americans, many of which can be traced to racial segregation. Many blacks are restricted to high-crime neighborhoods that are lacking in outdoor recreational areas, access to healthy foods, and decent health care. Discrimination in employment leads to lower wages that further impact the ability to enjoy healthy food, exercise, and recreation.
> >
> > The authors also point out that:
> > ... racial discrimination may also directly impact health by engaging psychobiological mechanisms induced in the stress response
> > In other words, stress, especially chronic stress, is bad for your health. This isn't really news. Experiences of racial discrimination are often accompanied by a sense of powerlessness, of anxiety, and of anger. These stressors, especially over a lifetime, can lead to negative health impacts. Jon Stewart did not know how right he was when he said, "If racism is something you're sick of hearing about, imagine how exhausting it must be living it every day."
> > As a source of chronic psychosocial stress, repeated racism may result in a heightened pro-inflammatory state that can have particularly detrimental consequences for the etiology and progression of cardiovascular and other immune disorders. Studies on discrimination have found evidence for adverse consequences for hypertension, atherosclerosis, and their inflammatory mediators. A recent study found that racism-related factors may also be associated with accelerated aging at the cellular level.
> > Past studies have had problems quantifying racism. They can look at localized institutional racism via housing and employment, or they can rely on self-reported incidents of racism. Of course, self-reported attitudes are difficult to verify and are subject to self-censorship, especially in regard to micro-aggressions and racism without a clear perpetrator, and institutional studies don't actually reflect racist attitudes as much as their results.
> >
> > The authors of this study have turned to internet searches using the "N-word" for help in finding areas of racist attitudes in America.
> > This measure, calculated based on Internet search queries containing the “N-word”, was strongly associated with the differential in 2008 votes for Barack Obama, the Black Democratic presidential candidate, vs. 2004 votes for John Kerry, the White Democratic presidential candidate.
> > The study authors used the designated market areas (DMA) as defined by the Nielsen Media Research. Residents within these DMAs generally receive their information from common television and/or radio broadcasts and newspapers, providing similar messages that influence racial attitudes. The authors make clear that not all searches for the "N-word" are due to racial bias and that not all residents in a DMA share racist attitudes, but the volume of the available data provides a high signal-to-noise ratio.
> >
> > Using this information to find areas in which racism is alive and well, they then looked at black mortality rates using data from 2004–2009, collated by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). They examined four leading causes of death among blacks: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes. Unsurprisingly, they found a significant association between the racism indicated by the internet searches and an increase in black mortality.
> > Results from our study indicate that living in an area characterized by a one standard deviation greater proportion of racist Google searches is associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause mortality rate among Blacks. This effect estimate amounts to over 30,000 deaths among Blacks annually nationwide.
> >
> > These findings indicate that area racism, as indexed by the proportion of Google searches containing the “N-word”, is significantly associated with not only the all-cause Black mortality rate, but also Black-White disparities in mortality.
> > Racism doesn't just kill with a bullet to the back, it also kills by a thousand cuts, silently and mostly unnoticed.
> >

> > Was it only a year ago that Ta-Nehisi Coates made the Case for Reparations<http://www. theatlantic.com/features/ archive/2014/05/the-case-for- reparations/361631/>? Reparations, hell, how about we stop killing black Americans first, and then discuss a way to repay them for the massive wrongs that have been done.

> > New York state police handcuff and shackle 'combative' five-year-old
> >
> > * Officers arrived after school reported boy was disruptive and uncontrollable
> > * They handcuffed him for ‘his safety’ and safety of staff, spokesman says

> > Ed Pilkington<http://www. theguardian.com/profile/ edpilkington> in New York

> > Monday 4 May 2015 , The Guardian (UK)
> > The idea that police officers should use handcuffs and leg shackles to control an unruly individual is hardly unusual in the US, where fondness for the use of metal restraints runs through the criminal justice system.
> > What is unusual is when the individual in question is five years old, and the arrest takes place in an elementary school.

> > New York state police were called last week to the primary school in Philadelphia, New York<http://www.theguardian. com/us-news/new-york>, close to the Canadian border, after staff reported that a pupil, Connor Ruiz, was disruptive and uncontrollable. When officers arrived at the premises, they placed the five-year-old boy in handcuffs, carried him out to a patrol car and put his feet into shackles before taking him to a medical center for evaluation.
> > The child’s mother, Chelsea Ruiz, told the local Watertown Daily Times<http://www. watertowndailytimes.com/ news03/fort-drum-parents- irate-after-police-handcuff- shackle-5-year-old-special- needs-student--20150502> she was shocked and angered by what had happened.

> > “An officer told me they had to handcuff his wrists and ankles for their safety,” she said. “I told him that was ridiculous. How could someone fear for their safety when it comes to a small, five-year-old child?”
> > A spokesman for the state police force, Jack Keller, justified the constraints on grounds that the child was “out of control” and “combative”, and was deemed to be a danger to himself or staff. Troopers had found him “screaming, kicking, punching and biting”.
> > “Our concern was his safety, of not only himself but the staff he was dealing with and the other students in the class where he was,” Keller said.

> > Handcuffing of young children is frequently<http://www. theonlinecitizen.com/2014/12/ children-handcuffed-by-police- at-katong/> reported<http:// thefreethoughtproject.com/ police-handcuff-9-year- special-child-elementary- school/> in the US. Last December, a child aged four was handcuffed in Nathanael Greene primary school in Stanardsville, Virginia.
> > In 2013, the handcuffing of a nine-year-old girl in Portland<http://www. oregonlive.com/portland/index. ssf/2014/10/portland_police_ will_be_restri.html>, Oregon prompted a public outcry that forced the police department to revise its rules. The new procedures forbid officers from handcuffing a child under 12, unless they pose a “heightened risk to safety”.

> > Ruiz said that two weeks ago she had placed her son in a special-needs class, precisely to avoid the kind of incident that occurred when police were called to the school.
> > “We had a plan in place so they would call me to come to the school if they couldn’t calm him down,” she said, “and they didn’t do that.”
> > She said Connor was “terrified of going back to school”, and added that she planned to transfer him to a different school district.
> >
>
> --
> kenneth w. harrow
> faculty excellence advocate
> professor of english
> michigan state university
> department of english
> 619 red cedar road
> room C-614 wells hall
> east lansing, mi 48824
> ph. 517 803 8839
>

...

--

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Peace, Brother Chambi.

Yes, I know of Ralph's work. He is a young gifted scholar. My journey has been bumpier than most. I think I am a lot more passionate about Africa, a bit more critical of the professoriate, and more radical than most. That said we are both Black anthropologist and attuned to Black "urban" culture. I dont know him personally, but I  imagine we would agree on many things (not that disagreement is a bad thing).

kzs

...

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Bro Ogugua,

"Woman of color" is widely used in the USA. We generally use it to mean someone who is not white. The term is especially prominent among progressives in the US who employ it as a term of solidarity. Besides a subset of my Black nationalist comrades (I'm a Black nationalist), I don't know of anyone who considers "man/woman of color" offensive.

kzs

[Anunoby, Ogugua]

“Person of color” was original intended as a slur- in fact a derogatory term. It remains so. Its users know it is and are obliged by those it is applied to, each time they do not seem to mind they are so characterized. Its usage has not changed. Its meaning has not changed. Anyone the term is applied to who is happy to be so called by a person of a different color in 2015, has all my support to enjoy, even celebrate being so called.

What does “things have got better mean” and for who? Have things got better if the gap between different populations is not getting narrower but is getting wider in some cases?  Things have got better is in many cases, the ruse employed to confuse the inattentive members of the victim classes. Things have gotten better some claim, because Obama was elected president. Voter suppression for example, is worse today than it was before Obama was elected president ensuring that another Obama is not going to be elected president anytime soon. How much better have things really got I dare to ask? Some apologists may argue of course that all of that is politics. May be. There was a different, less repressive type of politics before Obama was elected if I remember correctly. Which community continues to be better off I ask?

 

One of the enduring effect of systemic oppression on its victims is that even a false attempt to hide its effects is considered by some victims to be progress. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) was told by some senior black leaders in the 1950’s and 1960’s that things were getting better and that he (MLK) should not rock the boat. MLK knew that things were not really getting better. He tried to get things to really get better. The rest is history.

 

oa

[Ayo Obe]

That was what I thought too (that "of colour" is the present preferred terminology), but honestly, who can safely negotiate the minefield that is ethnicity identification in the United States?

Ayo

I invite you to follow me on Twitter @naijama

[Farooq A. Kperogi]

OA,

I, too, am not a fan of the term "people of color," but your outrage at Ken's use of it is unjustified and a little over the top. The pragmatics of the expression shows that it's never used as a slur. In contemporary usage, people deploy it to encapsulate a disparate range of identities located on the racial margins in Western societies. Read this insightful NPR piece on the history, uses, and shifting semantic boundaries of the expression: http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/03/30/295931070/the-journey-from-colored-to-minorities-to-people-of-color

Farooq

Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/farooqkperogi

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

[Ikhide]

OA is being too hard on Ken; Ken used the politically correct term du jour. It is persons of color, women of color, students of color, etc. As an educator, and someone who writes occasionally, they are my preferred terms to "black", "minority", etc. In official correspondence, "persons of color" is the preferred term.These labels sha, they are always shifting. We have struggled with the right things to say. Ken meant no harm. I use the term all the time. And I am not the only person of color who does.

- Ikhide

[kenneth harrow]

dear oa
what makes a term derogatory? we can turn to our word maven farooq to get an answer. but in this case, persons of color, women of color, are commonly used respectful terms. you might not like them, but an individual dislike doesn't constitute grounds for defining a term as derogatory.
we don't invent a vocabulary: it is shared, and its values are shared ones. that's how language works.
i'd prefer other terms as well, but in fact i was using the term respectfully.

ken

[Salimonu Kadiri]

*Woman of colour* is widely used in the USA. We generally use it to mean someone who is not white. The term is especially prominent among progressives in the US who employ it as a term of solidarity. Besides a subset of my Black nationalist comrades (I'm a Black nationalist), I don't know of anyone who considers *man/woman of colour* offensive - Kwame Shabazz.
 
Anthropologically considered, human race is divided into three racial groups.These are: 1. Caucasoid - ascribed to the pale-complexioned racial group of mankind, with pointed long and/or concave nose, embracing peoples indigenous to Europe, North Africa, South West Asia and Indian subcontinent and their descendants in other parts of the world; 2. Mongoloid - ascribed to light-complexioned racial group with straight black hair, slanting eyes, short nose, and scanty facial hairs, embracing most of the peoples of Asia, the Eskimos, and the North American Indians (American aborigines); and 3. Negroid - ascribed to the brown-black skin, tightly-curled hair, a short flat nose, and full lips people. This group includes the indigenous peoples of Africa south of the Sahara, their descendants elsewhere, and some Melanesian peoples. Even if Euro-America, because of their military conquests and subjugations around the world, has divided the human race into three: white, black and yellow, no human being fits into these descriptions physically. Therefore, Euro-American division of human race into white, black and yellow implies that no human being is colourless. In other words all human beings are coloured. It will make sense, but not progressive, if every American is referred to as *MAN/WOMAN OF COLOUR.* To reserve the term *MAN/WOMAN OF COULOUR* to the American blacks alone is not only an insult but, segregation and racism against Black Americans. If Kwame Shabazz should refer to himself as *MAN OF COLOUR NATIONALIST* he will discover, how ridiculous and senseless the term is. As an African, I have always wondered why Obama is referred to as an Afro-American or an African-American while Clinton and others are never referred to as Euro-American or European-American.

 

---

Date: Thu, 7 May 2015 19:51:36 -0700
From: kwames...@gmail.com

[Anunoby, Ogugua]

It was not my intention to be hard on Ken. I was disappointed that he would use such a loaded term to describe a younger colleague of a different race that I believe, he would not allow to be used on him regardless of conventionality if he was on the other side.

Race is the single most important basis of the discrimination and systemic injustice visited on people of African (AF) descent by people of European (EU) descent in this country. It is the most important and least acceptable/tolerable difference between the races to them. I do not see how the use of the term can be respectful. That “person of color” has been forced on many people is not to say that the term is not derogatory. What is the parallel respectful term for the other side I dare to ask?

I wondered why it was easier for and preferable to Ken, to use the term “person of color” to describe a younger colleague of a different race, when he could have used her ancestry or heritage if he must set her apart by race? He after all used their age difference to better effect in my opinion. I do not see how “person of color” enhanced the case he tried to make. I wondered why the temperance and kindliness that many others and I, have associated with him as a respected member of this forum deserted him? I believe that Ken knows perhaps better than I do, that indifference or acceptance of a term, like individual dislike of it, is not a necessary condition for the term to be derogatory.

As all forum members probably know, an insult is a joke when it is on the other person.

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Ogunlakaiye,

As for your point about "man-of-color nationalist." Ha! Nice one. I agree that it would strike most, including me, as odd phrasing. However, as several posters have noted, words are contextual and their meanings change over time. Person/Man/Woman-of-color are used in specific social contexts. The context is basically determined by a community of speakers. So, for example, going back to my previous comments about "tribe." I advise my students not to use it in their academic writing, but I also alert them to the fact that it might be perfectly fine to use with a group of Ghanaians. One has to listen to what insiders do and say and then adapt accordingly.

Historically, perhaps through the first few decades of the 1900s, "person/man/woman-of-color or "colored" was used to describe African Americans. Now here is where it gets a bit complicated: in contemporary times, "colored" is considered outdated and even offensive. But "person/man/woman-of-color" is acceptable to describe any non-white person (not just African Americans). Likewise, there was a time when African Americans embraced the term Negro, but now it is rejected as offensive by most African Americans under 50 years old (but still apparently used by some Black southern elders). "African American" was popularized by Jesse Jackson in the 70s as a way of celebrating our African heritage. White Americans like Clintion are mostly the descendants of voluntary immigrants so they have a different political history which informs their identity politics.

kzs

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Peace to you, Brother Ogunlakaiye,

We have veered way off topic, but I'm an anthropologist so I thought I might reply.

I can tell you with certainty that anthropologists have rejected the idea of racial taxonomies for several decades now. The categories that you have reproduced are considered outmoded and unscientific. The consensus goes something like this: race is not biological or scientific, its a social construct.

We acknowledge that the ideology or politics of race is important. That is to say, people invoke many different ideas about race (as you did in your post), those ideas are socially meaningful, and they impact peoples' lives in significant ways.

You may review the full statement on race endorsed by the American Anthropological Association and other useful info here.

Slightly aside, Nigerians (and to a lesser extent Ghanaians) sometimes use the term "race" and "tribe" interchangeably. Most American scholars discourage the use of "tribe" because, as the thinking goes, it has too much racist baggage. Historically, it was used to homogenize and stereotype African societies which in reality had a wide range of political scale  So, for example, Oyo or Dahomey or Asante were deemed "tribes" when, in fact, they had the scale and complexity of empires.

kzs

On Friday, May 8, 2015 at 4:24:40 PM UTC-5, ogunlakaiye wrote:

[Salimonu Kadiri]

Well, Kenneth Harrow, since I don't know you, I can only guess that you are a Caucasian who is sympathetic to the course of the oppressed and exploited Blacks. Just like it is impossible for egg eaters to feel the pain of the hens laying eggs, you cannot feel the effect of humiliations we suffer in the hands of our civilized abusers and exploiters! Persons of colour, women of colour are not and cannot be respectful terms when they are exclusively limited in application to the Negroid race by the Caucasoid. If there are persons of colour, women of colour, the opposite to them must be persons without colour, or  women without colour. If persons/women of colour are respectful terms in referring to the Negroid race, then persons/women without colour ought to be respectful terms in referring to the Caucasoid. The Caucasoid refer to themselves as *WHITES* but at the same time they do not refer to themselves as coloured even though *White* is a colour just like black. Who is coloured and who is colourless? I cannot see anything respectful in referring to the Caucasians as Persons/Women of pale complexion!!
 

---

Date: Fri, 8 May 2015 09:24:25 -0400

[Femi Segun]

SK:

Thanks so much for this clarification. It baffles me how we have just come to accept this broad categorisation of people into white and black. I think the dichotomy of white and black is a social construction which denotes more meaning than we care to think about or which we know without bothering to interrogate. Of late, I have been finding if difficult to use the word black and white because in reality, I have not seen a white or black person in the proper sense of the definition of those colours. The use of the 'people of colour also falls into this derogatory classification. In fact, it is a contradiction in terms. If Africans or other minorities in the US are classified as people of colour, and assuming that  there are  people who are even  white, the question then is: Is white not a colour? I see these classifications in terms of power, racist profiling of one people over the other and a projection of some sense of superiority, which unfortunately, we find too solemn to question or challenge. I guess its time that we engaged more with this narrative as the dichotomy of white and black has defined race relations, knowledge production, power, domination, hegemony and overall sense of being, especially among Africans. The deference to which the so called whites are held by virtually all and sundry among Africans attests to this contradictions.

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Who said that Caucasians are indigenous to North Africa?

