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[nel e nel]

One thing I'm curious about in regards to affirmative action:

The boilerplate argument against it is the typical "but a POC took a place that could have been given to a more qualified white person, how is that fair?"

When the data is shown that much of the underperformance of POC can be tied to wealth inequality (which is tied to property taxes funding schools, and access to opportunities, more time for parents to be at home to be involved with their kids, etc etc), then the response is often "well then AA should be determined by income, etc".

I wonder if these folks complaining about AA being based on race think that there would actually be less POC 'taking spaces for more qualified white people'? Based on all the info we have about poverty and poverty rates, it suggests that actually more POC would get access to opportunities if AA switched to an economic model instead of a race/ethnicity model. (According to my college friends who went to Berkeley High in the 90s, the school actually did this switch and predictably more POC were admitted to their high school, much to the chagrin of the white folks who were campaigning for the change)

How do folks in this thread feel about that idea? (moving to a more economic/income based form of AA)

 

[nel e nel]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92toXdu2KR0

woof. Thanks for this though, next time someone talks about "well, they should just listen to the officer and not try to talk back to them!" I'll show them this.

 

[mckmas8808]

Well, it essentially was since slavery basically birthed racism.

I know you mean well so don't take this the wrong way, but you have to switch this statement around. I read a couple other people say this too. It's wrong and it's important to get right.

Slavery didn't birth racism.....Racism BIRTHED slavery! It's key to remember that it starts with racism and white superiority first. That's how you get the terrible governmental policies like slavery, Jim Crow laws, FHA housing discrimination laws, and these horrible new drug laws of the 80s.

It's just a shame because I feel this new form of institutional racism that is hardwired into this countries DNA is even more difficult to disentangle from this government's weave, because so many people refuse to acknowledge it even exists.

So we've made progress, but we have come to a stumbling block that is one of the most infuriating ones yet from a "how do you actually fix it?" perspective

And Amir0x so many people refuse to acknowledge it because on some level it's will go against their economic interest. Sit back and think for a minute about it and lets compare it to Major League Baseball at the turn of the 20th century.

If you are white why would you allow black players in your league (besides being racist)? White MLB pros had played some exhibition games against black players. They knew of the talent that they had, so why would you possibly sacrifice your job to someone that easily? It's better to artificially keep the competition low (especially if you don't view that person and others within that race to be equal to you).

The article on the Seattle police force within this thread opened my eyes to that. You have black people selling drugs in the downtown area and you have mainly white people selling drugs in the suburbs. Both sell them in the open with the white people selling it at a higher rate, yet the police "decided" to target black people downtown more instead. That tells you something if you ask me. Cops would rather not chase easy crime in the white majority areas and would rather go downtown to the black neighborhoods where less crime is happening and make arrest for the same crimes. The game is rigged us black people.

In my experience with public schooling, and this is a point that Ta-Nehisi makes in his piece, the slaves are portrayed as almost inert; as being the beneficiaries of the war but who are portrayed as not having any real agency. Sure, I knew that there were black union soldiers, but I wasn't told that there were nearly 200,000. I even remembered a quote by Lincoln in another post Ta-Nehisi made (seriously, you could get all your reading recommendations from him, I think):

I knew from your other post that you read Ta-Nehisi's work. I follow him on Twitter and I'm a HUGE fan of his. I could tell by your word usage and articles that you read his work too. He's so easy to follow and his logic is second to none.

His huge take down on the changes and the history of The New Republic publication and how they've dealt with race and their take on The Bell Curve book and other racial conversations has been so eye opening.

Especially the back and forth between him and Andrew Sullivan. He is single handily exposed Sullivan and his views on the race debate. The fact that a smart wordsmith like Sullivan can openly believe in the conclusions of what the Bell Curve book puts forth is embarrassing. But it's the way Ta-Nehisi displays the "WHY" Sullivan is so short sighted on his thoughts and the "WHY" believing that black people on average are genetically not as smart as white people is not new at all. The suppose scientific reasons why white people are smarter than black people has been something that's been said for 100s of years. Yet Andrew Sullivan acts as if the Bell Curve book introduced it for the time and that it should be examined closely.

