More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Dow has been part of Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE),
He filmed more than a hundred of their oral histories.
“They are struggling to construct a just narrative for themselves as new information comes in, and they are having to restructure and refashion their own narratives and coming up short,” he said. “I include myself in that,” he added after a moment. “We are seeing the deconstruction of the white-male archetype.
INCITE’s initial report, Facing Whiteness, which is accessible on Columbia University’s website,
Never mind that that capacity to set himself outside the pattern of white male dominance is the privilege. It, perhaps, brings them comfort. White comfort. There’s no outrunning the kingdom, the power, and the glory.
Princeton study found that students who identify as Asian need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites to have the same chance of admission to private colleges, a difference some have called ‘the Asian tax.’”
Plessy v. Ferguson:
Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”
The scenario states: “While teaching a section on African Art you display the following image and ask students what they think of the image. A student states that the image ‘looks like a monkey.’ Some students in the class laugh at the response and some black students look upset.”
Pamela Ramsey Taylor, who commented on Facebook that “it will be so refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified First Lady back in the White House. I’m tired of seeing a [sic] Ape in heels.”
Don’t “monkey this up,” Florida governor Ron DeSantis said during his 2018 gubernatorial race, and we all understood the statement historically meant don’t vote for the black candidate even as DeSantis denied it.
By presenting whites as the quintessential humans who possess the bodies and behaviors taken to be deeply meaningful human traits, whites justified, and continue to justify, white supremacy.”
In the diversity workshop, no one asks why the scenario leaves out the race of the student who states that the image of the black figure “looks like a monkey.”
the white faculty and staff in the room insist
on giving the “joking student” (is he/she/they white?) the benefit of the doubt. The lone black male faculty member in the room offers up the thought that maybe the student didn’t mean anything by
the white women leading the workshop would say. They said nothing. The facilitators moved on after everyone who wished to respond responded, despite the fact that white women in management are usually the ones calling for diversity training.
Only then did my friend interrupt to point out that while it might be a joke, it’s still a racist joke.
Only then did the others suggest that the student (is he/she/they white?) be taken aside and spoken to. I wondered about the phrase “taken aside.”
If white people don’t see their whiteness, how can they speak to it? Was the student white? Who wrote the scenario? Does diversity not include any training to see ourselves or is it simply about addressing black grievance?
Another recent Pew study found that “most black and Asian adults (63% and 66%, respectively) say race or race relations come up in their conversations with family and friends at least sometimes, compared with about half of white (50%) and Hispanic (49%) adults.”
The philosopher Charles Mills and sociologist Wulf Hund edited a volume on “simianization,” which collects essays on dehumanization as a form of racism with particular attention to the comparison to apes. It offers both a review of contemporary cases of this form of racism and a history. The volume, given its publication date, does not include former BBC broadcaster Danny Baker’s tweet, which contained the image below referencing the birth of the royal mixed-race baby in 2019.
“James Baldwin
“When Americans say change in the generality, they really mean progress. And when they say progress, they really mean—and they don’t know they mean this—they really mean how quickly and to what extent and how profoundly a black person becomes white. They take themselves quite helplessly as the only possible model of what they call change.”
The poet Erica Hunt describes love as “a close reading” that “help[s] me invent myself more—in the future.” It’s the most workable definition I’ve found to date.
what do you think when you are not thinking?
There also exist blacks who are embarrassed by black and brown poverty because they see life through the judging lenses of white discrimination and understand their own exceptionalism as tenuous inasmuch as its optics are stained by a disadvantaged black population at large. We are a sad lot churning inside the repetitions and insistences of the “afterlife of slavery.”
We knew the position of many white parents in policies that would integrate black and brown children, but now some Asian parents are taking on the racially coded rhetoric and positions usually heard from some whites.
The thing that brought both my husband and me to the gymnasium is the knowledge that though the deep-seated racist systems are reaffirmed and the evidence is there for us to see, I still want the world for my daughter that is more than this world, a world that has our daughter already in it.