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department
CCSU. New Britain. CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on
Africa and the African Diaspora

________________________________

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Salimonu Kadiri [ogunl...@hotmail.com]
Sent: Friday, May 08, 2015 2:01 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

There is research showing that college educated blacks are less likely<http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/black-men-need-more-education-to-get-the-same-jobs/375770/> to get a call back than whites with education; there remains a vast wealth gap<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gap_n_6317202.html> between white and blacks; the black middle-class in chronically susceptible to downward mobility<http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/01/24/the-american-dream-shatters-in-prince-georges-county/>; black males. On and on. The indignities of being black in America are endless. Obama has only made feel a little better about our oppression.

kzs

On Wednesday, May 6, 2015 at 9:22:14 AM UTC-5, Kenneth Harrow wrote:

just to give the gist of the krugman editorial:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article

"The great sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago that widely-decried social changes among blacks, like the decline of traditional families, were actually caused by the disappearance of well-paying jobs in inner cities. His argument contained an implicit prediction: if other racial groups were to face a similar loss of job opportunity, their behavior would change in similar ways.
And so it has proved. Lagging wages — actually declining in real terms for half of working men — and work instability have been followed by sharp declines in marriage, rising births out of wedlock, and more.
As Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution writes: “Blacks have faced, and will continue to face, unique challenges. But when we look for the reasons why less skilled blacks are failing to marry and join the middle class, it is largely for the same reasons that marriage and a middle-class lifestyle is eluding a growing number of whites as well.”

Continue reading the main story<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article#story-continues-5>

On 5/6/15 3:20 AM, Kwabena Akurang-Parry wrote:

Class affects one's conditions and lived experiences within "racial" or "ethnic" categories. But in America, for example, it is"race" that defines discrimination to the extent that marginalized whites have better opportunities than blacks located in any part of the vertical space.


> Date: Tue, 5 May 2015 18:44:11 -0400
> From: har...@msu.edu
> To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)
>
> gloria
> have you seen krugman's column in which he argues that you have to
> include class in determining the debilitating effects of discrimination.
> it is very compelling. basically he says, when people, white as well as
> black, have become poorer, they don't live as long or as well.
> here is the column he wrote a few days ago:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article
>
> it shouldn't be an all or nothing argument. middle class black people
> are indeed subject to maltreatment more than are whites; but the larger
> picture has to include more than race to explain the factors in society
> that impact people's lives.
> ken
>
>
> On 5/5/15 4:50 PM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) wrote:
> > Sun May 03, 2015 , http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in-the-United-States?detail=email
> >

> > The most racist areas in the United States<http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in-the-United-States><http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in-the-United-States>
> >
> > bySusan Grigsby<http://dailykos.com/user/Susan%20Grigsby><http://dailykos.com/user/Susan%20Grigsby> forDaily Kos<http://dailykos.com/blog/main><http://dailykos.com/blog/main>
> >
> > [https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/attachment.ashx?id=RgAAAACIR4fP8%2fDSEaNAAAD4YBApBwDd9LcDLkTSEaMkAKDJ4RrzAAAA7%2f1AAACG0aK%2bn4McSrUVwdL4l7nbAFDo8iUEAAAJ&attcnt=1&attid0=EAAIhqf4v5x1SKTZJ2smsTOj<https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/attachment.ashx?id=RgAAAACIR4fP8/DSEaNAAAD4YBApBwDd9LcDLkTSEaMkAKDJ4RrzAAAA7/1AAACG0aK%2bn4McSrUVwdL4l7nbAFDo8iUEAAAJ&attcnt=1&attid0=EAAIhqf4v5x1SKTZJ2smsTOj>]<http://images.dailykos.com/images/141407/lightbox/journal.pone.0122963.g001_copy.jpg?1430691641><http://images.dailykos.com/images/141407/lightbox/journal.pone.0122963.g001_copy.jpg?1430691641>
> >
> > There are neighborhoods in Baltimore in which the life expectancy is 19 years less than other neighborhoods in the same city. Residents of the Downtown/Seaton Hill neighborhood have a life expectancy lower than 229 other nations, exceeded only by Yemen. According to the Washington Post<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/30/baltimores-poorest-residents-die-20-years-earlier-than-its-richest/?wpisrc=nl_wnkpm&wpmm=1><http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/30/baltimores-poorest-residents-die-20-years-earlier-than-its-richest/?wpisrc=nl_wnkpm&wpmm=1>, 15 neighborhoods in Baltimore have a lower life expectancy than North Korea.

> >
> > And while those figures represent some of the most dramatic disparities in the life expectancy of black Americans as opposed to whites, a recent study of the health impacts of racism in America reveals that racist attitudes may cause up to 30,000 early deaths every year.
> >

> > The study, Association between an Internet-Based Measure of Area Racism and Black Mortality<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122963#pone.0122963.ref042><http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122963#pone.0122963.ref042>, has just been published in PLOS ONE and has mapped out the most racist areas in the United States. As illustrated above, they are mostly located in the rural Northeast and down along the Appalachian Mountains into the South. How they did it and what it may mean are below the fold.

> > We already know about the racism that led to Jim Crow, the KKK, and lynchings. We also know about the racism that has become embedded in our justice system, from cops who kill, to prosecutors who ensure that blacks receive longer prison terms than do whites. We know that those sentencing disparities lead to greater disenfranchisement of blacks.
> >
> > We think we know how racism has injured and killed black Americans. But do we really? There are the obvious cases, like Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, but what about the silent killers? The hypertension and the chronic medical conditions that lead so many more blacks to an early grave than they do whites. Could racist attitudes lead to 30,000 early deaths every year?
> >
> > According to the authors of the study, current research points to a variety of causes for the disparities in health between white and black Americans, many of which can be traced to racial segregation. Many blacks are restricted to high-crime neighborhoods that are lacking in outdoor recreational areas, access to healthy foods, and decent health care. Discrimination in employment leads to lower wages that further impact the ability to enjoy healthy food, exercise, and recreation.
> >
> > The authors also point out that:
> > ... racial discrimination may also directly impact health by engaging psychobiological mechanisms induced in the stress response
> > In other words, stress, especially chronic stress, is bad for your health. This isn't really news. Experiences of racial discrimination are often accompanied by a sense of powerlessness, of anxiety, and of anger. These stressors, especially over a lifetime, can lead to negative health impacts. Jon Stewart did not know how right he was when he said, "If racism is something you're sick of hearing about, imagine how exhausting it must be living it every day."
> > As a source of chronic psychosocial stress, repeated racism may result in a heightened pro-inflammatory state that can have particularly detrimental consequences for the etiology and progression of cardiovascular and other immune disorders. Studies on discrimination have found evidence for adverse consequences for hypertension, atherosclerosis, and their inflammatory mediators. A recent study found that racism-related factors may also be associated with accelerated aging at the cellular level.
> > Past studies have had problems quantifying racism. They can look at localized institutional racism via housing and employment, or they can rely on self-reported incidents of racism. Of course, self-reported attitudes are difficult to verify and are subject to self-censorship, especially in regard to micro-aggressions and racism without a clear perpetrator, and institutional studies don't actually reflect racist attitudes as much as their results.
> >
> > The authors of this study have turned to internet searches using the "N-word" for help in finding areas of racist attitudes in America.
> > This measure, calculated based on Internet search queries containing the “N-word”, was strongly associated with the differential in 2008 votes for Barack Obama, the Black Democratic presidential candidate, vs. 2004 votes for John Kerry, the White Democratic presidential candidate.
> > The study authors used the designated market areas (DMA) as defined by the Nielsen Media Research. Residents within these DMAs generally receive their information from common television and/or radio broadcasts and newspapers, providing similar messages that influence racial attitudes. The authors make clear that not all searches for the "N-word" are due to racial bias and that not all residents in a DMA share racist attitudes, but the volume of the available data provides a high signal-to-noise ratio.
> >
> > Using this information to find areas in which racism is alive and well, they then looked at black mortality rates using data from 2004–2009, collated by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). They examined four leading causes of death among blacks: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes. Unsurprisingly, they found a significant association between the racism indicated by the internet searches and an increase in black mortality.
> > Results from our study indicate that living in an area characterized by a one standard deviation greater proportion of racist Google searches is associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause mortality rate among Blacks. This effect estimate amounts to over 30,000 deaths among Blacks annually nationwide.
> >
> > These findings indicate that area racism, as indexed by the proportion of Google searches containing the “N-word”, is significantly associated with not only the all-cause Black mortality rate, but also Black-White disparities in mortality.
> > Racism doesn't just kill with a bullet to the back, it also kills by a thousand cuts, silently and mostly unnoticed.
> >

> > Was it only a year ago that Ta-Nehisi Coates made the Case for Reparations<http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/><http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/>? Reparations, hell, how about we stop killing black Americans first, and then discuss a way to repay them for the massive wrongs that have been done.

> > New York state police handcuff and shackle 'combative' five-year-old
> >
> > * Officers arrived after school reported boy was disruptive and uncontrollable
> > * They handcuffed him for ‘his safety’ and safety of staff, spokesman says

> > Ed Pilkington<http://www.theguardian.com/profile/edpilkington><http://www.theguardian.com/profile/edpilkington> in New York

> > Monday 4 May 2015 , The Guardian (UK)
> > The idea that police officers should use handcuffs and leg shackles to control an unruly individual is hardly unusual in the US, where fondness for the use of metal restraints runs through the criminal justice system.
> > What is unusual is when the individual in question is five years old, and the arrest takes place in an elementary school.

> > New York state police were called last week to the primary school in Philadelphia, New York<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/new-york><http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/new-york>, close to the Canadian border, after staff reported that a pupil, Connor Ruiz, was disruptive and uncontrollable. When officers arrived at the premises, they placed the five-year-old boy in handcuffs, carried him out to a patrol car and put his feet into shackles before taking him to a medical center for evaluation.
> > The child’s mother, Chelsea Ruiz, told the local Watertown Daily Times<http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/news03/fort-drum-parents-irate-after-police-handcuff-shackle-5-year-old-special-needs-student--20150502><http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/news03/fort-drum-parents-irate-after-police-handcuff-shackle-5-year-old-special-needs-student--20150502> she was shocked and angered by what had happened.

> > “An officer told me they had to handcuff his wrists and ankles for their safety,” she said. “I told him that was ridiculous. How could someone fear for their safety when it comes to a small, five-year-old child?”
> > A spokesman for the state police force, Jack Keller, justified the constraints on grounds that the child was “out of control” and “combative”, and was deemed to be a danger to himself or staff. Troopers had found him “screaming, kicking, punching and biting”.
> > “Our concern was his safety, of not only himself but the staff he was dealing with and the other students in the class where he was,” Keller said.

> > Handcuffing of young children is frequently<http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2014/12/children-handcuffed-by-police-at-katong/><http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2014/12/children-handcuffed-by-police-at-katong/> reported<http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-handcuff-9-year-special-child-elementary-school/><http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-handcuff-9-year-special-child-elementary-school/> in the US. Last December, a child aged four was handcuffed in Nathanael Greene primary school in Stanardsville, Virginia.
> > In 2013, the handcuffing of a nine-year-old girl in Portland<http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/10/portland_police_will_be_restri.html><http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/10/portland_police_will_be_restri.html>, Oregon prompted a public outcry that forced the police department to revise its rules. The new procedures forbid officers from handcuffing a child under 12, unless they pose a “heightened risk to safety”.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

[lajaodukoya]

Olu Obafemi "The Man From Sagamu" speaks to this racist and hegemonic construction. 

Sent from my Samsung device

-------- Original message --------
From: Femi Segun <solor...@gmail.com>
Date: 08/05/2015 23:20 (GMT+01:00)
To: 'Chika Onyeani' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

SK:

Thanks so much for this clarification. It baffles me how we have just come to accept this broad categorisation of people into white and black. I think the dichotomy of white and black is a social construction which denotes more meaning than we care to think about or which we know without bothering to interrogate. Of late, I have been finding if difficult to use the word black and white because in reality, I have not seen a white or black person in the proper sense of the definition of those colours. The use of the 'people of colour also falls into this derogatory classification. In fact, it is a contradiction in terms. If Africans or other minorities in the US are classified as people of colour, and assuming that  there are  people who are even  white, the question then is: Is white not a colour? I see these classifications in terms of power, racist profiling of one people over the other and a projection of some sense of superiority, which unfortunately, we find too solemn to question or challenge. I guess its time that we engaged more with this narrative as the dichotomy of white and black has defined race relations, knowledge production, power, domination, hegemony and overall sense of being, especially among Africans. The deference to which the so called whites are held by virtually all and sundry among Africans attests to this contradictions.

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:12 PM, 'Ikhide' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

OA is being too hard on Ken; Ken used the politically correct term du jour. It is persons of color, women of color, students of color, etc. As an educator, and someone who writes occasionally, they are my preferred terms to "black", "minority", etc. In official correspondence, "persons of color" is the preferred term.These labels sha, they are always shifting. We have struggled with the right things to say. Ken meant no harm. I use the term all the time. And I am not the only person of color who does.

- Ikhide

On May 7, 2015, at 10:01 PM, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooq...@gmail.com> wrote:

OA,

I, too, am not a fan of the term "people of color," but your outrage at Ken's use of it is unjustified and a little over the top. The pragmatics of the expression shows that it's never used as a slur. In contemporary usage, people deploy it to encapsulate a disparate range of identities located on the racial margins in Western societies. Read this insightful NPR piece on the history, uses, and shifting semantic boundaries of the expression: http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/03/30/295931070/the-journey-from-colored-to-minorities-to-people-of-color

Farooq

Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/farooqkperogi

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 5:33 PM, Anunoby, Ogugua <Anun...@lincolnu.edu> wrote:

Ken,

 

What does “woman of color” mean?

Why in good conscience, would anyone, describe another, especially a colleague they just had an intelligent conversation with, a “person of color”? Was it inevitable that this colleague be so described? Taken literarily, every person is a person of color. That characterization is a discriminatory slur- a relic of America’s racist past that will not go away for the reason it was used below- skin color for some, is a difference that sets apart the members of the human race more than anything else. It should be unacceptable, roundly rejected, and condemned by all. It is neither comfort nor defense that some themselves are so characterized, use it about themselves.

I must state categorically that I am disappointed, very disappointed, the term has been used by choice, by a much respected member of this forum, from whom I believe many forum members including me, have learned a lot. I am sorry Ken. I am truly disappointed.

“Old dogs learn slowly” but not all learning should be slow.

 

oa

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow
Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2015 1:20 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

 

dear kwame
just had a long discussion with a young colleague, a woman of color, and she was much more in agreement with you than with me!
(old dogs learn slowly)
ken

On 5/6/15 8:02 PM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Brother Ken,

There are two flaws in Wilson's work (and most other mainstream scholars): 1) he takes white middle class "behavior" as normative. So, for example, white America's general refusal to acknowledge white privilege is, in my view, a sort of anti-black violence. 2) State sanctioned violence (local police, National Guard, Armed Forces) is unmarked and un-analyzed as violence (like Wall Street theft is rarely criminalized). Thus Wilson winds up with just another tired variant of the cultural deficit model.

In other words, poverty doesnt predict crime and violence, it predicts certain types of crime and violence. This is important. The consequence is that we wind up analyzing certain sorts of violence that are associated with poverty while virtually ignoring the sorts of crimes/violence that is more likely to be perpetuated by the mostly white upper class. But beyond that I think you exaggerate the influence of class on the quality of life of African Americans. I also think you overstate the degree to which American society has changed.

There is lots of data out there suggesting that not much has changed and, indeed, in some ways we have gone backwards (Indeed, Harold Cruse argues in Crisis of the Negro Intellectual that integration was a disaster for Black progress and self-determination). A few examples come to mind: You seem to suggest that hiring white women at your university is equivalent with, say, a black female hire. But white women have made substantial gains from affirmative action legislation even as a subset of white women are on the front lines in the effort to dismantle AA.

We should bear in mind that AA was originally a racial redress for centuries of white power. It was watered down and morphed into "diversity" in the 70s after the Bakke decision. White women, as members of white nuclear families, have benefited from and supported white supremacy which was the law of the land for most of America's existence. This is why the work of Black feminist on intersectionality is so crucial.

There is research showing that college educated blacks are less likely to get a call back than whites with education; there remains a vast wealth gap between white and blacks; the black middle-class in chronically susceptible to downward mobility; black males. On and on. The indignities of being black in America are endless. Obama has only made feel a little better about our oppression.

kzs

On Wednesday, May 6, 2015 at 9:22:14 AM UTC-5, Kenneth Harrow wrote:

just to give the gist of the krugman editorial:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article

"The great sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago that widely-decried social changes among blacks, like the decline of traditional families, were actually caused by the disappearance of well-paying jobs in inner cities. His argument contained an implicit prediction: if other racial groups were to face a similar loss of job opportunity, their behavior would change in similar ways.

And so it has proved. Lagging wages — actually declining in real terms for half of working men — and work instability have been followed by sharp declines in marriage, rising births out of wedlock, and more.

As Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution writes: “Blacks have faced, and will continue to face, unique challenges. But when we look for the reasons why less skilled blacks are failing to marry and join the middle class, it is largely for the same reasons that marriage and a middle-class lifestyle is eluding a growing number of whites as well.”

Continue reading the main story

On 5/6/15 3:20 AM, Kwabena Akurang-Parry wrote:

[Ikhide]

Labels. I love going home to Nigeria. Nigeria has her challenges, but a visit is always a nice break from constantly obsessing about race in America. I would dearly love to go home to my mother Izuma and be a man again, not a "person of color." LOL!