 

[Piecake]

First of all, I'd easily argue that when someone is bleeding band-aids are quite useful. It stops infections and it can protect the wound. Of course the band-aid, in of itself doesn't fix the wound put it keeps it from getting worst. I'd say the same can be said for Affirmative Action. It doesn't fix white supremacy (that's not its intentions anyway), but it does protect black people from the wound to a degree of it.

And 2nd I'd also argue that that Obama didn't "ramp" up the drug war. Initially I believe they protected the Drug War in court because it was already the law of the land. And there was probably some other political reason to do that too. But the record shows that he turned around and stop going after non-violent drug offenders. And as of now he told the DOJ to NOT chase after these states that are changing their laws to allow small weed possession.

Seasoned activists may respond that all of this is “just politics,” but, as we have seen in earlier chapters, they are the same politics that gave rise to the New Jim Crow. Now that crime seems to be rising again in some ghetto communities, Obama is pledging to revive President Clinton’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program and increase funding for the Byrne grant program—two of the worst federal drug programs of the Clinton era.50 These programs, despite their benign names, are responsible for the militarization of policing, SWAT teams, Pipeline drug task forces, and the laundry list of drug-war horrors described in chapter 2.

Clinton once boasted that the COPS program, which put tens of thousands of officers on the streets, was responsible for the dramatic fifteen-year drop in violent crime that began in the 1990s. Recent studies, however, have shown that is not the case. A 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office concluded the program may have contributed to a 1 percent reduction in crime—at a cost of $8 billion.51 A peer-reviewed study in the journal Criminology found that the COPS program, despite the hype, “had little or no effect on crime.”52 And while Obama’s drug czar, former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske, has said the War on Drugs should no longer be called a war, Obama’s budget for law enforcement is actually worse than the Bush administration’s in terms of the ratio of dollars devoted to prevention and drug treatment as opposed to law enforcement.53 Obama, who is celebrated as evidence of America’s triumph over race, is proposing nothing less than revving up the drug war through the same failed policies and programs that have systematically locked young men of color into a permanent racial undercaste.

From the The New Jim Crow. Grant you, he could have never did his proposals, reversed his other decisions, and did the stuff like you said, but this was what I was remembering Since I had the New JIm Crow on the brain

I know you mean well so don't take this the wrong way, but you have to switch this statement around. I read a couple other people say this too. It's wrong and it's important to get right.

Slavery didn't birth racism.....Racism BIRTHED slavery! It's key to remember that it starts with racism and white superiority first. That's how you get the terrible governmental policies like slavery, Jim Crow laws, FHA housing discrimination laws, and these horrible new drug laws of the 80s.

I don't think that makes any sense since slavery existed long before racism.

he period of the Renaissance and Reformation was also the time when Europeans were coming into increasing contact with people of darker pigmentation in Africa, Asia, and the Americas and were making judgments about them. The official rationale for enslaving Africans was that they were heathens, but slave traders and slave owners sometimes interpreted a passage in the book of Genesis as their justification. Ham, they maintained, committed a sin against his father Noah that condemned his supposedly black descendants to be "servants unto servants." When Virginia decreed in 1667 that converted slaves could be kept in bondage, not because they were actual heathens but because they had heathen ancestry, the justification for black servitude was thus changed from religious status to something approaching race

http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-01.htm

This view only strengthened and deepened as one 'race' was enslaved. Now, I do not think it is the only factor since Imperialism and European global dominance seems likely, but it definitely was the major one.

Slavery first happened because people are greedy and wanted someone to work tobacco, sugar, and rice, not because they were racists.

 

[thepotatoman]

And Amir0x so many people refuse to acknowledge it because on some level it's will go against their economic interest. Sit back and think for a minute about it and lets compare it to Major League Baseball at the turn of the 20th century.

If you are white why would you allow black players in your league (besides being racist)? White MLB pros had played some exhibition games against black players. They knew of the talent that they had, so why would you possibly sacrifice your job to someone that easily? It's better to artificially keep the competition low (especially if you don't view that person and others within that race to be equal to you).