“The results of the present studies suggest that Americans largely misperceive race-based economic equality. Indeed, our results suggest a systematic tendency to
perceive greater progress toward racial economic equality than has actually been achieved, largely driven by overestimates of current levels of equality.
My own observation has been that white teachers of Colored schools in the southern states, show but little interest in their pupils. This is not strange, since they have been selected as teachers more because of their necessities, than from any interests they have shown in the progress and elevation of the colored race.
wonder if she really wonders if the perpetrators “look back with regret.” This idea that racism is solely a dynamic of youth and ignorance seems its own form of American optimism.4 She wonders if they are “cheering on the white nationalist movement” rather than if they are white nationalists.
One student received a letter that stated, “You God damned stinkin’, Filthy, black skinned Monkies do Not belong among a white human society. You shit colored Animals will eventually be phased out. In plain English—Eliminated.”
When Hillary Clinton refused to pull out of the 2008 Democratic primary despite no apparent way forward, because as she said “we all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June [1968] in California,” she was in fact pointing to the unspoken reality that President Obama’s achievements did not safeguard him from white terrorism.
“Blacks are more exposed than whites/others to pollution from every emitter group. The same holds for Hispanics, with the exceptions of PM2.5 originating from agriculture, from coal electric utilities, and from residential wood combustion, for which they are exposed to 11%, 40%, and 14% less, respectively, than whites/others. Those three types of emissions are concentrated in regions of the United States with relatively low Hispanic populations.
The Price of the Ticket: “A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State…. The idea of black persons as property, for example, does not come from the mob. It is not a spontaneous idea. It does not come from the people, who knew better … this idea comes from the architects of the American State. These architects decided that the concept of Property was more important—more real—than the possibilities of the human being.”
Arndt states that he heard the phrase “white male privilege” as “extremely offensive.” In the complaint he filed, he states that he was “racially and sexistly slurred.” The white female police captain Weber, who used the phrase, was put on paid administrative leave.
He was punished with a two-day suspension without pay.
He will not know himself as the favored even as he destroys others in order not to know.
Black transgender people reported much higher rates of biased harassment and assault (38% and 15%).”
“One of the things I think is true, which is a way of thinking about the afterlife of slavery in regard to how we inhabit historical time, is the sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and the future, are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement.
We have a precedent in Eartha Kitt, who after confronting Lady Bird and Lyndon Johnson about Vietnam at a luncheon at the White House was blacklisted.
In “Sexism—a Problem with a Name,” Sara Ahmed writes that “if you name the problem you become the problem.”
Had the woman who admired the dessert tray, in an attempt to redirect the conversation, said to me, Here’s your coat. What’s your hurry? Now, that would have made me
smile—the corners of my mouth would have lifted and raised my cheeks to form crow’s feet around my eyes. I would have smiled with my eyes in admiration of her directness—get out—rather than serving up redirection and false civility.
Ashley Jardina’s work may be of interest: “When the dominant status of whites relative to racial and ethnic minorities is secure and unchallenged, white identity likely remains dormant.
“found that all of the children expressed an in-group bias at the age of 30 months. When asked to choose a potential playmate from among photos of unfamiliar white and black boys and girls, all of the children chose a samerace playmate. However, by 36 months, the majority of both black and white children chose white playmates … and this pattern held at the 60-month mark, although it decreased slightly at that point.”
It’s difficult to be hopeful when even the “eye gaze patterns” of teachers in preschool tend to target black children, especially boys, at the sign of any disturbance in the classroom.4 One wonders how this could not become a social cue for all the children.
“What we call education is really indoctrination into white supremacy. I want every white person who could be happy to receive the same treatment as black people to stand. . . . Nobody standing? This means you know what is happening.”
It’s what reigns invisible behind the term “white.” It doesn’t inoculate her from illness, loss, or forfeiture of wealth, but it ensures a level of citizenry, safety, mobility, and belonging I can never have.