- Ikhide

[kenneth harrow]

i feel this discussion is wandering off topic, from a simple language
usage to the wider notions of race

so much has come in since i've been able to get back on line, it
certainly touched a nerve
first, to ogugua who first took offense, i hope you know that no offense
was intended. it is really important, i believe, when we talk to each
other to how we might imagine the intention and how we might be
sensitive to the reception.
i am not opposed to people expressing anger; but before i'd want to do
so, over an imagined insult, i'd want to be sure that it was really
intended.
the case of "woman of color," then, within the discursive community to
which we belong, is not insulting.
if someone were to say to me, as you had done initially, that it was
insulting, i would have to think that you were not conversant enough
with the language to have understood the term. i know it is annoying to
hear that, but i want to shift the issue away from whether the words
literally are insulting--which perhaps you were meaning?--to how a word
acquires meaning.
then i thought, you must have been responding to the term used as "a
colored person," which i would agree with you is insulting term.
so then i wondered if you knew the difference, and could only conclude
you must not know the difference because it seemed as though you were
taking the former term for the latter--an understandable mistake, but
still a linguistic mistake.
am i wrong there?

i appealed to farooq on this because he is a linguistic expert, and my
understanding is that words have meaning only in context, and within a
discourse. within a given discourse, "person of color" might mean one
thing, and have another meaning in a different discourse.
in this course, someone, maybe ikhide, or kwame, was entirely right. i
was using the term, "person of color," following the flattest, least
pointed, least specific form of designation. it is a term that is used
now, in the context of the university and its committees and official
discourses, as meaning non-white people. there are lots of terms used
for that, like minorities, or, sometimes, a listing of hispanic, native
american, african american, asian american.

if you ask me, all these terms are problematic, but we have to
communicate. i had personal reasons for using "person of color" since i
wanted to be a unspecific as possible, not wishing my friend to feel i
was pointed to him/her publicly in what i had been told. so no one on
the list--no one--really knows what "race" or "color" of the person i
intended. i meant it that way. it is irrelevant, except to say that my
friend recounted his/her experiences, and they came closer to kwame's
point, which is what it tried to convey to him.

but these terrible terms we are obliged to use are all signs of how we
construct difference, and unfortunately they so often carry the weight
of history, with its implications of higher and lower. since race is a
construct, the terms are constructed within an historical frame that
seems to always convey higher and lower. all terms associated with slave
imply low status, and all the words involving black people carry that
burden (like the zenj coast of east africa meaning black and slave
simultaneously.) words for slave have been linked to race/color. in
french we have "negre," in english "nigger"--and they become racialized
slave terms, as malcolm x pointed out with the rebels being "field
niggers" and subordinated black people being "house nigger." the
dominicans took that same vocabulary and turned it completely in making
their own sense designations, something i didn't know till i read junot
diaz.


we fight the institution of slavery and racism by fighting the
vocabulary, by inventing terms that free us from the implications of
better or lower. but in the end, the shifting of terms from "colored
people" to Negro to Black to Afro-American to African-American to
African American or Person of Color indicate desires to modify the
connotations--just like "homosexual" to "gay" to LGBT to LGBTQ etc.

in fact, i hate all those terms, i usually avoid filling in the blank on
race, on forms, which i consider demeaning--for all of us.
i found it liberating to be in an african environment, cameroon as it so
happened, where american racial feelings did not exist.
after a while i learned there was another language, another set of
racial hierarchies that didn't exist at home in michigan or the u.s.,
and another really painful discourse. everyone we knew had a "boy," the
french word for a house servant, or a domestic, or a houseboy
(regardless of gender), or a maid, or a etc..... and again we were
back with the niceties of language trying to dodge the realities of the
master-servant relationship.
i learned that black and white were not used. instead, a white person
was called a "européen" and a black person was called an africain, or
more often, a cameroonian--unless he or she was mixed race, and then the
term "métis" was used. the anglophones had mulatto, which has got to be
the ugliest race term imaginable. in fact, an african was just a person.
no need to say black or whatever. blacks were normal and whites were the
minorities and stranger, needing a designated term--and that term was
européean. in the end, that had nothing to do with coming from europe,
but was used for all whites.

words have meaning only in their context, not in their origins.

once, in senegal, i had to speak to the police about someone, and i
referred to that person as an "indigène" of St Louis. i was corrected
and told "indigène" was an insulting term, used by the colonialists to
designate an african. i was embarrassed, and learned the hard way.

of course, if we think about it, black and white are derogatory and
stupid--like caucasian, another euphemistic term that could not be more
racial and stupid, or aryan, another real winner.

but they can't carry the weight of an insult if we are not using them
intentionally to insult and are not received as insults, but rather as
conventional terms. the conventions of black and white are of racial
difference, and as long as we need to find a way to designate racial
difference, we are trapped within a conventional set of terms. the more
we separate race from ethnic or national identities, the more we can
avoid the stupidity of thought that seeks to separate us into different
peoples and into better and worse, higher and lower people.

sorry for the lengthy reply.
ogugua, please forgive me, but i did not intend any insult, believe me.
ken

[Salimonu Kadiri]

Brother Kwame, may honour be yours as with the home-pigeon and may ease come your way as with the doves.
 
I am not an anthropologist but I am always thirsty for knowledge on subjects concerning the fate of Africa in the world. Before the 2nd World War, genetics, biology, medicine had been merged together to form a new science known as Racial Biology by the Western World. From the materials collected on Racial Biology, Racial Hygiene was selected and named Eugenic. The father of Eugenics was an Englishman, FRANCIS GALTON (1822-1911). Joseph Arthur de Gobineau was a French Count, a Diplomat and a Philosopher in History. Gobineau died in 1882, before Hitler was born in 1889, and he wrote the essay on inequality between races on which Nazi racial doctrine germinated. Eugenic which is synonymous to Racial Hygiene is a study of methods of improving the quality of human race, especially, through selective breeding. Thus, in 1932, the third International Conference of Eugenicists was held at the Museum of Natural History in New York with the primary aim of finding means of stopping from procreating at will. The conference unanimously elected Dr Ernst Rudin and Henry Fairchild Osborn as President and Vice President respectively. In 1934, Henry Fairchild Osborn of USA was awarded the Goethe medal by Adolf Hitler. It was after the World War II that Eugenicists and by implication Anthropologists ( Social and Physical) lost their values and had to keep low profile, politically.
 
In view of the above I am frightened  to read the following from you, "The consensus, (between anthropologists) goes like this: race is not biological or scientific, it is a social construct." If race is not biological or scientific, what then is the definition of race? Or are you saying there is nothing like race? Have we not heard that terms male/female and man/woman are social constructs and that individual feeling is what determines gender and not the physiological and genital properties? That is why I am afraid of your expression: race is not biological or scientific, it is a social construct.    
 

---

Date: Fri, 8 May 2015 16:36:42 -0700

[kenneth harrow]

i had one more thought on this, a brief one.
words take their meanings only within discursive communities.
within my community, and in particular the u.s. academy, "person of color" is a polite terms of referring to non-white people, with as little "weight" as possible, i.e., as neutral as possible.
i have no idea if the term is used in england, say, or what it means, or how it would be taken.
the same for nigeria, or india, or any other anglophone country. i somehow imagine canada is similar to the u.s.

there isn't a "right" meaning to those words: they take on meaning within the community of speakers who use it. and it is really that community, in its usage, that determines the connotations of polite vs derogatory. and as i said before, those change a lot over time.

in answer to saimonu's question, "who determines who is 'colored' or not," the answer is obviously the community of speakers. in cameroon, when we were there in the 1970s, mabel smythe was the u.s. ambassador. to the cameroonians, this light-skinned african american woman was white! not mixed, not black. white. they were astonished when we said she was black!
to an american it was obvious she was black.
if it had been in the caribbean, they would have not only called her a femme de couleur, a woman of color, but more, an octroon, or one of those horrible terms designating how much white or black blood she had.
the history of race is written in these words, how they were used, how they have changed. and perhaps none more fascinating that "nègre," the term chosen by césaire and senghor to designate Negritude, the most important african literary movement of the 1930s-50s, to designate a term of pride in the black race, in black people, history, etc. and yet it was based on a word of questionable propriety, especially then. a francophone person might tell us how it has changed valence decade after decade.

ken

[kenneth harrow]

salimou
the argument re race as a construct can be found in Appiah's In My Father's House.
he has a chapter on that.
ken

[Salimonu Kadiri]

Kwame, thank you for your lecture. The questions that remain to be answered are: was it the non-white Americans who chose to describe themselves as Person/Man/Woman-of-colour or was it the white supremacists that coined the expression and forced the non-whites to accept it? And what was the purpose of inventing Person/Man/Woman-of-colour expression when all humans possess colour?
 

---

Date: Fri, 8 May 2015 16:58:47 -0700

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Brother Ogunlakaiye,

I included links in the previous post that explains the anthropological position. I am reposting here:

http://www.aaanet.org/resources/a-public-education-program.cfm

Im saying that Hitler, Galton, et. al. were white supremacists who rationalized their claims by deploying the myth of race--a pseudo science. There is no scientific way to neatly divide up people based upon physical and behavioral traits. Africa, for example, has a wide range of genotypes and phenotypes. American anthropologists have rejected racial supremacy 1900s. In fact American Anthropology was founded by Franz Boas a German Jew who emigrated from Nazi Germany in the 1880s. So race exists as a social construct and ideology--that is to say people believe in something called race. Race works much in the same way that people believe in Christianity or Islam or Candomblé or Ifa or Vodun (Voodoo). People believe in God(s) and that belief has real consequences, but that doesn't make it scientific.

kzs

...

[Kwabena Akurang-Parry]

I don't think Ken meant it in any derogatory way. It is just one of those concepts with multiple rituals of renaming and rendering. 
Kwabena
 

---

Date: Sat, 9 May 2015 15:59:50 -0500

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Bro Ogunlakaiye,

Some of the earliest archival accounts of Kongolese impressions of Europeans described them as white like spirits. At other times Europeans were described as pale or pink or lacking color. These are human perceptions of difference which are not always literal and frequently metaphorical. Black people are not literally Black. But the Akan describe their part of the world as Abibiman (black nation/people). Some terms for Europeans include:

Akan - Obruni/Oburoni (people from beyond the horizon). Note: some Akan speakers give an alt. etymology "wicked people." But this is not accepted by Ghanaian linguists, as far as i know.

Ewe - Clever dog

Kikuyu - Aimless wanderer

I am not certain that "colored" was originally derogatory. What I do know is that African Americans used black and colored interchangeably by the early 1800s. Take for example the title of African American abolitionist David Walker's book published in 1829 "Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America." http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/menu.html

...

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Ken, I notice that you use these "horrible" words a lot in your work.

If they are so horrible to you why use them. Infact you actually
take a spade and dig them up from where they were buried.
Who but you ever uses the 'O" word in whatever context.
It is one of the criticisms I had of Trash.
Revival of the old concepts of colonial dominance is done in this work
deliberately or not.

You are perpetuating the tradition that you claim to dislike.

Let us assume Senghor had called the movement Black Consciousness-
instead of Negritude, would you have liked it?

To those who say race does not exist I say right on!
But I ask the same quetion I asked of AIDS deniers and people like Mbeki.

If AIDS does not exist what was killing so many people in the 90s?

Race may not exist, biologically speaking but it is alive and well

sociologically speaking.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department
CCSU. New Britain. CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on
Africa and the African Diaspora

________________________________

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow [har...@msu.edu]
Sent: Saturday, May 09, 2015 4:59 PM

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

i had one more thought on this, a brief one.
words take their meanings only within discursive communities.
within my community, and in particular the u.s. academy, "person of color" is a polite terms of referring to non-white people, with as little "weight" as possible, i.e., as neutral as possible.
i have no idea if the term is used in england, say, or what it means, or how it would be taken.
the same for nigeria, or india, or any other anglophone country. i somehow imagine canada is similar to the u.s.

there isn't a "right" meaning to those words: they take on meaning within the community of speakers who use it. and it is really that community, in its usage, that determines the connotations of polite vs derogatory. and as i said before, those change a lot over time.

in answer to saimonu's question, "who determines who is 'colored' or not," the answer is obviously the community of speakers. in cameroon, when we were there in the 1970s, mabel smythe was the u.s. ambassador. to the cameroonians, this light-skinned african american woman was white! not mixed, not black. white. they were astonished when we said she was black!
to an american it was obvious she was black.
if it had been in the caribbean, they would have not only called her a femme de couleur, a woman of color, but more, an octroon, or one of those horrible terms designating how much white or black blood she had.
the history of race is written in these words, how they were used, how they have changed. and perhaps none more fascinating that "nègre," the term chosen by césaire and senghor to designate Negritude, the most important african literary movement of the 1930s-50s, to designate a term of pride in the black race, in black people, history, etc. and yet it was based on a word of questionable propriety, especially then. a francophone person might tell us how it has changed valence decade after decade.

ken

On 5/8/15 6:12 PM, Salimonu Kadiri wrote:
Well, Kenneth Harrow, since I don't know you, I can only guess that you are a Caucasian who is sympathetic to the course of the oppressed and exploited Blacks. Just like it is impossible for egg eaters to feel the pain of the hens laying eggs, you cannot feel the effect of humiliations we suffer in the hands of our civilized abusers and exploiters! Persons of colour, women of colour are not and cannot be respectful terms when they are exclusively limited in application to the Negroid race by the Caucasoid. If there are persons of colour, women of colour, the opposite to them must be persons without colour, or women without colour. If persons/women of colour are respectful terms in referring to the Negroid race, then persons/women without colour ought to be respectful terms in referring to the Caucasoid. The Caucasoid refer to themselves as *WHITES* but at the same time they do not refer to themselves as coloured even though *White* is a colour just like black. Who is coloured and who is colourless? I cannot see anything respectful in referring to the Caucasians as Persons/Women of pale complexion!!

________________________________
Date: Fri, 8 May 2015 09:24:25 -0400

From: har...@msu.edu<mailto:har...@msu.edu>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

dear oa
what makes a term derogatory? we can turn to our word maven farooq to get an answer. but in this case, persons of color, women of color, are commonly used respectful terms. you might not like them, but an individual dislike doesn't constitute grounds for defining a term as derogatory.
we don't invent a vocabulary: it is shared, and its values are shared ones. that's how language works.
i'd prefer other terms as well, but in fact i was using the term respectfully.

ken

On 5/7/15 5:33 PM, Anunoby, Ogugua wrote:

Ken,



What does “woman of color” mean?

Why in good conscience, would anyone, describe another, especially a colleague they just had an intelligent conversation with, a “person of color”? Was it inevitable that this colleague be so described? Taken literarily, every person is a person of color. That characterization is a discriminatory slur- a relic of America’s racist past that will not go away for the reason it was used below- skin color for some, is a difference that sets apart the members of the human race more than anything else. It should be unacceptable, roundly rejected, and condemned by all. It is neither comfort nor defense that some themselves are so characterized, use it about themselves.

I must state categorically that I am disappointed, very disappointed, the term has been used by choice, by a much respected member of this forum, from whom I believe many forum members including me, have learned a lot. I am sorry Ken. I am truly disappointed.

“Old dogs learn slowly” but not all learning should be slow.



oa

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com> [mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow
Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2015 1:20 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)



dear kwame
just had a long discussion with a young colleague, a woman of color, and she was much more in agreement with you than with me!
(old dogs learn slowly)
ken


On 5/6/15 8:02 PM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Brother Ken,

There are two flaws in Wilson's work (and most other mainstream scholars): 1) he takes white middle class "behavior" as normative. So, for example, white America's general refusal to acknowledge white privilege is, in my view, a sort of anti-black violence. 2) State sanctioned violence (local police, National Guard, Armed Forces) is unmarked and un-analyzed as violence (like Wall Street theft is rarely criminalized). Thus Wilson winds up with just another tired variant of the cultural deficit model.

In other words, poverty doesnt predict crime and violence, it predicts certain types of crime and violence. This is important. The consequence is that we wind up analyzing certain sorts of violence that are associated with poverty while virtually ignoring the sorts of crimes/violence that is more likely to be perpetuated by the mostly white upper class. But beyond that I think you exaggerate the influence of class on the quality of life of African Americans. I also think you overstate the degree to which American society has changed.

There is lots of data out there suggesting that not much has changed and, indeed, in some ways we have gone backwards (Indeed, Harold Cruse argues in Crisis of the Negro Intellectual that integration was a disaster for Black progress and self-determination). A few examples come to mind: You seem to suggest that hiring white women at your university is equivalent with, say, a black female hire. But white women have made substantial gains from affirmative action legislation even as a subset of white women are on the front lines in the effort to dismantle AA.

We should bear in mind that AA was originally a racial redress for centuries of white power. It was watered down and morphed into "diversity" in the 70s after the Bakke decision. White women, as members of white nuclear families, have benefited from and supported white supremacy which was the law of the land for most of America's existence. This is why the work of Black feminist on intersectionality is so crucial.

There is research showing that college educated blacks are less likely<http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/black-men-need-more-education-to-get-the-same-jobs/375770/> to get a call back than whites with education; there remains a vast wealth gap<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gap_n_6317202.html> between white and blacks; the black middle-class in chronically susceptible to downward mobility<http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/01/24/the-american-dream-shatters-in-prince-georges-county/>; black males. On and on. The indignities of being black in America are endless. Obama has only made feel a little better about our oppression.

kzs

On Wednesday, May 6, 2015 at 9:22:14 AM UTC-5, Kenneth Harrow wrote:

just to give the gist of the krugman editorial:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article

"The great sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago that widely-decried social changes among blacks, like the decline of traditional families, were actually caused by the disappearance of well-paying jobs in inner cities. His argument contained an implicit prediction: if other racial groups were to face a similar loss of job opportunity, their behavior would change in similar ways.
And so it has proved. Lagging wages — actually declining in real terms for half of working men — and work instability have been followed by sharp declines in marriage, rising births out of wedlock, and more.
As Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution writes: “Blacks have faced, and will continue to face, unique challenges. But when we look for the reasons why less skilled blacks are failing to marry and join the middle class, it is largely for the same reasons that marriage and a middle-class lifestyle is eluding a growing number of whites as well.”