Privilege can so easily become entitlement. No one wants to think of themself as a bad person, but also no one wants to go far out of their way to hurt themselves to help others. So your mind tends to come up with justifications for why you're on the top of society while others aren't.

It's what links racism together with fiscal conservatism. "I could do it without help, and so can you" mentality has a strong hold with a lot of people. Add race to that to make it obvious that "so can you" doesn't really completely apply, and you start the blame game where the real racism happens. Originally the excuse was "you can't because you're literally subhuman savages" and now the excuse is "you can't because welfare checks and black pop culture".

Obviously the problem is and has always been with white people, but that requires people to admit things they don't want to admit to even themselves. So yes, ultimately racism does exist as a way to uphold the economic advantage, but it's manifested in a lot more subtle way.

 

[mckmas8808]

I don't think that makes any sense since slavery existed long before racism.



http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-01.htm

This view only strengthened and deepened as one 'race' was enslaved. Now, I do not think it is the only factor since Imperialism and European global dominance seems likely, but it definitely was the major one.

Slavery first happened because people are greedy and wanted someone to work tobacco, sugar, and rice, not because they were racists.

While those people were greedy, they also viewed certain people to be less than they were and literally fought a war in order to maintain that status quo. I don't think they did that mainly due to greed.

Either way it's bad though.

 

[Mumei]

While those people were greedy, they also viewed certain people to be less than they were and literally fought a war in order to maintain that status quo. I don't think they did that mainly due to greed.

Either way it's bad though.

I think you've misunderstood the argument he's making. He is talking about a period much earlier than that - in the seventeenth-century rather than the mid-nineteenth - when elites in colonial America moved from using primarily indentured servitude to using slavery. During this period, race consciousness was deliberately fostered on the part of elites through the passage of laws that positioned the planter class and the lower classes as separate from blacks, by giving lower-class whites a status above black people. This helped to preclude an alliance between poor whites and slaves, and this is what he means by "slavery basically birthed racism."

This is a simplified explanation, though; read Chapters 14 (Toward Slavery) and 15 (Toward Racism) in American Slavery, American Freedom for a more thorough overview of this processes that helped this take place.

 

[TacticalFox88]

Mumei, do you honestly believe that the majority of white people, if they were sat down and had this explained to them rationally and thoughtfully without a shred of trying to assign guilt towards them, they could "see the light" so to speak, as you did when you read Racism Without Racists?

 

[Mumei]

Mumei, do you honestly believe that the majority of white people, if they were sat down and had this explained to them rationally and thoughtfully without a shred of trying to assign guilt towards them, they could "see the light" so to speak, as you did when you read Racism Without Racists?

I have no idea.

I didn't have to make much of a jump; my position before reading Racism Without Racists could best be described as, "Black people are not well-off in the U.S. as white people. This isn't because black people are worse than white people in some way. I don't know why this is. If this is because of racism, I don't understand how it is simultaneously so prevalent and so powerful as to have these effects, and yet so invisible that I'm never aware of its operation."

And it does start to answer those questions, though I found it more valuable for its explanation of the four frames of colorblindness, and its connection of the rhetorical tactics with the ideology of colorblindness. As soon as I started reading it, I recognized the arguments from having read GAF, and I saw them everywhere after having read it. The New Jim Crow (with the helpful subtitle "Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness") helped expand this, and it was easy to see how what I'd read in Racism Without Racists applied to that.

I'm not sure how someone coming at it from a different angle - someone who is actively hostile as opposed to sympathetic but clueless - would respond to the arguments being made. I think it depends on whether that person is genuinely interested in understanding or not.

 

[Piecake]

I think you've misunderstood the argument he's making. He is talking about a period much earlier than that - in the seventeenth-century rather than the mid-nineteenth - when elites in colonial America moved from using primarily indentured servitude to using slavery. During this period, race consciousness was deliberately fostered on the part of elites through the passage of laws that positioned the planter class and the lower classes as separate from blacks, by giving lower-class whites a status above black people. This helped to preclude an alliance between poor whites and slaves, and this is what he means by "slavery basically birthed racism."

