Race and Racism
gregladen | June 21, 2009The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is seeking class action status for a 2006 federal lawsuit that accuses drug manufacturer Eli Lilly of discrimination against African-American employees. The plaintiffs include nine current and former employees who allege that the drug manufacturer engaged in pay and promotion discrimination on the basis of race. An amended complaint filed last week with the US District Court for the Southern District of Indiana includes allegations of discrimination from 106 additional current and former employees, reported Business Week.…
gregladen | June 19, 2009Sadly, we hear the news that Walter Cronkite is gravely ill. Well, not so sadly really, since he appears to have had a great life and in living that life, managed to get quite old. So good for him.
I have one Cronkite story (below the fold) and only one, and I'll tell it to you below. I also just want to mention that my generation grew up with Cronkite as the guy who told us the news, truthfully, and in a straight forward manner. Cronkite told my family (and I only barely remember this) that Jack Kennedy was dead, and (this I remember) Jack's brother, and MLK. He told us about what was…
gregladen | June 11, 2009The role of racial discrimination in mental health has been established in a number of studies, and a new study works out some of the details in how this works.
The study found blacks may, in general, have poorer mental health as a result of two mechanisms: First, chronic exposure to racial discrimination leads to more experiences of daily discrimination and, second, it also results in an accumulation of daily negative events across various domains of life, from family and friends to health and finances. The combination of these mechanisms, reports Anthony Ong, assistant professor of human…
gregladen | June 10, 2009MORE UPDATES: The guard, Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, shot earlier today by right winger von Brunn has died.
The 89 year old gunman, James Wenneker von Brunn 88, of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, shot one person, who is in grave condition in hospital. The gunman was himself shot by one or more guards and has also sustained life threatening injuries. Reporters on the street are saying he is not expected to live. The gunman was using a rifle.
D.C. police spokeswoman Traci Hughes said the suspect walked into the museum at about 12:50 p.m. ET with a rifle and shot a guard. U.S. Park Police…
gregladen | May 15, 2009Important note: This 'gaff' (=offensive remark) was made in a private meeting but 'got out' via Twitter, and eventually nailed down by a blogger.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
gregladen | April 19, 2009During the election campaign, the Palin/Whatshisname ticket made hay over Obama's statements that he would engage in international conversations with unsavory knee-jerks such as the president of Iran. I call these people knee-jerks because they invoke a knee-jerk response in right wing and even moderate circles. Obama is of course right in that it is counter productive to write off any possibility of communication with another nation or a globally significant faction of any kind a priori. Sure, writing them off a priori makes a point, and does so in a powerful way. But then what do you do…
gregladen | April 13, 2009A timely repost, given the discussion going on here.
The North End, Boston, Massachusetts I'm standing outside Luigi's restaurant having a smoke, and Luigi's doorman had joined me. Across the street yellow stingray is parked, as usual, to block the alley. The word is, the fire escape down into that alley leads directly from Baronelli's office. The stingray is an escape pod.
Almost every restaurant on Hanover street and the dozen side streets is like Luigi's: owned by a family from a particular part of Italy or Sicily, with a local cuisine variant, and for the most part, run by the…
gregladen | April 12, 2009The problem with those dang ethnic people is that you can't even pronounced their names. Regarding the difficulty some Chinese and other east Asian people have with conflicts in their own naming system and the naming system assued by, for instance, a state's Motor Vehicle department, Texas (where else) State Representative Betty Brown says:
Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese -- I understand it's a rather difficult language -- do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here? ...
Can't you see that this is…
gregladen | April 6, 2009In June of 1940, France fell to Germany. Among the troops who were overwhelmed by the German attacks were about 17,000 black West African colonial troops with the French Army. Many of these soldiers were shot do death by the Germans, who considered these Africans to be subhumans, as they stood in surrender. Surely, it would be fair to consider this to have been part of the Holocaust.
Then the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese did a pretty good job of trying to take over the world, millions upon millions died in that war, and the rest of the Holocaust happened.
The Allies banded together…
gregladen | February 18, 2009Nature, the publishing group, not the Mother, has taken Darwin's 200th as an opportunity to play the race card (which always sells copy) and went ahead and published two opposing views on this question: "Should scientists study race and IQ?