Continue reading the main story<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article#story-continues-5>

On 5/6/15 3:20 AM, Kwabena Akurang-Parry wrote:

Class affects one's conditions and lived experiences within "racial" or "ethnic" categories. But in America, for example, it is"race" that defines discrimination to the extent that marginalized whites have better opportunities than blacks located in any part of the vertical space.


> Date: Tue, 5 May 2015 18:44:11 -0400
> From: har...@msu.edu
> To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)
>
> gloria
> have you seen krugman's column in which he argues that you have to
> include class in determining the debilitating effects of discrimination.
> it is very compelling. basically he says, when people, white as well as
> black, have become poorer, they don't live as long or as well.
> here is the column he wrote a few days ago:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article
>
> it shouldn't be an all or nothing argument. middle class black people
> are indeed subject to maltreatment more than are whites; but the larger
> picture has to include more than race to explain the factors in society
> that impact people's lives.
> ken
>
>
> On 5/5/15 4:50 PM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) wrote:
> > Sun May 03, 2015 , http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in-the-United-States?detail=email
> >

> > The most racist areas in the United States<http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in-the-United-States><http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in-the-United-States>
> >
> > bySusan Grigsby<http://dailykos.com/user/Susan%20Grigsby><http://dailykos.com/user/Susan%20Grigsby> forDaily Kos<http://dailykos.com/blog/main><http://dailykos.com/blog/main>
> >

> > [https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/attachment.ashx?id=RgAAAACIR4fP8%2fDSEaNAAAD4YBApBwDd9LcDLkTSEaMkAKDJ4RrzAAAA7%2f1AAACG0aK%2bn4McSrUVwdL4l7nbAFDo8iUEAAAJ&attcnt=1&attid0=EAAIhqf4v5x1SKTZJ2smsTOj<https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/attachment.ashx?id=RgAAAACIR4fP8/DSEaNAAAD4YBApBwDd9LcDLkTSEaMkAKDJ4RrzAAAA7/1AAACG0aK%2bn4McSrUVwdL4l7nbAFDo8iUEAAAJ&attcnt=1&attid0=EAAIhqf4v5x1SKTZJ2smsTOj>]<http://images.dailykos.com/images/141407/lightbox/journal.pone.0122963.g001_copy.jpg?1430691641><http://images.dailykos.com/images/141407/lightbox/journal.pone.0122963.g001_copy.jpg?1430691641>
> >
> > There are neighborhoods in Baltimore in which the life expectancy is 19 years less than other neighborhoods in the same city. Residents of the Downtown/Seaton Hill neighborhood have a life expectancy lower than 229 other nations, exceeded only by Yemen. According to the Washington Post<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/30/baltimores-poorest-residents-die-20-years-earlier-than-its-richest/?wpisrc=nl_wnkpm&wpmm=1><http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/30/baltimores-poorest-residents-die-20-years-earlier-than-its-richest/?wpisrc=nl_wnkpm&wpmm=1>, 15 neighborhoods in Baltimore have a lower life expectancy than North Korea.

> >
> > And while those figures represent some of the most dramatic disparities in the life expectancy of black Americans as opposed to whites, a recent study of the health impacts of racism in America reveals that racist attitudes may cause up to 30,000 early deaths every year.
> >

> > The study, Association between an Internet-Based Measure of Area Racism and Black Mortality<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122963#pone.0122963.ref042><http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122963#pone.0122963.ref042>, has just been published in PLOS ONE and has mapped out the most racist areas in the United States. As illustrated above, they are mostly located in the rural Northeast and down along the Appalachian Mountains into the South. How they did it and what it may mean are below the fold.

> > We already know about the racism that led to Jim Crow, the KKK, and lynchings. We also know about the racism that has become embedded in our justice system, from cops who kill, to prosecutors who ensure that blacks receive longer prison terms than do whites. We know that those sentencing disparities lead to greater disenfranchisement of blacks.
> >
> > We think we know how racism has injured and killed black Americans. But do we really? There are the obvious cases, like Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, but what about the silent killers? The hypertension and the chronic medical conditions that lead so many more blacks to an early grave than they do whites. Could racist attitudes lead to 30,000 early deaths every year?
> >
> > According to the authors of the study, current research points to a variety of causes for the disparities in health between white and black Americans, many of which can be traced to racial segregation. Many blacks are restricted to high-crime neighborhoods that are lacking in outdoor recreational areas, access to healthy foods, and decent health care. Discrimination in employment leads to lower wages that further impact the ability to enjoy healthy food, exercise, and recreation.
> >
> > The authors also point out that:
> > ... racial discrimination may also directly impact health by engaging psychobiological mechanisms induced in the stress response
> > In other words, stress, especially chronic stress, is bad for your health. This isn't really news. Experiences of racial discrimination are often accompanied by a sense of powerlessness, of anxiety, and of anger. These stressors, especially over a lifetime, can lead to negative health impacts. Jon Stewart did not know how right he was when he said, "If racism is something you're sick of hearing about, imagine how exhausting it must be living it every day."
> > As a source of chronic psychosocial stress, repeated racism may result in a heightened pro-inflammatory state that can have particularly detrimental consequences for the etiology and progression of cardiovascular and other immune disorders. Studies on discrimination have found evidence for adverse consequences for hypertension, atherosclerosis, and their inflammatory mediators. A recent study found that racism-related factors may also be associated with accelerated aging at the cellular level.
> > Past studies have had problems quantifying racism. They can look at localized institutional racism via housing and employment, or they can rely on self-reported incidents of racism. Of course, self-reported attitudes are difficult to verify and are subject to self-censorship, especially in regard to micro-aggressions and racism without a clear perpetrator, and institutional studies don't actually reflect racist attitudes as much as their results.
> >
> > The authors of this study have turned to internet searches using the "N-word" for help in finding areas of racist attitudes in America.
> > This measure, calculated based on Internet search queries containing the “N-word”, was strongly associated with the differential in 2008 votes for Barack Obama, the Black Democratic presidential candidate, vs. 2004 votes for John Kerry, the White Democratic presidential candidate.
> > The study authors used the designated market areas (DMA) as defined by the Nielsen Media Research. Residents within these DMAs generally receive their information from common television and/or radio broadcasts and newspapers, providing similar messages that influence racial attitudes. The authors make clear that not all searches for the "N-word" are due to racial bias and that not all residents in a DMA share racist attitudes, but the volume of the available data provides a high signal-to-noise ratio.
> >
> > Using this information to find areas in which racism is alive and well, they then looked at black mortality rates using data from 2004–2009, collated by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). They examined four leading causes of death among blacks: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes. Unsurprisingly, they found a significant association between the racism indicated by the internet searches and an increase in black mortality.
> > Results from our study indicate that living in an area characterized by a one standard deviation greater proportion of racist Google searches is associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause mortality rate among Blacks. This effect estimate amounts to over 30,000 deaths among Blacks annually nationwide.
> >
> > These findings indicate that area racism, as indexed by the proportion of Google searches containing the “N-word”, is significantly associated with not only the all-cause Black mortality rate, but also Black-White disparities in mortality.
> > Racism doesn't just kill with a bullet to the back, it also kills by a thousand cuts, silently and mostly unnoticed.
> >

> > Was it only a year ago that Ta-Nehisi Coates made the Case for Reparations<http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/><http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/>? Reparations, hell, how about we stop killing black Americans first, and then discuss a way to repay them for the massive wrongs that have been done.

> > New York state police handcuff and shackle 'combative' five-year-old
> >
> > * Officers arrived after school reported boy was disruptive and uncontrollable
> > * They handcuffed him for ‘his safety’ and safety of staff, spokesman says

> > Ed Pilkington<http://www.theguardian.com/profile/edpilkington><http://www.theguardian.com/profile/edpilkington> in New York

> > Monday 4 May 2015 , The Guardian (UK)
> > The idea that police officers should use handcuffs and leg shackles to control an unruly individual is hardly unusual in the US, where fondness for the use of metal restraints runs through the criminal justice system.
> > What is unusual is when the individual in question is five years old, and the arrest takes place in an elementary school.

> > New York state police were called last week to the primary school in Philadelphia, New York<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/new-york><http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/new-york>, close to the Canadian border, after staff reported that a pupil, Connor Ruiz, was disruptive and uncontrollable. When officers arrived at the premises, they placed the five-year-old boy in handcuffs, carried him out to a patrol car and put his feet into shackles before taking him to a medical center for evaluation.
> > The child’s mother, Chelsea Ruiz, told the local Watertown Daily Times<http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/news03/fort-drum-parents-irate-after-police-handcuff-shackle-5-year-old-special-needs-student--20150502><http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/news03/fort-drum-parents-irate-after-police-handcuff-shackle-5-year-old-special-needs-student--20150502> she was shocked and angered by what had happened.

> > “An officer told me they had to handcuff his wrists and ankles for their safety,” she said. “I told him that was ridiculous. How could someone fear for their safety when it comes to a small, five-year-old child?”
> > A spokesman for the state police force, Jack Keller, justified the constraints on grounds that the child was “out of control” and “combative”, and was deemed to be a danger to himself or staff. Troopers had found him “screaming, kicking, punching and biting”.
> > “Our concern was his safety, of not only himself but the staff he was dealing with and the other students in the class where he was,” Keller said.

> > Handcuffing of young children is frequently<http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2014/12/children-handcuffed-by-police-at-katong/><http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2014/12/children-handcuffed-by-police-at-katong/> reported<http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-handcuff-9-year-special-child-elementary-school/><http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-handcuff-9-year-special-child-elementary-school/> in the US. Last December, a child aged four was handcuffed in Nathanael Greene primary school in Stanardsville, Virginia.
> > In 2013, the handcuffing of a nine-year-old girl in Portland<http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/10/portland_police_will_be_restri.html><http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/10/portland_police_will_be_restri.html>, Oregon prompted a public outcry that forced the police department to revise its rules. The new procedures forbid officers from handcuffing a child under 12, unless they pose a “heightened risk to safety”.

To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com>

Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.



--

kenneth w. harrow

faculty excellence advocate

professor of english

michigan state university

department of english

619 red cedar road

room C-614 wells hall

east lansing, mi 48824

ph. 517 803 8839

har...@msu.edu<mailto:har...@msu.edu>

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin

To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com>

Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin

To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com>

Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


--
kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839

har...@msu.edu<mailto:har...@msu.edu>

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin

To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com>

Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin

To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com>

Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


--
kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839

har...@msu.edu<mailto:har...@msu.edu>

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Sorry. I forgot to include the Ewe and Kikuyu words for Europeans:

Ewe - Ayevu (Clever dog)

Kikuyu - Mzungu (Aimless wanderer)

On Saturday, May 9, 2015 at 4:24:07 PM UTC-5, ogunlakaiye wrote:

...

[kenneth harrow]

hi gloria
i am not entirely sure of what you mean. i think cesaire and senghor
were right to turn "negre" to a neologism; they did a detournement of
the term, creating a new term that undid the pejorative nature of the
slur. black power has done that in our country too; amiri baraka did so
as well.
in my case, i am not really sure where and what you mean. i am no
senghor, so maybe i failed. but my larger sense is that there are
conventions of propriety that i like to defy. i don't want to give
offense to people for racial or ethnic grounds; but when it comes to old
fashioned bourgeois gentility, i do willingly give offense rather than
be governed by their rules.

as far as race not existing, of course it exists, especially as a
discursive and political construct, which are real within those realms.
in a sense, those are the only realms within which to locate any
realities, if you add ideological to the list. the fact that something
exists politically means that real human beings will be affected, even
killed, by the way those terms are used. so, that's a way of being real,
i suppose.

but if you were saying that i use words like "african american" or any
of the others in the list, including "black," what choice do i have? if
we agree to discuss race, we have to use the terms mutually
understandable to each other.
ken

[kenneth harrow]

kwame
you are giving the etymological origins of these words, right? but they change w usage, don't they? anyway, the one that stands out for me is obruni, which i learned from reading saidya hartman's Lose Your Mother. she said it meant stranger, but i gathered it really meant white person, or "europeén" as in francophone africa--and that she resented the term being applied to her.
ken

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Two Songs

We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue

Keep on keeping on

...

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Yes, "stranger" is colloquial. "Person from beyond the horizon" is etymological. Ghanaians call all white people Obruni. They also frequently call African Americans Obruni which is a bone of contention for African Americans. Many AAs find it insulting, There is a good amount of stuff online about it. However, Ghanains rarely, if ever, use it with malicious intent. Also, they sometimes call a light-complexioned (?) child Obruni as a term of endearment. 

I really dislike Hartman's book, but I teach sections of it occasionally as a counterpoint. When Saidiya was doing the research for what became "Lose Your Mother," I was in Ghana for the first time as an undergrad (1998). Our paths passed in Ghana a few times. Saidiya had many bad experiences in Ghana and, consequently, produced a cynical text. My experience was the opposite. I loved my time there so much that I decided to stay the entire year and I have been going back and forth since that time. Ghana is now my second home. I think I may have been called Obruni once or twice. I hang out with ordinary people, traveled a lot on the local transportation (tro-tros), avoid tourists, and I make an effort to learn the basics of some of the local languages--Twi, Ewe, Ga, Hausa.

kzs

...

[Kwabena Akurang-Parry]

Kwame:
Let us delve into the etymology of Abibiman (black nation/people). What is "abibi"?  It is a derivative of “abibiri” referring to variations of dark shades, not black as such. In fact, “abibiri/abiri/abere can mean light complexion. For example, if an Akan tells you “wo biri/ bere” it means you have a relatively light complexion. Also if an Akan says “akutu no abere “it means the “orange has “ripened” and here “ripe” refers to the color of the orange changing from green to yellow-like.
 Interestingly Akans often use “tuntum” instead of “abibiri/abiri” to refer to black/ness or dark shades. Thus one wonders why Akans don’t call their world Tuntuman (black nation). After all Akans say “woye onipa tuntum” meaning “you are a black person.” For its part “abiri” means “dirty” and is applied to material things that need to be washed or cleaned. For example, I would tell my son, “Wo atade no abiri” nti ko horo;” this means ”Your shirt is dirty so wash it.”
 
The etymological roots of Obruni/Oburoni

1. Aburokyire – means aboro akyiri to wit “beyond what we can see” – horizon, space, sea, etc.” Thus Oburoni means “people who leave in the area beyond what we can see” Note that the suffix “ni” means inhabitants or citizens of place.

2. Oburoni (singular) Aburofo (plural). In Akan both means wicked, cruel, hideous, mischievous, roguish, harmful, destructive, etc. Thus the use of “Oburoni/Aburofo” may have its roots from the way that some Akans perceived and constructed whites in the precolonial period.

3. In contemporary times, Akans use “oburoni” to describe people with light complexion.

4. Also “me buroni” has become a concept for all good things, for example, a number of Ghanaian hi-life songs are interspersed with “me buroni” referring good lovers, benevolent people, great achievers, etc. Even “good” fruits are fall under “me buroni,” for example, aburofo akutu [white people’s orange], aburofo aborobe [white people’s pineapple], aburofo tomatoes [white people’s tomatoes]. Here let me add an aside: so much for the cultural benightedness of Ghanaians!

There is an article by J. B. Danquah in the Transactions of the Historical Society of Gold Coast and Togoland, in which Dr. Danquah relates the oburoni concept to “Buronya” (Christmas). Not sure I got the journal title right though!

  

---

Date: Sat, 9 May 2015 15:41:37 -0700

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Ɔbenfo, Kwabena.

Meda wɔ ase paa, for those linguistic details. Unfortunately, I have not kept up with my Twi. You have inspired me to start studying the language again as I would like to be fluent in a few African languages (the others being Hausa and a small language group, Yotti/Bali, of Central Nigeria and Cameroon, and perhaps Kiswahili).

There is also a much older (but disputed) etymology tracing the usage of "black" as an ethnonym to Kemet (ancient Egypt). Kemet means "land of the Blacks." Cheikh Anta Diop argued that this was a metaphorical reference to the dark complexioned inhabitants. Mainstream scholars, however, believe that "black" is a reference to the fertile soil on the banks of the Nile.  

In the US context African Americans often (but not always) perceived "black" as an insult because whites brutally enforced the idea that anything African was bad or evil. Beginning in the 1930s the Nation of Islam (and especially Elijah Muhammad's most illustrious student, Malcolm X in the 1960s) was largely responsible for African Americans embracing "Black" as term of pride and self-identity.

kzs

kzs
===
kwame zulu shabazz

email: kwames...@gmail.com

cell: 336-422-9577
skype: kwame zulu shabazz
twitter: https://twitter.com/kzshabazz
===
THE NEUTRAL SCHOLAR IS AN IGNOBLE MAN. Here, a man must be hot, or be accounted cold, or, perchance, something worse than hot or cold. The lukewarm and the cowardly, will be rejected by earnest men on either side of the controversy." Fredrick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered" (1854).
===
EVERY ARTIST, EVERY SCIENTIST MUST DECIDE, NOW, WHERE HE STANDS. He has no
alternative. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of national and racial superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. This struggle invades the former cloistered halls of our universities and all her seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. The artist elects to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice! I had no alternative! - Paul Robeson, speech about the Spanish Civil War at the Albert Hall, London,on 24th June 1937

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/usaafricadialogue/yNxj2W3NtMc/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Hi Ken,

My brain wasn't working well in my previous reply to you. "Stranger" and someone from "beyond the horizon" connotes the same thing. Thus the original sense of the word is consistent with the typical reference to a white person (or a light-complexioned black person, or a black person perceived to be "strange," e.g. speaking English with an American accent or walking around with a huge backpack).

