Tag Archives: race

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Evan, like me, founded yesterday’s GESO speak-out on diversity in the graduate school radicalizing and empowering.

Evan, unlike me, got to top it off by speaking justice to Graduate School Dean (and future Yale College Dean) Peter Salovey:

I asked if he was planning to ever respond to the letter 58 of my colleagues had signed and on which I was the contact person. He says the listening tour will be coming our way soon. What followed was a lengthy conversation about pay equity (“I prefer to call it a question of pay and not of equity”), this whole financial aid idea, the ideal world in which Yale would have tons of money (as if it doesn’t right now?) in which the graduate school would give us all $40k in the first three years and let us save or – worse -invest the money. Jennifer said she’d rather have a wage that would pay the rent. Dean Salovey said he thinks we should do only what teaching is necessary for our education; I told him about the Kutsinski Report’s reminder that staffing requirements should not impact teaching loads, and the Prown Report which states that hadn’t happened, and which also says our time to degree is longer because of our teaching. The dean replied that the point is to try to get you out sooner. I talked about the job market and how we are presently teaching ourselves out of jobs and that we’re looking at lectorships and adjuncting, and he said he likes to keep that a separate issue, so I pointed out again that the Prown Report shows the only reason grad students teach as PTAIs and TF IV’s is because the language requirement made the staffing need so great in the first place and that an adjunct caste had grown up around it… he was friendly as usual and we had some laughs that we fortunately kept interrupting with really disturbing facts about our standards of living (me: “If you want us to finish, what is the logic of financially supporting us less as our responsibilities to teaching and research increase in the later years of the program?”) Props also to Shalane Hansen for showing up in time to rip into the dean about mentorship and the gender imbalance in Religious Studies. It was amazing.

As an undergraduate, my education and my community are degraded as long as Yale’s institutional inertia and lack of institutional support keep women, working people, and people of color out of opportunities to be my teachers and to graduate and go on to teach others. And I have a stake in making that change.

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Earlier this week I got the chance to hear League of Conservation Voters President Deb Callahan present an impressively self-aware critique of the operation of LCV and other American environmentalist groups, in which she compared the 11 million Americans in environmental groups to the 13 million in unions and asked why the latter had representation that was so much more effective than the former. Her answer, in large part, was that the environmental movement needs to shift its resources from soft money campaigning into grassroots organizing. Amen to that. During the question period, I asked Callahan why a movement fighting injustices which disproportionately target people of color has membership and leadership that’s so overwhelmingly white. Her answer was part rationalization, part apology, and part putting forth the beginnings of a program to build a movement based around the people who, she argued, should be its real base: Harlem families whose kids all have athsma rather than wealthy liberals in San Francisco.

One step she mentioned was the funding and organizing LCV has invested in the past week in Barack Obama, the black state senator and former community organizer running in the heated Democratic Senate primary this Tuesday. Obama, who’s also been endorsed by SEIU, UNITE, and Jesse Jackson Jr., is a real progressive who’s pulled ahead of more conservative millionaires and demonstrated a strong chance of becoming the only African-American in the Senate come November. Check out his website here.

As Harold Meyerson argued Friday in the Washington Post, electing this man, according to all signs, would be a major victory not only for Illinois but for a revitalized Democratic party and America.

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Every time I try to really like John Kerry, he goes and does something like this:

“President Clinton was often known as the first black president. I wouldn’t be upset if I could earn the right to be the second,” he told the American Urban Radio Network.

Given that the “first Black President” rewarded Black supporters by gutting AFDC and presiding over the expansion of the drug war and the prison industrial complex, and called Sister Souljah a rabid racist and Charles Murray a thought-provoking academic, one can only imagine what the second one would come up with.

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The Democrats’ choice to have a response to Bush tonight by Bill Richardson simulcast in Spanish is a good one on both counts: The Democrats can use Spanish without hypocrisy because unlike the GOP, they haven’t been fighting to keep the fastest-growing language in the US out of schools and voting booths (certain elements, of course, can be depended on to deride this, like any move for inclusion or any policy benefiting people of color, as patronizing/ race-baiting/pandering); and Richardson is a successful and respected Southern Latino Governor who recently came into the spotlight negotiating with North Korea – and an excellent candidate for Vice President.