The answers are Yes, argued by Stephen Cici and Wendy Williams of the Dept of Human Development at Cornell, and No, argued by Steven Rose, a neuroscientist at Open University.
I would like to weigh in.
The real answer, as is so often the case, is "You dumbass, what kind of question is that? Think about it further and rephrase the question!"
But I don't…
gregladen | February 18, 2009The Kennedy School of Government had banned all smoking within the building, but had not yet banned smoking just outside the doors facing the Charles River, to the south of the complex. An African American woman, about fifty years of age, took a light from me, and we stood in the falling snow enjoying our smokes. That was a heavy year for snow. It seemed that every day about the same time the two of us would be standing here in a blizzard.
I never knew her name, but I knew she worked in the cafeteria. We talked about a wide range of topics, including (and possibly mainly) the weather. A week…
gregladen | February 16, 2009So Amanda and I arrive at some public building in a largish Midwestern city. I'm a scientist, here to sit on a panel for a public discussion related to science and education. The building, a library, is not open yet but is scheduled to open in a few minutes. There are two groups of people standing in the flurries and chilly wind waiting for opening. The larger group is pressed against the door, seemingly anxious, and I (incorrectly, it turns out) attribute this anxiety to the cold. I'm thinking they want to go inside because it is cold. All but two people in this group are brown to dark…
gregladen | February 4, 2009I've always been annoyed at women giving birth to seven, eight kids at once. There are too many freakin' people in the world, who do they think they are? But my annoyances is limited.
Other people in the past seem to have been less annoyed, and instead of being miffed they reward these baby factories. The family that has six or seven kids (or more) because of over-done fertility treatments (or some other mojo) gets free diapers, college funds are set up, and so on. They become heroes and society steps up to take care of their children.
I suppose that make sense for the sake of the…
gregladen | February 3, 2009Well, the above statement, while true, is just a tiny bit beyond the peer reviewed paper I'm reporting to you today, but this paper supports the assertion and the results presented in the paper should not be a surprise to anyone.
Here's the basic idea:
If you focus on categorizing people into races at the expense of recognizing variation within these alleged racial groups, you will a) get 'good' at categorizing races, b) get bad at recognizing individual differences within the "other" races (other = not you), and c) become more racist.
If, on the other hand, you focus on ... learn, train…
gregladen | February 1, 2009An interesting essay ...
...Debra Lee, chief executive of Black Entertainment Television, has been on Washington's A-list for some time, but she has been even more popular since Nov. 4, receiving invites from folks she doesn't really know.
"The first reaction is: 'Wow. Isn't that curious? Are they just using me?' " she said. "Then you think about Obama, who says he wants to be inclusive."
At the same time, an invitation to Lee's home is an even hotter ticket, after Jarrett and incoming White House social secretary Desiree Rogers showed up for one of her late-night parties last month. On…
gregladen | February 1, 2009This exhibit. Worth a look if you are in the area. Let me know what you think of it!
some details.
gregladen | January 11, 2009Americans, take note:
Prince Harry has apologised for using offensive language to describe a member of his army platoon.
The News of the World has published video in which the prince calls one of his Sandhurst colleagues a "Paki" in commentary he made over filming.
bbc
Now, help me out here, citizens of the UK and colonies and former colonies: How bad is this?
I had always assumed that "Paki" was a slur. I have seen the word used mainly in novels in which Brits or Americans were speaking distainfully of the Pakistanis, usually in spy novels and such, but I never knew if "Paki" was…
gregladen | January 5, 2009Heath and Deborah Campbell had three children. They named them:
JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell
Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell
Adolf Hitler Campbell
That, right there, would be child abuse. Do you not agree?
The story is making the rounds (h/t: McDuff) because it is little Adolph's third birthday and the local shop-rite (supermarket) refuses to provide the family with a cake enscribed "Happy Birthday Adolph Hitler."
The story can be found here and here.
gregladen | December 5, 2008Getting sentenced is a drag. One time, when I got sentenced, a conjuncture of highly unlikely events occurred that made the whole thing rather more scary, and more of a circus, than usual.
My sentence was unfair, of course, as I was innocent. I was convicted on the strength of planted evidence. The fact that my arrest involved a high speed chase and that I was arrested along with a convicted felon didn't help either. But that's another story, for another time.
But nonetheless, I ended up standing in front of the judge in the courtroom listening to a sentence of probation. Routine, no…