But, yes, as I think I noted in a previous post, it is certainly true that root meanings can lead one astray. My favorite example is "girl" which was originally gender neutral--a child of either sex. It might be interesting to research whether or not a language like English might be less stable than say, Twi/Akan. I wonder because English is basically a bastard language with tons of lexical borrowings from many different languages, including western African languages (although structurally more or less Germanic). Akan/Twi, of course, also has loan words but not nearly as many as are in the English language.

kzs

On Saturday, May 9, 2015 at 7:18:59 PM UTC-5, Kenneth Harrow wrote:

...

[Salimonu Kadiri]

Kenneth Harrow is deodorizing cow-dung, but the more he sprays the cow-dung the greater the stinking odour. Hear him, "words take their meanings only within discursive communities.Within my community, and in particular the U.S. academy, *person of colour is a polite term of referring to non-White people, with as little 'weight' as possible, i. e., as neutral as possible." This forum is not U.S. Academy and I for one do not share your idea that WHITE IS NOT A COLOUR. When you choose to refer to non-White people, whether with featherweight or cotton-weight, as PEOPLE OF COLOUR, you are contemptuous of the people so referred to and by so doing, you are proclaiming White superiority over them. You cannot reserve *person of colour* to refer to non-White person when White is a type of colour just like e.g. blue, red, yellow, black etc. Words that take their meanings within a discursive community should be restricted in use within that community and not outside it, most especially, if others could feel offended. It is common for students to give unpleasant nicknames to lecturers which are only used within the group of students concerned but not known to others or the lecturers self. It is never polite to confront any lecturer with a negative  nickname!! A community of speakers may decide within its self to call other people, persons of colour but not to the face of the people so nicknamed. You are not a man without colour and I am not a person of colour!!

 

Question of colour, especially, in reference to human beings, is relative. The African American woman that was regarded by the Cameroonians as White was only relative to the normal pigment of inhabitants in Cameroon. It had no negative motive. That Kenneth Harrow and his group protested against regarding the light-complexioned African American as White, depended on the fact that US was founded on racism. Since Kenneth Harrow would not admit America's institutionalization of racism he transferred it to  the Caribbean where he hypothetically insinuated that the light-skinned African American U.S. Ambassador in Cameroon would have been called an *OCTROON.* In USA, a child between a White and a Black person is called MULATTO; the offspring of a MULATTO and a White is called a QUADROON, to indicate possession of one-quarter of a Black person's blood; and a child between a QUADROON and a White person is called OCTROON to indicate possession of one-eighth of Black person's blood. These divisions are American in origin and not Caribbean. At the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi Germans, one of the accused, Dr Alfred Rosenberg, argued that the crime for which they were accused was not unique in history as there were precedents in USA, Australia and New-Zealand. Then one read this, "From 1891 to 1921 the South lynched forty-five Negro women, several of whom were young girls from fourteen to sixteen years old. ... One victim was in her eighth month of pregnancy. Members of the mob suspended her from a tree by her ankles. Gasoline was poured on her clothes and ignited. A chivalrous white man took his knife and split open her abdomen. The unborn child fell to the ground. A member of the mob crushed its head with his heel. ... Another victim was burned at the stake with her husband before a crowd of one thousand persons.. (p. 110, Sex and Racism by Calvin C. Hernton)." That was not Social construct.

 

While it is indisputable that Césaire and Senghor designated Negritude with Nègre, it should be recognized that had they chosen anti-colonial title, it would not have been published.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

---

Date: Sat, 9 May 2015 15:59:50 -0500

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

"These divisions are American in origin and not Caribbean."Kadiri

I would add to that that they are all variants of white supremacist
ideology, and went hand in hand with eugenics. Nazi philosophy is an offspring.

These disgusting terms were often hurled at the victims of rapists.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department
CCSU. New Britain. CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on
Africa and the African Diaspora

________________________________

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Salimonu Kadiri [ogunl...@hotmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2015 5:05 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

Kenneth Harrow is deodorizing cow-dung, but the more he sprays the cow-dung the greater the stinking odour. Hear him, "words take their meanings only within discursive communities.Within my community, and in particular the U.S. academy, *person of colour is a polite term of referring to non-White people, with as little 'weight' as possible, i. e., as neutral as possible." This forum is not U.S. Academy and I for one do not share your idea that WHITE IS NOT A COLOUR. When you choose to refer to non-White people, whether with featherweight or cotton-weight, as PEOPLE OF COLOUR, you are contemptuous of the people so referred to and by so doing, you are proclaiming White superiority over them. You cannot reserve *person of colour* to refer to non-White person when White is a type of colour just like e.g. blue, red, yellow, black etc. Words that take their meanings within a discursive community should be restricted in use within that community and not outside it, most especially, if others could feel offended. It is common for students to give unpleasant nicknames to lecturers which are only used within the group of students concerned but not known to others or the lecturers self. It is never polite to confront any lecturer with a negative nickname!! A community of speakers may decide within its self to call other people, persons of colour but not to the face of the people so nicknamed. You are not a man without colour and I am not a person of colour!!

Question of colour, especially, in reference to human beings, is relative. The African American woman that was regarded by the Cameroonians as White was only relative to the normal pigment of inhabitants in Cameroon. It had no negative motive. That Kenneth Harrow and his group protested against regarding the light-complexioned African American as White, depended on the fact that US was founded on racism. Since Kenneth Harrow would not admit America's institutionalization of racism he transferred it to the Caribbean where he hypothetically insinuated that the light-skinned African American U.S. Ambassador in Cameroon would have been called an *OCTROON.* In USA, a child between a White and a Black person is called MULATTO; the offspring of a MULATTO and a White is called a QUADROON, to indicate possession of one-quarter of a Black person's blood; and a child between a QUADROON and a White person is called OCTROON to indicate possession of one-eighth of Black person's blood. These divisions are American in origin and not Caribbean. At the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi Germans, one of the accused, Dr Alfred Rosenberg, argued that the crime for which they were accused was not unique in history as there were precedents in USA, Australia and New-Zealand. Then one read this, "From 1891 to 1921 the South lynched forty-five Negro women, several of whom were young girls from fourteen to sixteen years old. ... One victim was in her eighth month of pregnancy. Members of the mob suspended her from a tree by her ankles. Gasoline was poured on her clothes and ignited. A chivalrous white man took his knife and split open her abdomen. The unborn child fell to the ground. A member of the mob crushed its head with his heel. ... Another victim was burned at the stake with her husband before a crowd of one thousand persons.. (p. 110, Sex and Racism by Calvin C. Hernton)." That was not Social construct.

While it is indisputable that Césaire and Senghor designated Negritude with Nègre, it should be recognized that had they chosen anti-colonial title, it would not have been published.







________________________________
Date: Sat, 9 May 2015 15:59:50 -0500
From: har...@msu.edu
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

i had one more thought on this, a brief one.
words take their meanings only within discursive communities.
within my community, and in particular the u.s. academy, "person of color" is a polite terms of referring to non-white people, with as little "weight" as possible, i.e., as neutral as possible.
i have no idea if the term is used in england, say, or what it means, or how it would be taken.
the same for nigeria, or india, or any other anglophone country. i somehow imagine canada is similar to the u.s.

there isn't a "right" meaning to those words: they take on meaning within the community of speakers who use it. and it is really that community, in its usage, that determines the connotations of polite vs derogatory. and as i said before, those change a lot over time.

in answer to saimonu's question, "who determines who is 'colored' or not," the answer is obviously the community of speakers. in cameroon, when we were there in the 1970s, mabel smythe was the u.s. ambassador. to the cameroonians, this light-skinned african american woman was white! not mixed, not black. white. they were astonished when we said she was black!
to an american it was obvious she was black.
if it had been in the caribbean, they would have not only called her a femme de couleur, a woman of color, but more, an octroon, or one of those horrible terms designating how much white or black blood she had.
the history of race is written in these words, how they were used, how they have changed. and perhaps none more fascinating that "nègre," the term chosen by césaire and senghor to designate Negritude, the most important african literary movement of the 1930s-50s, to designate a term of pride in the black race, in black people, history, etc. and yet it was based on a word of questionable propriety, especially then. a francophone person might tell us how it has changed valence decade after decade.

ken

On 5/8/15 6:12 PM, Salimonu Kadiri wrote:
Well, Kenneth Harrow, since I don't know you, I can only guess that you are a Caucasian who is sympathetic to the course of the oppressed and exploited Blacks. Just like it is impossible for egg eaters to feel the pain of the hens laying eggs, you cannot feel the effect of humiliations we suffer in the hands of our civilized abusers and exploiters! Persons of colour, women of colour are not and cannot be respectful terms when they are exclusively limited in application to the Negroid race by the Caucasoid. If there are persons of colour, women of colour, the opposite to them must be persons without colour, or women without colour. If persons/women of colour are respectful terms in referring to the Negroid race, then persons/women without colour ought to be respectful terms in referring to the Caucasoid. The Caucasoid refer to themselves as *WHITES* but at the same time they do not refer to themselves as coloured even though *White* is a colour just like black. Who is coloured and who is colourless? I cannot see anything respectful in referring to the Caucasians as Persons/Women of pale complexion!!

________________________________
Date: Fri, 8 May 2015 09:24:25 -0400

From: har...@msu.edu<mailto:har...@msu.edu>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

dear oa
what makes a term derogatory? we can turn to our word maven farooq to get an answer. but in this case, persons of color, women of color, are commonly used respectful terms. you might not like them, but an individual dislike doesn't constitute grounds for defining a term as derogatory.
we don't invent a vocabulary: it is shared, and its values are shared ones. that's how language works.
i'd prefer other terms as well, but in fact i was using the term respectfully.

ken

On 5/7/15 5:33 PM, Anunoby, Ogugua wrote:

Ken,



What does “woman of color” mean?

Why in good conscience, would anyone, describe another, especially a colleague they just had an intelligent conversation with, a “person of color”? Was it inevitable that this colleague be so described? Taken literarily, every person is a person of color. That characterization is a discriminatory slur- a relic of America’s racist past that will not go away for the reason it was used below- skin color for some, is a difference that sets apart the members of the human race more than anything else. It should be unacceptable, roundly rejected, and condemned by all. It is neither comfort nor defense that some themselves are so characterized, use it about themselves.

I must state categorically that I am disappointed, very disappointed, the term has been used by choice, by a much respected member of this forum, from whom I believe many forum members including me, have learned a lot. I am sorry Ken. I am truly disappointed.

“Old dogs learn slowly” but not all learning should be slow.



oa

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com> [mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow
Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2015 1:20 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)



dear kwame
just had a long discussion with a young colleague, a woman of color, and she was much more in agreement with you than with me!
(old dogs learn slowly)
ken


On 5/6/15 8:02 PM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Brother Ken,

There are two flaws in Wilson's work (and most other mainstream scholars): 1) he takes white middle class "behavior" as normative. So, for example, white America's general refusal to acknowledge white privilege is, in my view, a sort of anti-black violence. 2) State sanctioned violence (local police, National Guard, Armed Forces) is unmarked and un-analyzed as violence (like Wall Street theft is rarely criminalized). Thus Wilson winds up with just another tired variant of the cultural deficit model.

In other words, poverty doesnt predict crime and violence, it predicts certain types of crime and violence. This is important. The consequence is that we wind up analyzing certain sorts of violence that are associated with poverty while virtually ignoring the sorts of crimes/violence that is more likely to be perpetuated by the mostly white upper class. But beyond that I think you exaggerate the influence of class on the quality of life of African Americans. I also think you overstate the degree to which American society has changed.

There is lots of data out there suggesting that not much has changed and, indeed, in some ways we have gone backwards (Indeed, Harold Cruse argues in Crisis of the Negro Intellectual that integration was a disaster for Black progress and self-determination). A few examples come to mind: You seem to suggest that hiring white women at your university is equivalent with, say, a black female hire. But white women have made substantial gains from affirmative action legislation even as a subset of white women are on the front lines in the effort to dismantle AA.

We should bear in mind that AA was originally a racial redress for centuries of white power. It was watered down and morphed into "diversity" in the 70s after the Bakke decision. White women, as members of white nuclear families, have benefited from and supported white supremacy which was the law of the land for most of America's existence. This is why the work of Black feminist on intersectionality is so crucial.

There is research showing that college educated blacks are less likely<http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/black-men-need-more-education-to-get-the-same-jobs/375770/> to get a call back than whites with education; there remains a vast wealth gap<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gap_n_6317202.html> between white and blacks; the black middle-class in chronically susceptible to downward mobility<http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/01/24/the-american-dream-shatters-in-prince-georges-county/>; black males. On and on. The indignities of being black in America are endless. Obama has only made feel a little better about our oppression.

kzs

On Wednesday, May 6, 2015 at 9:22:14 AM UTC-5, Kenneth Harrow wrote:

just to give the gist of the krugman editorial:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article

"The great sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago that widely-decried social changes among blacks, like the decline of traditional families, were actually caused by the disappearance of well-paying jobs in inner cities. His argument contained an implicit prediction: if other racial groups were to face a similar loss of job opportunity, their behavior would change in similar ways.
And so it has proved. Lagging wages — actually declining in real terms for half of working men — and work instability have been followed by sharp declines in marriage, rising births out of wedlock, and more.
As Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution writes: “Blacks have faced, and will continue to face, unique challenges. But when we look for the reasons why less skilled blacks are failing to marry and join the middle class, it is largely for the same reasons that marriage and a middle-class lifestyle is eluding a growing number of whites as well.”

Continue reading the main story<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article#story-continues-5>

On 5/6/15 3:20 AM, Kwabena Akurang-Parry wrote:

Class affects one's conditions and lived experiences within "racial" or "ethnic" categories. But in America, for example, it is"race" that defines discrimination to the extent that marginalized whites have better opportunities than blacks located in any part of the vertical space.


> Date: Tue, 5 May 2015 18:44:11 -0400
> From: har...@msu.edu
> To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)
>
> gloria
> have you seen krugman's column in which he argues that you have to
> include class in determining the debilitating effects of discrimination.
> it is very compelling. basically he says, when people, white as well as
> black, have become poorer, they don't live as long or as well.
> here is the column he wrote a few days ago:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article
>
> it shouldn't be an all or nothing argument. middle class black people
> are indeed subject to maltreatment more than are whites; but the larger
> picture has to include more than race to explain the factors in society
> that impact people's lives.
> ken
>
>
> On 5/5/15 4:50 PM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) wrote:
> > Sun May 03, 2015 , http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in-the-United-States?detail=email
> >

> > The most racist areas in the United States<http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in-the-United-States><http://dailykos.com/story/2015/05/03/1381214/-The-most-racist-areas-in-the-United-States>
> >
> > bySusan Grigsby<http://dailykos.com/user/Susan%20Grigsby><http://dailykos.com/user/Susan%20Grigsby> forDaily Kos<http://dailykos.com/blog/main><http://dailykos.com/blog/main>
> >

> > [https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/attachment.ashx?id=RgAAAACIR4fP8%2fDSEaNAAAD4YBApBwDd9LcDLkTSEaMkAKDJ4RrzAAAA7%2f1AAACG0aK%2bn4McSrUVwdL4l7nbAFDo8iUEAAAJ&attcnt=1&attid0=EAAIhqf4v5x1SKTZJ2smsTOj<https://webmail.ccsu.edu/owa/attachment.ashx?id=RgAAAACIR4fP8/DSEaNAAAD4YBApBwDd9LcDLkTSEaMkAKDJ4RrzAAAA7/1AAACG0aK%2bn4McSrUVwdL4l7nbAFDo8iUEAAAJ&attcnt=1&attid0=EAAIhqf4v5x1SKTZJ2smsTOj>]<http://images.dailykos.com/images/141407/lightbox/journal.pone.0122963.g001_copy.jpg?1430691641><http://images.dailykos.com/images/141407/lightbox/journal.pone.0122963.g001_copy.jpg?1430691641>
> >
> > There are neighborhoods in Baltimore in which the life expectancy is 19 years less than other neighborhoods in the same city. Residents of the Downtown/Seaton Hill neighborhood have a life expectancy lower than 229 other nations, exceeded only by Yemen. According to the Washington Post<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/30/baltimores-poorest-residents-die-20-years-earlier-than-its-richest/?wpisrc=nl_wnkpm&wpmm=1><http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/30/baltimores-poorest-residents-die-20-years-earlier-than-its-richest/?wpisrc=nl_wnkpm&wpmm=1>, 15 neighborhoods in Baltimore have a lower life expectancy than North Korea.

> >
> > And while those figures represent some of the most dramatic disparities in the life expectancy of black Americans as opposed to whites, a recent study of the health impacts of racism in America reveals that racist attitudes may cause up to 30,000 early deaths every year.
> >

> > The study, Association between an Internet-Based Measure of Area Racism and Black Mortality<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122963#pone.0122963.ref042><http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122963#pone.0122963.ref042>, has just been published in PLOS ONE and has mapped out the most racist areas in the United States. As illustrated above, they are mostly located in the rural Northeast and down along the Appalachian Mountains into the South. How they did it and what it may mean are below the fold.