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Let’s say you’re the Secretary of Health and Human Services and your scientists’ research concludes that there’s a “national problem” of “pervasive” racial disparities in access to affordable health care with a crippling “personal and societal price.” What do you do? Rewrite the report, apparently. Looks like the Ranking Democrat on the Committee on the House Government Reform Committee and the chairs of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Black Caucus, Asian Pacific Amrican Caucus, and Native American Caucus are less than pleased.

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There’s no way I would have been watching The West Wing this season if not for a perhaps perverse sense of loyalty to what it was back when it was Aaron Sorkin’s show. The writing, as many have observed, has tanked, and everything else has gone down with it. Tonight, however, may have been a new low. Whereas Sorkin could actually (and did) make the census riveting television, this season’s writers have made the policy discussion so dry and so trite that the one clever line of the show was when Leo responds to the President’s monologue by asking the others whether they were taking notes. And the character development may actually be worse. It was only in the last minutes of the episode, however, that I was offended in a way I can’t remember ever (despite often coming down pretty far to the left of the positions advanced there) being offended by the show.

President Bartlett has rightfully chosen to take a strong stance against mandatory minimums in drug sentencing and has commuted the sentences of thirty-some first-time non-violent drug offenders stuck with outrageous sentences under mandatory minimums. After the State of the Union, he’s introduced to a Black woman who’s one of the thirty-plus just released and expresses her gratitude. At this point Bartlett launches into a lecture on how lucky she is to be getting a second chance, how dire the consequences if she screws up again, how much the futures of other prison inmates are riding on her behavior, and how important it is that she appreciate her freedom. The sight (fictitious or not) of a white Nobel Laureate/ US President born to privilege taking the opportunity of having taken small steps towards ameliorating awful, punitive, and racist policy lecturing a Black woman who’s just made it out of years of humiliating and unjust punishment for a non-violent offense on how grateful she should be to him and how if she played by the rules he might be more magnanimous to others of her kind was offensive to the point of being difficult to watch. And that the woman simply smiles, blushes, and thanks him again for his kindness is absurd. I expected better.

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As DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton recently observed:

Not content with denying D.C. residents congressional voting rights, Congress has gone out of its way to silence us by placing a rider in the D.C. appropriation that keeps residents from lobbying Congress or country for their rights,” she wrote. This insult added to injury should be enough to send residents to the polls to vote on Tuesday in a primary whose purpose is to tell the country what most Americans do not know, according to opinion polls: that Congress denies voting rights to the citizens of its own capital.

The New York Times is more dismissive of the primary:

This is, alas, a nonbinding beauty contest.

But it relates the case for representation in simple and inarguable terms:

While Wyoming, population 494,000, has one representative and two senators, Washington, population 571,000, has none.

One wonders whether those half a million people would have gone without a vote for so many years if more of them were White.

FirstPrimaryBlog has the latest on tomorrow’s primary, including guest statements from Kucinich, Lieberman, and Sharpton in support of, respectively, statehood, congressional representation, and one or the other.

Five of the candidates – including Lieberman – made the shameful decision to withdraw from D.C.’s primary, leaving Dean, Sharpton, Kucinich, and Mosely-Braun. My prediction is Dean comes in first, Sharpton second.

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Incidentally, if you’re checking out the Bush-Cheney site – don’t miss the “Compassion” photo album. See if you can figure out what differentiates the people in those pictures from the ones in the photo albums for “Economy” or “Environment.” Here’s a hint: it’s not the content of their character.

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Mark Kurlansky tells one half of the story of the Nixon election and the Republican “Southern Strategy” that has flourished since, calling the Grand Old Party on its shameless appeals to racism as an electoral tactic. The story he doesn’t tell, however, is the simultaneous breakdown of the New Deal coalition and the agency of the Democrats in its collapse – a story that Democrats have too often obscured in working to expose the mendacious tactics of the right. It was four years earlier that the Democratic Convention sent the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party home.