This is a simplified explanation, though; read Chapters 14 (Toward Slavery) and 15 (Toward Racism) in American Slavery, American Freedom for a more thorough overview of this processes that helped this take place.

Yup, and thank you for explaining it more clearly.

I have no idea.

I didn't have to make much of a jump; my position before reading Racism Without Racists could best be described as, "Black people are not well-off in the U.S. as white people. This isn't because black people are worse than white people in some way. I don't know why this is. If this is because of racism, I don't understand how it is simultaneously so prevalent and so powerful as to have these effects, and yet so invisible that I'm never aware of its operation."

And it does start to answer those questions, though I found it more valuable for its explanation of the four frames of colorblindness, and its connection of the rhetorical tactics with the ideology of colorblindness. As soon as I started reading it, I recognized the arguments from having read GAF, and I saw them everywhere after having read it. The New Jim Crow (with the helpful subtitle "Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness") helped expand this, and it was easy to see how what I'd read in Racism Without Racists applied to that.

I'm not sure how someone coming at it from a different angle - someone who is actively hostile as opposed to sympathetic but clueless - would respond to the arguments being made. I think it depends on whether that person is genuinely interested in understanding or not.

Have you read When Affirmative Action was White by Ira Katznelson? I honestly don't know if it is good or not, but it just came to my attention because the author won the 2014 Bancroft prize, so he at least knew what he was doing in his newest book.

 

[Foxy Fox 39]

I love this thread more than you guys know.

 

[Amir0x]

Yup, and thank you for explaining it more clearly.



Have you read When Affirmative Action was White by Ira Katznelson? I honestly don't know if it is good or not, but it just came to my attention because the author won the 2014 Bancroft prize, so he at least knew what he was doing in his newest book.

I have! That one is great, it has an amazing break down of how certain government policies in the early part of the 20th Century systematically were designed to have preferential treatment toward whites, and how they were designed to appear completely balanced in distribution. It's shocking at times.

 

[Derwind]

I love this thread more than you guys know.

Seconded.

 

[mckmas8808]

Speaking of understanding, TA-NEHISI COATES wrote a great article with the help of University of Minnesota professor Steven Ruggles, explaining how it was slavery and racism that has hurt the "black" family more than rap music, black pathology, black TV, etc.

There's a strong bias toward looking at black people through the lens of the 1960s--as though black America begins with the Long Hot Summers. I suspect part of that is that we just didn't have great data on black families, and the data we had indicated that something had gone drastically "wrong" around 1960.

Steven Ruggles...

[T]he finding of recent studies that the high incidence of single parenthood and children residing without parents among blacks is not new. The pattern is clearly evident as far back as 1850 among free blacks. From 1880 through 1960, the percentage of black children with at least one absent parent was fairly stable and about two-and-one-half times greater than the percentage among whites. Recently, the percentages of both black children and white children with absent parents have risen dramatically...

Race differences in family structure have expanded throughout the twentieth century, especially over the past three decades. But the fundamental differences in the percentage of children residing without parents began well over a century ago. The critical question remains: What is the source of this distinctive African-American pattern of single parenthood? Recent economic changes can be invoked to explain the growing differential between black family structure and white family structure, but they cannot explain why blacks started from a higher base.​

Coates....
Again, you see a big shift in 1960. But that's true for both black and white families, and it's a shift that has been oft-commented upon. The change in marriage is not a "black" problem, and I am not even convinced that it is a "problem." People who want us to go back to 1880 should have the intellectual courage to advocate for the entirety of their vision, not just the parts they like. It is not simply a question of "Is marriage good for kids?" It's "Are shotgun marriages good for kids?" "Should marriage be valued at all costs, including enduring abuse or ill-treatment?" "Should women marry men regardless of their employment prospects and their contact with the correctional system?"

http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/of-baguettes-and-black-families/279678/

So remember when someone blames BET and those hip hop videos for creating the tear/disruption of the "black" family sturcture, you'd now know that this goes back as far as the year 1860. Obviously well before BET, sagging pants, and hip hop was created and seen by the masses.