> > We already know about the racism that led to Jim Crow, the KKK, and lynchings. We also know about the racism that has become embedded in our justice system, from cops who kill, to prosecutors who ensure that blacks receive longer prison terms than do whites. We know that those sentencing disparities lead to greater disenfranchisement of blacks.
> >
> > We think we know how racism has injured and killed black Americans. But do we really? There are the obvious cases, like Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, but what about the silent killers? The hypertension and the chronic medical conditions that lead so many more blacks to an early grave than they do whites. Could racist attitudes lead to 30,000 early deaths every year?
> >
> > According to the authors of the study, current research points to a variety of causes for the disparities in health between white and black Americans, many of which can be traced to racial segregation. Many blacks are restricted to high-crime neighborhoods that are lacking in outdoor recreational areas, access to healthy foods, and decent health care. Discrimination in employment leads to lower wages that further impact the ability to enjoy healthy food, exercise, and recreation.
> >
> > The authors also point out that:
> > ... racial discrimination may also directly impact health by engaging psychobiological mechanisms induced in the stress response
> > In other words, stress, especially chronic stress, is bad for your health. This isn't really news. Experiences of racial discrimination are often accompanied by a sense of powerlessness, of anxiety, and of anger. These stressors, especially over a lifetime, can lead to negative health impacts. Jon Stewart did not know how right he was when he said, "If racism is something you're sick of hearing about, imagine how exhausting it must be living it every day."
> > As a source of chronic psychosocial stress, repeated racism may result in a heightened pro-inflammatory state that can have particularly detrimental consequences for the etiology and progression of cardiovascular and other immune disorders. Studies on discrimination have found evidence for adverse consequences for hypertension, atherosclerosis, and their inflammatory mediators. A recent study found that racism-related factors may also be associated with accelerated aging at the cellular level.
> > Past studies have had problems quantifying racism. They can look at localized institutional racism via housing and employment, or they can rely on self-reported incidents of racism. Of course, self-reported attitudes are difficult to verify and are subject to self-censorship, especially in regard to micro-aggressions and racism without a clear perpetrator, and institutional studies don't actually reflect racist attitudes as much as their results.
> >
> > The authors of this study have turned to internet searches using the "N-word" for help in finding areas of racist attitudes in America.
> > This measure, calculated based on Internet search queries containing the “N-word”, was strongly associated with the differential in 2008 votes for Barack Obama, the Black Democratic presidential candidate, vs. 2004 votes for John Kerry, the White Democratic presidential candidate.
> > The study authors used the designated market areas (DMA) as defined by the Nielsen Media Research. Residents within these DMAs generally receive their information from common television and/or radio broadcasts and newspapers, providing similar messages that influence racial attitudes. The authors make clear that not all searches for the "N-word" are due to racial bias and that not all residents in a DMA share racist attitudes, but the volume of the available data provides a high signal-to-noise ratio.
> >
> > Using this information to find areas in which racism is alive and well, they then looked at black mortality rates using data from 2004–2009, collated by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). They examined four leading causes of death among blacks: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes. Unsurprisingly, they found a significant association between the racism indicated by the internet searches and an increase in black mortality.
> > Results from our study indicate that living in an area characterized by a one standard deviation greater proportion of racist Google searches is associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause mortality rate among Blacks. This effect estimate amounts to over 30,000 deaths among Blacks annually nationwide.
> >
> > These findings indicate that area racism, as indexed by the proportion of Google searches containing the “N-word”, is significantly associated with not only the all-cause Black mortality rate, but also Black-White disparities in mortality.
> > Racism doesn't just kill with a bullet to the back, it also kills by a thousand cuts, silently and mostly unnoticed.
> >

> > Was it only a year ago that Ta-Nehisi Coates made the Case for Reparations<http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/><http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/>? Reparations, hell, how about we stop killing black Americans first, and then discuss a way to repay them for the massive wrongs that have been done.

> > New York state police handcuff and shackle 'combative' five-year-old
> >
> > * Officers arrived after school reported boy was disruptive and uncontrollable
> > * They handcuffed him for ‘his safety’ and safety of staff, spokesman says

> > Ed Pilkington<http://www.theguardian.com/profile/edpilkington><http://www.theguardian.com/profile/edpilkington> in New York

> > Monday 4 May 2015 , The Guardian (UK)
> > The idea that police officers should use handcuffs and leg shackles to control an unruly individual is hardly unusual in the US, where fondness for the use of metal restraints runs through the criminal justice system.
> > What is unusual is when the individual in question is five years old, and the arrest takes place in an elementary school.

> > New York state police were called last week to the primary school in Philadelphia, New York<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/new-york><http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/new-york>, close to the Canadian border, after staff reported that a pupil, Connor Ruiz, was disruptive and uncontrollable. When officers arrived at the premises, they placed the five-year-old boy in handcuffs, carried him out to a patrol car and put his feet into shackles before taking him to a medical center for evaluation.
> > The child’s mother, Chelsea Ruiz, told the local Watertown Daily Times<http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/news03/fort-drum-parents-irate-after-police-handcuff-shackle-5-year-old-special-needs-student--20150502><http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/news03/fort-drum-parents-irate-after-police-handcuff-shackle-5-year-old-special-needs-student--20150502> she was shocked and angered by what had happened.

> > “An officer told me they had to handcuff his wrists and ankles for their safety,” she said. “I told him that was ridiculous. How could someone fear for their safety when it comes to a small, five-year-old child?”
> > A spokesman for the state police force, Jack Keller, justified the constraints on grounds that the child was “out of control” and “combative”, and was deemed to be a danger to himself or staff. Troopers had found him “screaming, kicking, punching and biting”.
> > “Our concern was his safety, of not only himself but the staff he was dealing with and the other students in the class where he was,” Keller said.

> > Handcuffing of young children is frequently<http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2014/12/children-handcuffed-by-police-at-katong/><http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2014/12/children-handcuffed-by-police-at-katong/> reported<http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-handcuff-9-year-special-child-elementary-school/><http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-handcuff-9-year-special-child-elementary-school/> in the US. Last December, a child aged four was handcuffed in Nathanael Greene primary school in Stanardsville, Virginia.
> > In 2013, the handcuffing of a nine-year-old girl in Portland<http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/10/portland_police_will_be_restri.html><http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/10/portland_police_will_be_restri.html>, Oregon prompted a public outcry that forced the police department to revise its rules. The new procedures forbid officers from handcuffing a child under 12, unless they pose a “heightened risk to safety”.

To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com>

Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.



--

kenneth w. harrow

faculty excellence advocate

professor of english

michigan state university

department of english

619 red cedar road

room C-614 wells hall

east lansing, mi 48824

ph. 517 803 8839

har...@msu.edu<mailto:har...@msu.edu>

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin

To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com>

Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin

To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com>

Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


--
kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839

har...@msu.edu<mailto:har...@msu.edu>

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin

To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com>

Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin

To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com>

Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


--
kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839

har...@msu.edu<mailto:har...@msu.edu>

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Beloveds,

Its one thing to critique the categories, its quite another to try to impose what you think the categories should be. Again, I stress that in the contemporary US, "people/women/men of color" is widely used by African Americans. White people aren't considered "of color." That has been the case for several hundred years going back at least to the early 1800s (as I documented in an earlier post). This usage is less common in Black ghettos, but very common usage amongst Black  Americans on university campuses or black/African American activists who, for example, advocate the politics of solidarity with other oppressed groups. This can be easily verified online. You might, for example, search Twitter and observe how frequently the term is used (see screenshot in this post). By the way, some black students in American universities have gotten the notion that African American is more formal or "professional" than "black." I'm not sure how that happened, but I use the terms interchangeably. And I should think that anyone teaching at an American university should know all of this.

kzs

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadi...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

dear oa
what makes a term derogatory? we can turn to our word maven farooq to get an answer. but in this case, persons of color, women of color, are commonly used respectful terms. you might not like them, but an individual dislike doesn't constitute grounds for defining a term as derogatory.
we don't invent a vocabulary: it is shared, and its values are shared ones. that's how language works.
i'd prefer other terms as well, but in fact i was using the term respectfully.

ken

On 5/7/15 5:33 PM, Anunoby, Ogugua wrote:

Ken,



What does “woman of color” mean?

Why in good conscience, would anyone, describe another, especially a colleague they just had an intelligent conversation with, a “person of color”? Was it inevitable that this colleague be so described? Taken literarily, every person is a person of color. That characterization is a discriminatory slur- a relic of America’s racist past that will not go away for the reason it was used below- skin color for some, is a difference that sets apart the members of the human race more than anything else. It should be unacceptable, roundly rejected, and condemned by all. It is neither comfort nor defense that some themselves are so characterized, use it about themselves.

I must state categorically that I am disappointed, very disappointed, the term has been used by choice, by a much respected member of this forum, from whom I believe many forum members including me, have learned a lot. I am sorry Ken. I am truly disappointed.

“Old dogs learn slowly” but not all learning should be slow.



oa

> > The study authors used the designated market areas (DMA) as defined by the Nielsen Media Research. Residents within these DMAs ge...

[Bode]

On 5/11/15, 8:03 AM, "kwame zulu shabazz" <kwames...@gmail.com> wrote:

"This usage is less common in Black ghettos, but very common usage amongst Black  Americans on university campuses or black/African American activists who, for example, advocate the politics of solidarity with other oppressed groups."

Anyone who has read their Du Bois well would recognize the root of that activism and solidarity of black and brown clearly articulated in those terms over 100 years ago.

Bode 

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Kwame is of the mindset that what is the case ought to be the case.
That's the naturalistic fallacy.

"People of color" is a euphemism for colored people.
Colored people has been rejected.


So people of color should /could/would/ might also be rejected - eventually.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department
CCSU. New Britain. CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on
Africa and the African Diaspora

There is research showing that college educated blacks are less likely<http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/black-men-need-more-education-to-get-the-same-jobs/375770/> to get a call back than whites with education; there remains a vast wealth gap<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gap_n_6317202.html> between white and blacks; the black middle-class in chronically susceptible to downward mobility<http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/01/24/the-american-dream-shatters-in-prince-georges-county/>; black males. On and on. The indignities of being black in America are endless. Obama has only made feel a little better about our oppression.

kzs

On Wednesday, May 6, 2015 at 9:22:14 AM UTC-5, Kenneth Harrow wrote:

just to give the gist of the krugman editorial:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article>

...

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com>.

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Sister Gloria/Bro OA

Curious to know if anyone has any evidence that "colored" was originally negative. As far as I know it was originally a neutral descriptive. Either way, as I already noted, roots can lead you astray--at least in American English. And you simply have no way of proving that "people of color" is going away. Nor is it true, as any linguist will affirm, that languages depend on "naturalism."

What you (or I) believe should be acceptable identifiers for Black people in America is one thing, what African Americans (or any other group) actually does with language is an entirely different matter.  And, besides, there are limitless examples of people co-opting negative identifiers for their own subversive ends. The great Ngugi wa Thong'o argues that Africans simply speaking Western languages and conceptualizing the world in those languages is a sort of violence. So, perhaps, we should abandon English, French and the rest altogether and only communicate in African languages. I'm for that, but I dont see us getting there soon.

kzs

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) ...

[Bode]

Gloria,

It is not a question of naturalism, it is a question of other genealogies
of that term, which was clearly mainstreamed in black thought of the 20th
century. That genealogy could be tracked in the works of none other than
the greatest black thinker, W. E. B. Du Bois. As you know, Du Bois¹s
career developed from African American emancipation to Pan Africanism and
beyond these to advocacy for oppressed people of color around the world.

One might argue that the last phase of advocacy for oppressed people of
color around the world was already present in his work for the
emancipation of African Americans. Remember they formed the organization
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in
1909, which till today still has the term "colored people" in its name. A
stronger expression of that advocacy for colored people or darker races
was philosophically defined in Souls of Black Folks: "the world problem of
the 20th century is the problem of the color line-the question of the
relation of the advanced races of men who happened to be white to the
great majority of the undeveloped or half-developed nations of mankind who
happen to be yellow, brown or blackŠ² The elaboration of this concept
would take center stage in Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography
of a Race Concept.

In his last novel Worlds of Color (1961) Du Bois wanted people of color to
be able to "let their true colors shine.² My colleague who has a course
titled "Women in Worlds of Color" was directly invoking Du Bois¹s last
novel. We have to move away from the popular domain and usage of the term
to its intellectual history, especially in black thought. Du Bois would
have to be ignorant or something to have developed his work around the
idea of people of color.

Bode Ibironke.




On 5/11/15, 10:12 AM, "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)"

>usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue+un
>subs...@googlegroups.com>.

>For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
>

>--
>Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
>To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
>To subscribe to this group, send an email to
>USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
>Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
>Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
>---
>You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
>"USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
>To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an

>email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.

[Abidogun, Jamaine M]

This discussion has intrigued me from the beginning.  As a social scientist sitting in a history department watching, the thing that has bothered me the most is the argument over meaning and who’s meaning.  Of course “who’s meaning” is of most importance.  Historically speaking “colored” or “coloured” was a polite version of Negro or nigger in the U.S..  It was still a qualifier to make certain people knew you were referring to the “other”.  No matter how you peal it or dice it; as long as a qualifier is felt as necessary we continue to establish the “other”.  If you are looking at demographics and tracking issues of discrimination, history, etc.  that is different.  But in everyday use, these labels are signifiers and carry great weight in our society.  We all feed into it; no one is blameless in this game of hierarchy and power.  To me the important thing is that we own it and we do our part to stop it.  We are who we are and our histories are what they are.  It is important to know ourselves and our histories, so we can stop the violence.  Symbolic violence in word use does matter.  You may not think or even the person in question may not think assigning someone as a “person of color” hurts, but it works to separate and ultimately to divide.  If you ask me if someone is African American or Anglo American – I will tell you based on my perception.  I won’t and consciously don’t use descriptors when I speak about my interactions. As a result, from a social science perspective, I have lots of stories, where it took months for “black” and “white” folks to sort out what we think is the obvious, i.e. race, color, ethnicity.  But you know what they listened to was the issue at hand and not to who was in the issue. Or should I say they didn’t color the issue.

 

Some interesting reading in the area is work by bell hooks.  Her social commentary is rich and insightful.  I assign her work in my courses and they students get it.  Although she has no simple answers.   A little a lot like our sister La Vonda did.

 

My two cents for today.  Wishing everyone much peace in justice.

 

-Jamaine Abidogun

--

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Peace to you, Jamaine.

I'm also a social scientist (cultural anthropology). You won't find many African American professors who will endorse your perspective. People of color, in fact, does the opposite of what you claim it does. Its inclusive, not divisive.

I teach bell hooks. She routinely uses "people of color," quote:

"In contrast, most people of color have no choice. No one can hide, change or mask dark skin color. White people, gay and straight, could show greater understanding of the impact of racial oppression on people of color by not attempting to make these oppressions synonymous, but rather by showing the ways they are linked and yet differ."

bell hooks, Talking Back, pg. 125. You may review the quote here -

https://books.google.com/books?id=MpN0ikR6-f4C&pg=PA125&dq=%22In+contrast,+most+people+of+color+have+no+choice.+No+one+can+hide,+change+or+mask+dark+skin+color.&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wstQVZTGA8ucgwTBgIHYBA&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

kzs
===
kwame zulu shabazz

email: kwames...@gmail.com

cell: 336-422-9577
skype: kwame zulu shabazz
twitter: https://twitter.com/kzshabazz
===
THE NEUTRAL SCHOLAR IS AN IGNOBLE MAN. Here, a man must be hot, or be accounted cold, or, perchance, something worse than hot or cold. The lukewarm and the cowardly, will be rejected by earnest men on either side of the controversy." Fredrick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered" (1854).
===
EVERY ARTIST, EVERY SCIENTIST MUST DECIDE, NOW, WHERE HE STANDS. He has no
alternative. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of national and racial superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. This struggle invades the former cloistered halls of our universities and all her seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. The artist elects to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice! I had no alternative! - Paul Robeson, speech about the Spanish Civil War at the Albert Hall, London,on 24th June 1937

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/usaafricadialogue/yNxj2W3NtMc/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.

[Abidogun, Jamaine M]

DuBois is writing from a social science perspective and is invoking "color" as both a social science construct and as a way to take away ownership from the dominant group. Yet others would argue, including myself, that even its use in an apparently "empowering" gesture just moves toward internalization of the dominant racist ideology. There is no winning here. But now the dominant group has won because we are mincing words rather than fighting for those who are targeted by underpaid and undertrained police and a social justice that disproportionately puts away people of African descent over above those of other origins. Scientifically speaking racism exists and must be addressed or it will not be resolved. Classism, sexism, ableism, etc doesn't get rid of racism - they compound it.

Okay I am going to my corner now. Peace.

-Jamaine Abidogun

>usaafricadialogue++un

[kwame zulu shabazz]

p.s. Sister Gloria, you said:

"People of color" is a euphemism for "colored "people.
"Colored "people has been rejected.

This is incorrect, in my view. I think the difficulty here is that you are not fluent in the subtleties of African American speech. As you know, there is lots of nuance in any language. American Vernacular English is no different. You are missing some of the nuance, just as I struggle to comprehend and reproduce the subtleties of tonal langauges like Yorùbá or Èwe.

I had already pointed out on this thread that while "colored" is widely rejected "people of color" is widely used. That should not be surprising, nor is it contradictory as you imply. The two usages convey two very divergent ideas. "People of color" is clearly not a euphemism for colored people. As I noted previously, it is frequently used as an inclusive identifier (e.g. black and brown people) and/or as way to demarcate solidarity with other non-white groups. Ken used it in a way that made sense to me. He was sharing a conversation he had with a colleague, but didn't want to be explicit about her identity.