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CNN misses the point:

For some, these men who defended a system that allowed slavery should not be memorialized on public schools where thousands of black children are educated.

What about the white students educated there? Isn’t that a problem as well?

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Just watched an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy last night. My sense has been, and still is, that those who are arguing that the show symbolizes a crude minstrelesque stereotyping of gay folks and those who are arguing that the show symbolizes a new prominence and acceptance of gay folks are both right. The most powerful argument of the former camp, I think, is that after performing stereotypical queer labor for heteros, the “Fab Five,” leave the heteros alone and go back into their queer home to watch from a distance as the people they’ve served experience romance. The fact that they’re drinking martinis doesn’t diminish the resemblance to servant quarters. The powerful argument of the latter camp, I think, is that queer folks are being brought into heteros’ homes not only to joke, advise, and support them but specifically to facilitate the development of healthier monogomous, faithful, loving relationships.

What struck me most strongly on watching the show last night, however, was the class-typing which pervades it. I think that the “positive stereotypes” associated with the “Fab Five,” while they share some of the problematic nature and potential utility in social progress as, say, the idea that Blacks beat Whites as Basketball, are comparatively noteworthy in that they’re almost totally inaccesible to a large swathe of the homosexual community. What are gay teenagers gorwing up in urban ghettos – especially those of color – to make of a queer icon distinguished by his inpeccable fashion who in a recent episode found an unacceptable shirt in a hetero man’s closet and asked him, “What are you, poor?”

There’s a compelling argument that the recent media buzz over “metrosexuals” – basically, hetero men who follow homosexual stereotypes – represents a reification of the claim that homosexuality and the expressions associated with it – warmth, compassion, fashion – both other you and make you less of a man. There’s a compelling argument to be made that the buzz over “metrosexuals” represents a problematization of constructs of gender and sexuality, and a growing comfort with the idea that multiple masculinities are available to heterosexual and homosexual guys alike. But what both of these arguments gloss over is that “metrosexuality” further weds sexuality and class by implying that northeastern urban wealthy trendy heterosexual men can perform homosexual stereotypes too.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the internet parodies of this show – some quite hateful – which have risen up have also been pervaded with class-typing: regular, blue-collar, beer-guzzling, poorly-dressed men converting effete trendy queers. But perhaps it should be concerning. Just as it should be concerning how many of the official and unofficial spokespeople of the political gay rights movement are white, upper-middle class folks (some of whom have a great deal of vested interest in divorcing the movement from class- and race- based justice movements). What’s needed is more voices, and diverse ones. Let a thousand queer TV shows bloom – but please, let them depict more than the type of gay folks in the Fab Five.

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It occurs to me that Zach’s aspersions about my personal hygiene may be a hint that I haven’t yet responded to his latest thoughts on Rush, the Right, and such. I don’t think there’s much left to say. I of course agree with Zach that gloating at embarrassments of political enemies is less constructive than learning from them – that’s, in fact, exactly what I was endeavoring to do. I, like Zach, appreciate “insight both strategic and theoretical into the ways in which ideologies of control and strategies of Empire are linked” – I stand by my original (if I may be so bold) insight that the role of the right’s class agenda in determining the application of its social agenda raises questions about the integrity of the latter and the relationship between the two. On the other hand, while I share Zach’s aspiration of “destablilizing the structures of gender, sexuality, and race,” I don’t find the use of the term “minority” to refer to groups that are, empirically, smaller in this country than the majority along whichever axis we’re referring to a particularly problematic terminology. I would also maintain that while identities are constructed, they exist, and factual explorations of the breakdown of identities – who identifies how? what else do they have in common? where do they live? how are they changing? – in this country should be marshalled by the left rather than condemned and left as the province of the everyone else. Finally, resoundingly, I would affectionately but bitingly make a comment to the effect that sometimes we have to choose between laundering clothes and organizing a movement and then sing Pete Seeger’s rendition of “Which side are you on?”