Forward ever,

kzs

kzs
===
kwame zulu shabazz

email: kwames...@gmail.com

cell: 336-422-9577
skype: kwame zulu shabazz
twitter: https://twitter.com/kzshabazz
===
THE NEUTRAL SCHOLAR IS AN IGNOBLE MAN. Here, a man must be hot, or be accounted cold, or, perchance, something worse than hot or cold. The lukewarm and the cowardly, will be rejected by earnest men on either side of the controversy." Fredrick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered" (1854).
===
EVERY ARTIST, EVERY SCIENTIST MUST DECIDE, NOW, WHERE HE STANDS. He has no
alternative. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of national and racial superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. This struggle invades the former cloistered halls of our universities and all her seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. The artist elects to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice! I had no alternative! - Paul Robeson, speech about the Spanish Civil War at the Albert Hall, London,on 24th June 1937

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/usaafricadialogue/yNxj2W3NtMc/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.

[Abidogun, Jamaine M]

Hi Kwame,

 

She does use “people of color”  I agree, but then she problematizes it and forces people to work it.  That is my point. I consciously don’t use signifiers, but when I teach history, culture, diversity, then these terms are used to force the issue because yes we are all caught in a racist society.  And you did get my point – even though it was in my next entry – these intersections matter – because we signify on everything – social hierarchy is a mess and we do create our own madness.

 

Cheers,

Jamaine

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Brother Jamaine,

There nothing wrong with problematizing concepts. However, we first have to be clear about the concept being problematized. I don't think your explanation of this particular concept is accurate (i.e. the "people of color" is divisive). And I have read a good amount of hooks. I have never heard her problematize the use of "people of color" and she is definitely not problematizing "people of color" in the quote i cited. she is using it precisely the way i have said it is used--as an inclusive identifier of non-white people.

Forward ever,

kzs

...

[Abidogun, Jamaine M]

Hi Kwame,

 

Well I would use signifiers, but what would I be now – ohh your sister J  

 

I agree that she takes it with pride and owns it; but then she works it to help us see how others use it to oppress.  It is not whether she is proud of her color; it is how the system works that I am referring to and ultimately how even in using it at times we are left with “well they say it, so it must be okay.”  Of course it is okay to be who you are, but these words have meaning that go beyond what we want and she demonstrates that over and over again.  When I say she was a woman of color to an administrator and he/she is a bigot (consciously or not), then two boxes have been ticked that are difficult to untick. As such the candidate is clouded for that administrator by race and gender.  At some point that administrator will find out “she” is a “person of color”, but then that administrator is faced with self  truth – what to make of all they thought before they “knew”. I am a supporter of affirmative action, so once the cards are on the table then you have to talk the talk; then do bring forward statistical inequities regarding gender and race as barriers to the academy.  That is a necessary discussion.   I catch myself on this with gender. Even though I am a woman,  I often read work subconsciously thinking a man wrote it because of socially engrained attitudes that enforce voices of authority as male. 

 

I would say hooks does problematize it layer and layer through her experiences of self and what that means as a “person of color” and as a “woman”.  It is not so easy to see until you step out of the box of race, gender, etc.  The best way I can explain it is going to a nation and understanding the different networks of hierarchy where race is not one.  Then coming back here.  It is not that the term itself appears derogatory, it is its significance within our hierarchy.  Taken outside our racist structure it is just a nice term to say she has darker pigment than a Euro group of people.  But we cannot take it out of our racist structure, so the dominant group does respond to her as “a person of color” not as just another person.  It is the power hierarchy that it signifies not the term itself.  Perhaps Bourdieu’s work on language would help in understanding how we reinforce these networks of power – even as the oppressed. 

 

This is soo complicated that no few paragraphs I write will unravel it.  I appreciate your work and add it to my own thoughts to continue this weaving of meaning and power and how it can be worked toward good.

 

Salute,

--

[Bode]

" When I say she was a woman of color to an administrator and he/she is a bigot (consciously or not), then two boxes have been ticked that are difficult to untick."

These are profound insights, eloquent and succinct. But another box for “exception” could also be checked precisely because of that term. Problematic overall but positive for the candidate.

Bode 

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Hi Jamaine,

I threw him in the dustbin after grad school. And I dont defer to white theorists. And I certainly wouldn't look to them to gain insight on Black culture. And why should I? White theorists have been center-stage for centuries. Diop or Antenor Firmin or Maria Stewart or Du Bois or Malcolm X or Anna Julia Cooper or Eze or Marcus Garvey.

Bourdieu is mostly useless for insights on Black people, in my opinion. He does have some long-winded essays on Berbers, but even then he rarely, if ever, cites a Black thinker. I might assign him because I'm obligated to give students a broad range of ideas, but thats about it.

kzs

...

[kenneth harrow]

what is the basis for the claim that "People of color" is a euphemism
for "colored people"?
i disagree, at least from my own knowledge of the words. is there some
linguistic authority that would confirm that? if it is usage,we all know
that is not true. we are talking about signifiers: one is old-fashioned
and relatively pejorative when used by the general public--that is
colored people.
the other is the common polite term, not pejorative, not a euphemism. it
is also applied now to more than to black people, but to "minorities" in
general, hispanics, asians, native americans. the term is loose, and
must be evolving with time from its older connotations
perhaps a linguistic can give us greater precision on its usage.
ken

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Ken, don't get me wrong. I don't think you should be blamed for using the term.
It is used by many progressives. Many never questioned its usage.
When you are in the belly of a whale you have little room to manoeuver.
Those who used it in the 19th century were revolutionaries.

At the same time I believe that it is a questionable term and a
euphemism. By using it to refer to Latinos, Asians, Native Americans
it probably became a generic slur.

One day it may follow the path of the dinosaur.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department
CCSU. New Britain. CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on
Africa and the African Diaspora

________________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow [har...@msu.edu]
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2015 2:29 PM

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

"As far as I know it was originally a neutral descriptive." Kwame


Neutral? A word coined to refer to Black people in the pre-20th century that was neutral!

"Nor is it true, as any linguist will affirm, that languages depend on "naturalism."

OK but 101 philosophy will tell you that " the naturalistic fallacy" has little to do with
naturalism as you use it.

"And, besides, there are limitless examples of people co-opting negative identifiers for their own subversive ends."

I agree with you on this one- although we are still struggling to make the "N" word legit.

I t is quite a battle.

We did not co opt the word "Negro" .... And why should we?

"And you simply have no way of proving that "people of color" is going away."

Agreed. That is why I have hedged my bets with these conditional words could/might/ should.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department
CCSU. New Britain. CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on
Africa and the African Diaspora

________________________________
From: kwame zulu shabazz [kwames...@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2015 10:53 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Cc: Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK) Modified

Sister Gloria/Bro OA

Curious to know if anyone has any evidence that "colored" was originally negative. As far as I know it was originally a neutral descriptive. Either way, as I already noted, roots can lead you astray--at least in American English. And you simply have no way of proving that "people of color" is going away. Nor is it true, as any linguist will affirm, that languages depend on "naturalism."

What you (or I) believe should be acceptable identifiers for Black people in America is one thing, what African Americans (or any other group) actually does with language is an entirely different matter. And, besides, there are limitless examples of people co-opting negative identifiers for their own subversive ends. The great Ngugi wa Thong'o argues that Africans simply speaking Western languages and conceptualizing the world in those languages is a sort of violence. So, perhaps, we should abandon English, French and the rest altogether and only communicate in African languages. I'm for that, but I dont see us getting there soon.

kzs

On Monday, May 11, 2015 at 9:23:25 AM UTC-5, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) wrote:



Kwame is of the mindset that what is the case ought to be the case.
That's the naturalistic fallacy.

"People of color" is a euphemism for "colored "people.
"Colored "people has been rejected.


So "people of color" should /could/would/ might also be rejected - eventually.


Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department
CCSU. New Britain. CT 06050

africahistory.net<http://africahistory.net>
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos<http://vimeo.com/user5946750/videos>

[kenneth harrow]

dear all
salimonu seems determined to slander me by distorting what i said, and assigning meanings to words that have nothing to do with their usage.
i guess i will respond, hoping that my response will not burden the readers. if you are fed up already, just don't bother reading it.
to begin, it is offensive to state that my words are cow-dung, or such in disguise. since when does this constitute dialogue or respectful communication?
secondly, you, salimonu, do not understand, or choose not to understand what the term "person of color" means. when i give the conventional usage, you then jump to the absurd conclusion that i am advocating what the words mean.
you do that in the first paragraph by saying that it is i who choose what the terms mean in referring to non-white people, as though that were my fault, as though i am insulting you and others by implying that "color" is absent or present.
in fact, it isn't color, it is an identity marker, a racial identity marker, and in fact nowadays encompasses people of a large range of "colors."  but aside from saying lighter skinned or darker skinned, color is an imbecilic marker for these terms, and is clearly used simply to signify races, as in "red" or "yellow," or "white" for that matter.

in the second paragraph--i must say it is really hard to write this.
i think i will quit responding. it isn't worth it.
i wish people on this list would do the lifting, and perhaps explain why salimonu needed to manufacture offense when i stated that cameroonians did not discern a black racial marker in the american ambassador, which americans did discern. again he has turned my words, misreading, misquoting, misunderstanding, to purportedly describe my account of this interesting difference into absurdly attributing intent that she be termed "octroon."
he continues with even greater inventiveness in attributing the racist vocabulary to the u.s. instead of the caribbean.

now, what precisely is at stake here?

i leave a blank space above this line for people to fill in.
ken

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Dear Bode,
First of all let me thank you for taking the trouble to address the issue.
The reply I wrote several hours ago got lost in cyber space. This is a modified version.



Let me go back to your eloquent commentary:

"It is not a question of naturalism, it is a question of other genealogies
of that term, which was clearly mainstreamed in black thought of the 20th
century."

Although the naturalistic fallacy is not identical with "is-ought" illogicality,

namely, the erroneous assumption that " what is the case, ought to be the case." I used the reference

in a general philosophical/ logical sense. There is no connection with nature or naturalism.

"Remember they formed the organization
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in
1909, which till today still has the term "colored people" in its name."

This is a version of "is - ought" illogicality. The fact that the organization uses
the term in its name does not give it a clean bill of health. What's good for 1909 may
not necessarily be good for 2020.


By the way did Du Bois not use the word "Negro" in his writings?

And what happened to that word? Would he have used it in 2015 in his writings?


Thanks for your illuminating commentary.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department
CCSU. New Britain. CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on
Africa and the African Diaspora

________________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bode [omi...@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2015 11:02 AM

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

" It is not a question of naturalism, it is a question of other genealogies
of that term, which was clearly mainstreamed in black thought of the 20th
century. "

Although the naturalistic fallacy is not synonymous with the "is-ought"
(what is the case, ought to be the case) illogicality, I used it in a general sense.
Nothing to do with nature or natural.

"Remember they formed the organization
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in
1909, which till today still has the term "colored people" in its name."

We are back to the "is-ought" syndrome.

Many of the bona fide revolutionary thinkers of the 19th and early

20th century used the word "Negro." Today the term is rejected.

(I use revolutionary thinkers in a positive sense.)



I have to admit though that having
seen some old apartheid signs saying "No coloureds or dogs," I am a bit
prejudiced against the word and its origin.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department
CCSU. New Britain. CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on
Africa and the African Diaspora

________________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bode [omi...@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2015 11:02 AM

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Sister Gloria,

Im glad to see that you have modified your position. Very early in this thread you insisted that "people of color" was pejorative. Later you wrote that "people of color" and "colored" had the same meaning. You now concur that African Americans, progressives, etc. use people of color as an pan-ethnic identifier that can include anyone who is not white.

By the way, Negro was definitely co-opted by African Americans by at least the 1700s. A few hundred years later we got the NAACP. A few decades later Marcus Garvey and others insisted on Negro with a capital "N." Malcolm X, as you know challenged that usage. Interestingly, the most recent US census reintroduced "Negro" because, apparently, many older black southerners still use the term.

Rather than take it for granted that "colored" was originally racist, I would like to see the evidence. But you left out the sentence the follows. I said that even if it was originally pejorative, we know for certain that it was co-opted by the people thus defined. I am not certain about the original usage of colored. but I seem to call that it was first used in Latin America and then New Orleans as a neutral descriptive. It then quickly devolved into a pejorative in the ante-bellum South.

If true, it means that white supremacists co-opted the term from its original neutral usage and then African Americans re-appropriated the term as a self-ascriptive moniker. Or, perhaps, it has always had divergent meanings and usages. I also recall that "Negro" was originally a neutral moniker. FYI, I did some research on the usage of the term "nigger" several years back. African Americans had already co-opted that term by at least the late 1600s to mean a range of things from denigration to endearment--exactly how it is used by African Americans today.

Forward ever,

kzs
===
kwame zulu shabazz

email: kwames...@gmail.com

cell: 336-422-9577
skype: kwame zulu shabazz
twitter: https://twitter.com/kzshabazz
===
THE NEUTRAL SCHOLAR IS AN IGNOBLE MAN. Here, a man must be hot, or be accounted cold, or, perchance, something worse than hot or cold. The lukewarm and the cowardly, will be rejected by earnest men on either side of the controversy." Fredrick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered" (1854).
===
EVERY ARTIST, EVERY SCIENTIST MUST DECIDE, NOW, WHERE HE STANDS. He has no
alternative. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of national and racial superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. This struggle invades the former cloistered halls of our universities and all her seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. The artist elects to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice! I had no alternative! - Paul Robeson, speech about the Spanish Civil War at the Albert Hall, London,on 24th June 1937

[Bode]

"I don't think you should be blamed for using the term. It is used by

many progressives.²

You mean other progressives like Ken too use it since Ken is also a
progressive and he is using it as progressives use it.



On 5/11/15, 2:55 PM, "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)"

>>usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue+u
>>nsubs...@googlegroups.com>.

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Kwame,

You seem to have some vested interest in the term 'colored' or 'people of color.'



I must admit that having seen numerous old (pre-50s) signs with the term:



" No coloreds or dogs"



I am prejudiced against it.



I reiterate my position: I don't blame Ken for using it since a lot of progressives still use it

but I am suspicious of the word and all variations of it.



I recognize also that revolutionary thinkers have used it in their era - but they

also used the word Negro in that period. We hardly use it now. I don't blame them for using

it then.



But If you feel comfortable believing that I have modified my position, so be it.



( Incidentally, Steve Biko rejected the term in the South African context but it is still officially used.)









Gloria

________________________________
From: kwame zulu shabazz [kwames...@gmail.com]

Sent: Monday, May 11, 2015 4:51 PM
To: Emeagwali, Gloria (History); usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK) Modified

Sister Gloria,

Im glad to see that you have modified your position. Very early in this thread you insisted that "people of color" was pejorative. Later you wrote that "people of color" and "colored" had the same meaning. You now concur that African Americans, progressives, etc. use people of color as an pan-ethnic identifier that can include anyone who is not white.

By the way, Negro was definitely co-opted by African Americans by at least the 1700s. A few hundred years later we got the NAACP. A few decades later Marcus Garvey and others insisted on Negro with a capital "N." Malcolm X, as you know challenged that usage. Interestingly, the most recent US census reintroduced "Negro" because, apparently, many older black southerners still use the term.

Rather than take it for granted that "colored" was originally racist, I would like to see the evidence. But you left out the sentence the follows. I said that even if it was originally pejorative, we know for certain that it was co-opted by the people thus defined. I am not certain about the original usage of colored. but I seem to call that it was first used in Latin America and then New Orleans as a neutral descriptive. It then quickly devolved into a pejorative in the ante-bellum South.

If true, it means that white supremacists co-opted the term from its original neutral usage and then African Americans re-appropriated the term as a self-ascriptive moniker. Or, perhaps, it has always had divergent meanings and usages. I also recall that "Negro" was originally a neutral moniker. FYI, I did some research on the usage of the term "nigger" several years back. African Americans had already co-opted that term by at least the late 1600s to mean a range of things from denigration to endearment--exactly how it is used by African Americans today.

Forward ever,

kzs
===
kwame zulu shabazz

email: kwames...@gmail.com<mailto:kwames...@gmail.com>

cell: 336-422-9577
skype: kwame zulu shabazz
twitter: https://twitter.com/kzshabazz
===
THE NEUTRAL SCHOLAR IS AN IGNOBLE MAN. Here, a man must be hot, or be accounted cold, or, perchance, something worse than hot or cold. The lukewarm and the cowardly, will be rejected by earnest men on either side of the controversy." Fredrick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered" (1854).
===
EVERY ARTIST, EVERY SCIENTIST MUST DECIDE, NOW, WHERE HE STANDS. He has no
alternative. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of national and racial superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. This struggle invades the former cloistered halls of our universities and all her seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. The artist elects to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice! I had no alternative! - Paul Robeson, speech about the Spanish Civil War at the Albert Hall, London,on 24th June 1937

On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 2:40 PM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@mail.ccsu.edu<mailto:emea...@mail.ccsu.edu>> wrote:
"As far as I know it was originally a neutral descriptive." Kwame


Neutral? A word coined to refer to Black people in the pre-20th century that was neutral!


"Nor is it true, as any linguist will affirm, that languages depend on "naturalism."


OK but 101 philosophy will tell you that " the naturalistic fallacy" has little to do with
naturalism as you use it.


"And, besides, there are limitless examples of people co-opting negative identifiers for their own subversive ends."

I agree with you on this one- although we are still struggling to make the "N" word legit.

I t is quite a battle.

We did not co opt the word "Negro" .... And why should we?



"And you simply have no way of proving that "people of color" is going away."

Agreed. That is why I have hedged my bets with these conditional words could/might/ should.



Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department
CCSU. New Britain. CT 06050

africahistory.net<http://africahistory.net>
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos<http://vimeo.com/user5946750/videos>
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on
Africa and the African Diaspora

________________________________
From: kwame zulu shabazz [kwames...@gmail.com<mailto:kwames...@gmail.com>]

Sent: Monday, May 11, 2015 10:53 AM

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Cc: Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK) Modified

Sister Gloria/Bro OA

Curious to know if anyone has any evidence that "colored" was originally negative. As far as I know it was originally a neutral descriptive. Either way, as I already noted, roots can lead you astray--at least in American English. And you simply have no way of proving that "people of color" is going away. Nor is it true, as any linguist will affirm, that languages depend on "naturalism."

What you (or I) believe should be acceptable identifiers for Black people in America is one thing, what African Americans (or any other group) actually does with language is an entirely different matter. And, besides, there are limitless examples of people co-opting negative identifiers for their own subversive ends. The great Ngugi wa Thong'o argues that Africans simply speaking Western languages and conceptualizing the world in those languages is a sort of violence. So, perhaps, we should abandon English, French and the rest altogether and only communicate in African languages. I'm for that, but I dont see us getting there soon.

kzs

On Monday, May 11, 2015 at 9:23:25 AM UTC-5, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) wrote:



Kwame is of the mindset that what is the case ought to be the case.
That's the naturalistic fallacy.

"People of color" is a euphemism for "colored "people.
"Colored "people has been rejected.


So "people of color" should /could/would/ might also be rejected - eventually.


Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department
CCSU. New Britain. CT 06050

africahistory.net<http://africahistory.net><http://africahistory.net>
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos<http://vimeo.com/user5946750/videos><http://vimeo.com/user5946750/videos>

Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on
Africa and the African Diaspora



On Saturday, May 9, 2015 at 4:24:07 PM UTC-5, ogunlakaiye wrote:
Kwame, thank you for your lecture. The questions that remain to be answered are: was it the non-white Americans who chose to describe themselves as Person/Man/Woman-of-colour or was it the white supremacists that coined the expression and forced the non-whites to accept it? And what was the purpose of inventing Person/Man/Woman-of-colour expression when all humans possess colour?

________________________________
Date: Fri, 8 May 2015 16:58:47 -0700

From: kwames...@gmail.com<mailto:kwames...@gmail.com>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

Ogunlakaiye,

As for your point about "man-of-color nationalist." Ha! Nice one. I agree that it would strike most, including me, as odd phrasing. However, as several posters have noted, words are contextual and their meanings change over time. Person/Man/Woman-of-color are used in specific social contexts. The context is basically determined by a community of speakers. So, for example, going back to my previous comments about "tribe." I advise my students not to use it in their academic writing, but I also alert them to the fact that it might be perfectly fine to use with a group of Ghanaians. One has to listen to what insiders do and say and then adapt accordingly.

Historically, perhaps through the first few decades of the 1900s, "person/man/woman-of-color or "colored" was used to describe African Americans. Now here is where it gets a bit complicated: in contemporary times, "colored" is considered outdated and even offensive. But "person/man/woman-of-color" is acceptable to describe any non-white person (not just African Americans). Likewise, there was a time when African Americans embraced the term Negro, but now it is rejected as offensive by most African Americans under 50 years old (but still apparently used by some Black southern elders). "African American" was popularized by Jesse Jackson in the 70s as a way of celebrating our African heritage. White Americans like Clintion are mostly the descendants of voluntary immigrants so they have a different political history which informs their identity politics.

kzs

On Friday, May 8, 2015 at 4:24:40 PM UTC-5, ogunlakaiye wrote:
*Woman of colour* is widely used in the USA. We generally use it to mean someone who is not white. The term is especially prominent among progressives in the US who employ it as a term of solidarity. Besides a subset of my Black nationalist comrades (I'm a Black nationalist), I don't know of anyone who considers *man/woman of colour* offensive - Kwame Shabazz.

Anthropologically considered, human race is divided into three racial groups.These are: 1. Caucasoid - ascribed to the pale-complexioned racial group of mankind, with pointed long and/or concave nose, embracing peoples indigenous to Europe, North Africa, South West Asia and Indian subcontinent and their descendants in other parts of the world; 2. Mongoloid - ascribed to light-complexioned racial group with straight black hair, slanting eyes, short nose, and scanty facial hairs, embracing most of the peoples of Asia, the Eskimos, and the North American Indians (American aborigines); and 3. Negroid - ascribed to the brown-black skin, tightly-curled hair, a short flat nose, and full lips people. This group includes the indigenous peoples of Africa south of the Sahara, their descendants elsewhere, and some Melanesian peoples. Even if Euro-America, because of their military conquests and subjugations around the world, has divided the human race into three: white, black and yellow, no human being fits into these descriptions physically. Therefore, Euro-American division of human race into white, black and yellow implies that no human being is colourless. In other words all human beings are coloured. It will make sense, but not progressive, if every American is referred to as *MAN/WOMAN OF COLOUR.* To reserve the term *MAN/WOMAN OF COULOUR* to the American blacks alone is not only an insult but, segregation and racism against Black Americans. If Kwame Shabazz should refer to himself as *MAN OF COLOUR NATIONALIST* he will discover, how ridiculous and senseless the term is. As an African, I have always wondered why Obama is referred to as an Afro-American or an African-American while Clinton and others are never referred to as Euro-American or European-American.


________________________________
Date: Thu, 7 May 2015 19:51:36 -0700

From: kwames...@gmail.com<mailto:kwames...@gmail.com>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The most racist areas in the United States (dailykos) & the 5 year old that NY police placed in handcuffs and shackles (Guardian-UK)

Bro Ogugua,

"Woman of color" is widely used in the USA. We generally use it to mean someone who is not white. The term is especially prominent among progressives in the US who employ it as a term of solidarity. Besides a subset of my Black nationalist comrades (I'm a Black nationalist), I don't know of anyone who considers "man/woman of color" offensive.

kzs

On Thursday, May 7, 2015 at 6:42:49 PM UTC-5, Anunoby, Ogugua wrote:
Ken,

What does “woman of color” mean?
Why in good conscience, would anyone, describe another, especially a colleague they just had an intelligent conversation with, a “person of color”? Was it inevitable that this colleague be so described? Taken literarily, every person is a person of color. That characterization is a discriminatory slur- a relic of America’s racist past that will not go away for the reason it was used below- skin color for some, is a difference that sets apart the members of the human race more than anything else. It should be unacceptable, roundly rejected, and condemned by all. It is neither comfort nor defense that some themselves are so characterized, use it about themselves.
I must state categorically that I am disappointed, very disappointed, the term has been used by choice, by a much respected member of this forum, from whom I believe many forum members including me, have learned a lot. I am sorry Ken. I am truly disappointed.
“Old dogs learn slowly” but not all learning should be slow.

oa

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com> [mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow

Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2015 1:20 PM

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Gloria, you said:

"People of color" is a euphemism for "colored" people.

Later, you conceded that "people of color" is an inclusive moniker often used by progressives to refer to anyone who is not white.

I rarely use the term. I typically use black or African American. And, as I am a Malcolm X-ite, my personal preference when I self-identify is Afrikan. My only "investment" in "people of color," as it were, is to point out that the term is widely used by African Americans.

kzs

kzs
===
kwame zulu shabazz

email: kwames...@gmail.com

cell: 336-422-9577
skype: kwame zulu shabazz
twitter: https://twitter.com/kzshabazz
===
THE NEUTRAL SCHOLAR IS AN IGNOBLE MAN. Here, a man must be hot, or be accounted cold, or, perchance, something worse than hot or cold. The lukewarm and the cowardly, will be rejected by earnest men on either side of the controversy." Fredrick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered" (1854).
===
EVERY ARTIST, EVERY SCIENTIST MUST DECIDE, NOW, WHERE HE STANDS. He has no
alternative. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of national and racial superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. This struggle invades the former cloistered halls of our universities and all her seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. The artist elects to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice! I had no alternative! - Paul Robeson, speech about the Spanish Civil War at the Albert Hall, London,on 24th June 1937

[kenneth harrow]

hi gloria
thanks for not blaming me, anyway.
as to the term being a slur, what is the difference between a slur and a
reference? in the case of the french "nègre" it is usually the context
that determined, and continues to determine, whether it is pejorative or
not, although that has changed very rapidly in the past few years.
if you want to say, as you are, that the usage is framed by a racist
environment, no one would disagree. but within the environment, there
are words framed to insult or degrade and others intended not to do so.
for instance, in the 1950s, when Negro became the preferred polite term,
it was deliberated understood and used that way. twenty years later it
came associated with excessive deference, but older folks still insisted
upon it.
there is nothing whatsoever inherent in the term that makes it a slur or
not; it is the usage, the intent, the context that creates those
affective values.
ken

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Brother Bode,

Concur on all points. My only quibble is that I think there is a tendency to reduce "intellectual" to black "elites." From there, all too often, we default to Du Bois. Not necessarily a bad thing. But Du Bois did look down on common folk. And, according to Du Bois's biographer, David Levering Lewis, part his ire directed at Garvey had to do with Garvey being unlettered.

I favor what academics sometimes call, "knowledge from below." Lets democratize "intellectual" a bit and think about how "ordinary" folk theorize their experiences. And, by the way, "Knowledge from below" didn't originate with contemporary western scholars. It was conceptualized thousands of years ago in Northeast Africa (Kemet/Ancient Egypt), codified in the Story of the Eloquent Peasant:

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/aes/p/papyrus_with_part_of_the_tale.aspx

NB: Du Bois also declared that Garvey was "fat, black, and ugly." Levering says that, in his later years, Du Bois expressed remorse about the fights with Garvey. 

kzs
===
kwame zulu shabazz

email: kwames...@gmail.com

cell: 336-422-9577
skype: kwame zulu shabazz
twitter: https://twitter.com/kzshabazz
===
THE NEUTRAL SCHOLAR IS AN IGNOBLE MAN. Here, a man must be hot, or be accounted cold, or, perchance, something worse than hot or cold. The lukewarm and the cowardly, will be rejected by earnest men on either side of the controversy." Fredrick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered" (1854).
===
EVERY ARTIST, EVERY SCIENTIST MUST DECIDE, NOW, WHERE HE STANDS. He has no
alternative. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of national and racial superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. This struggle invades the former cloistered halls of our universities and all her seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. The artist elects to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice! I had no alternative! - Paul Robeson, speech about the Spanish Civil War at the Albert Hall, London,on 24th June 1937

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/usaafricadialogue/yNxj2W3NtMc/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.

[kenneth harrow]

kwame
this, from a grad student thesis i am reading tonight:
"  Frantz Fanon drew on phenomenology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, among other sources in his theorization of colonial violence and trauma (Rothberg 228).
ken

--

Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Peace, Brother Ken.

Yes, that is precisely my point. Fanon leans on many white thinkers. Of course, it is impossible to entirely ignore white thinkers, but black scholars can and must decenter white thought--especially white masculinist thought. Or as Alice Walker puts it, we must reject the white gaze and tell our own stories on our own terms drawing upon our own experiences.

Historically, white scholars have given almost no consideration to black thought. In fact many of them (but not all) declared that Africans were incapable of original ideas or of making history! How many black thinkers did Marx or Freud cite? And why is that ok at most graduate programs in the USA? What were African people thinking and doing when white philosophers were working out psychoanalysis and phenomenology?

I agree with Steve Biko,

"The best weapon in the hands of the enemy is the mind of the oppressed."

Sovereignty of thought will be our biggest battle.

Forward ever,

kzs
===
kwame zulu shabazz

email: kwames...@gmail.com

cell: 336-422-9577
skype: kwame zulu shabazz
twitter: https://twitter.com/kzshabazz
===
THE NEUTRAL SCHOLAR IS AN IGNOBLE MAN. Here, a man must be hot, or be accounted cold, or, perchance, something worse than hot or cold. The lukewarm and the cowardly, will be rejected by earnest men on either side of the controversy." Fredrick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered" (1854).
===
EVERY ARTIST, EVERY SCIENTIST MUST DECIDE, NOW, WHERE HE STANDS. He has no
alternative. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of national and racial superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. This struggle invades the former cloistered halls of our universities and all her seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. The artist elects to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice! I had no alternative! - Paul Robeson, speech about the Spanish Civil War at the Albert Hall, London,on 24th June 1937

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/usaafricadialogue/yNxj2W3NtMc/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.

[Pablo]

Bro Kwame,  dey,

  Three points,  since you appear as a primary interlocutor here, and maybe I'll get to race stuff later.  First,  "The Eloquent Peasant" is great piece of philosophical literature, to be sure. I use it as an example of maat--- in modern discourse, the union  of  truth, justice, and harmony, which of course could maintain hierarchy, as it did. A profound piece of ancient kemet romanticism, heard through the non-subaltern voice of literate papyrus writers of the Middle Kingdom, which was, as you know, a site of a major peasant uprisings -- why wouldn't it be,  when the of the primary sources of wealth, and  we are to assume, exploitation,  was grain?  Of course there are many traditions from below in the pre-"modern" non-European and European worlds; and few would claim that it is a European tradition-- a bit of strawmanism, perhaps?  Many societies had their revolts from below, and local knowledges of natural justice, which was not what we would necessarily mean revolution  but a bit of from each acceding to what they should give and take-- but not too much, less it brings about trouble.

On non-western thought,   á la Bordieu,  many of us jettisoned the lenses of graduate school to do what we want, at least post-tenure; many of us continue on and pull them out of our pockets and/or purses, or just from the frontal lobes,  but they are always there. They may not be the be and the end all, but they are there. So,  unless we are in the department of your own thing, and write on the journals and books of your own things, then a little bit of those lenses are always retained, layered on top of,  beneath, even aside, when put aside by Kemet.  We have the luxury of  abandoning them after the grad seminar, or so we think; but to use that old song of Rahsaan Roland Kirk "We did it", and  so should our students and graduate students, at least if they want to get a job.  Then they can be counter-hegemonic, like you, afterwards, or at least having done the reading.  None of this stops interrogating that western canon  and its claims of thought that assumes it is hegemonic (and I am not talking about Eze's or apparent misreadings  of Kant's early racism). That said, I do believe, and not just for the anthropologists, that there needs to be an understanding of what you call the theorization or ordinary peoples' ideas (through participant observation?).  My good friend,  Ato- Sekyi-Otu, who, to my mind,  remains having the best book on Fanon, has been looking at proverbial wisdom in Ghana;  not in some folkloric way, but though understanding the philosophical tenets of Ghanian proverbs, primarily, but not only Fanti. He can write it not because of western theory, which he has never thrown away, but because he knows; and as you know, the debate will always be about what tools we use.

Finally (for now), on a another note, if you pardon the ensuing  non-pun,  while I  understand your point about understand the nuances of context when deriving meaning from the use of words (e.g. coloured, colour,  negro nègre, etc.),  what is "tonal' language?  I thought all languages were  tonal. Musically, I kinda, know what you mean;  but even musically it dun make no sense to call something non-tonal, unless you mean it in the western musical sense that it is not centered (does not gravitate) towards the tonic, rather than in the somewhat trivial sense that everything can be represented by note (a tone, even a thin-pitched drum) in all forms of music.  So,  how does one do this for (non-tonal) languages, which (can a linguist explain here?)  by their very nature  are tonal in the sense that they have some pitch, or do they have to be set to "music" to be tonal?   Does adding  more accents represent the many implications of  the sound-meanings of the words?  Or does it just  mean the more tones and accents may make it harder for the non-speaker to understand, but does not make it more tonal, as opposed to non-tonal?!  Just askin'.

As Agawu says, many musicologists have studied the relationship between  the tonal, as musical expression/meaning, which "relies as much on what is sounded as on what is not sounded",  and that studies of talking drums, including ways in which drums and other speech surrogates reproduce the tonal and accentual elements of spoken language". However, he goes onto to cite  musicians of tonality who  eschew the search for “superficial analogies between music and language.” I was on a PhD defense on Jola drumming in our department of music, when someone said, it sounds very tonal,  like the language,  and all the musicians laughed, as did my Ghanaian drummer colleague, who was also there.


Best,
Pablo

[kenneth harrow]

dear kwame
two thoughts. first, that there is no black without white; there is no white without black. these terms, by themselves, are meaningless, and people don't call themselves "black" or "white" except by way of differentiation, just as is the case, according to amselle, for tribal or ethnic appellations. my student, about to defend, wrote this in chapter one:  the state and its “Other” (the insurgent, the separatist, and the terrorist) are fetishes of each other producing endlessly mirroring images of each other.

i would have used a different set of terms from you in describing the project of "decentering white thought." everyone i know in african studies decenters eurocentrism. this is as old as the discipline. who has not started their african studies course without beginning with tarzan etc to be decentered.
but instead of white, what if we called it dominant, or, as pablo said, hegemonic.
and instead of decenter, deconstruct--which actually decenters anyway.

lastly, the core for postcolonial studies might be tracked through fanon, bhabha, spivak, mudimbe, and mbembe, and you can't understand their concepts or language without a grounding in a range of european thinkers, like foucault, hegel, kant etc. if they held racist views, there is no need to throw out the baby w the bathwater.

it makes no sense to me to recast it back in black and white terms instead of questioning the colonial division, not only of race but of thought. my preferred thinker on the interlacing of european/african cultures is gikandi who has had the insight not only to claim but to demonstrate how dominant european thought has be forged in the blendings of african and european realities and superstructures, not as dialectical opposites but as mutually hybridizing societies and cultures.

i would not want to ask james ferguson, now, or abdelmaliq simone or robert young or shohat or stam for a color test before i read their works and try to work with them. i wouldn't ask for that test when i read no telephone to heaven. to do so is to let a colonialist frame dictate my positioning when reading. it is impolite to highlight an email, but that is my main point.
ken