 

[ibyea]

I am very impressed with this thread Amirox. I am not a black person, so I wouldn't know personally, but I have lately been aware of the horrific injustices that this country has done to them and other minorities. And the statistics you have collated hopefully allows others to see how legitimate the anger is.

 

[Piecake]

I have! That one is great, it has an amazing break down of how certain government policies in the early part of the 20th Century systematically were designed to have preferential treatment toward whites, and how they were designed to appear completely balanced in distribution. It's shocking at times.

Thanks, I will put that on my list. I knew about stuff like the GI Bill, but it sounds like this book goes a lot more in depth.

 

[TylerD]

I'm going to read the thread but I also suggest PBS's Frontline "Prison State" for viewing if it hasn't been mentioned. Covers a housing project called Beecher Terrace in Louisville, KY and the very high incarceration rate of its residents.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/locked-up-in-america/#prison-state

 

[Mumei]

Have you read When Affirmative Action was White by Ira Katznelson? I honestly don't know if it is good or not, but it just came to my attention because the author won the 2014 Bancroft prize, so he at least knew what he was doing in his newest book.

I have! This is my current list of things that I've read that seem relevant:

1. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander
2. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, by Edward E. Baptist
3. The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois
4. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
5. Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, by Ayana Byrd
6. Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights, by Pete Daniel
7. Women, Race, and Class, by Angela Y. Davis
8. Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?, by Michael Eric Dyson
9. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, by Eric Foner
10. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925, by Herbert G. Gutman
11. How the Irish Became White, by Noel Ignatiev
12. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, by Ira Katznelson
13. For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law, by Randall Kennedy
14. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Second Edition with an Update a Decade Later, by Anette Lareau
15. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, by Douglas S. Massey
16. American Slavery, American Freedom, by Edmund S. Morgan
17. Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School, by Mica Pollock
18. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, by Dorothy Roberts
19. Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America, by Beryl Satter
20. "Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity, by Beverly Daniel Tatum
21. Punishing Race: A Continuing American Dilemma, by Michael Tonry
22. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities, by Craig Steven Wilder
23. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson
24. White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, by Tim Wise
25. The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies, by Betty Wood

I'd also like to mention Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment by Robert A. Ferguson. While it is not directly about race, the subject it covers - just how spectacularly awful the American criminal justice system is (it's worse than you think; even if you know about the terrible things it's still worse than you think) - is relevant given the fact that black people are more likely to be affected by this.

Anyway, it's a hodgepodge of different subjects, covering different historical periods. I've been reading more about slavery and now Reconstruction recently because it wasn't something I knew a whole lot about besides what I could remember from reading Lies My Teacher Told Me about five years ago (honestly, not much other than "anti-black people terrorism" and "assorted bad things") and cultural osmosis (clearly not useful).

If you know what sort of subject you're looking for, I could probably give you a suggestion (even if it isn't something I've gotten around to reading myself).

 

[Amir0x]

Damn that's a great reading list Mumei, I haven't read like half that list.

*gets ready to order some on Amazon*

 

[Piecake]

Damn Mumei. Tell me your reading secret. How do you read so much?

As for what I am interested in, pretty much anything that deals with history, which is why the white affirmative action book appealed to me. I've read Warmth of Other Suns, The New Jim Crow, reading reconstruction, and will read The Half has Never Been told next, so if you have a favorite relevant history-focused book beyond that I will definitely put it on my list.

 

[LiveFromKyoto]

Slavery didn't birth racism.....Racism BIRTHED slavery! It's key to remember that it starts with racism and white superiority first.

That...just isn't true. Economics and greed birthed slavery. It's an institution practically as old as civilization, since ancient Rome and the Egyptian Pharaohs and Babylon and beyond. Even in its colonial form slaves were bought off African chieftains and slavers who had been enslaving fellow Africans since time immemorial. And slavery still exists, now, today, on several continents in several forms.

 

[Amir0x]

There are over 21,000,000 slaves alive today in this world, significantly more than at the height of the slave trade. It's a cause I am very passionate about and that hugely depresses me every time I stop to work toward its end

 

[NEO0MJ]

Damn Mumei. Tell me your reading secret. How do you read so much?

He might not reflect it in his writing, but Mumei is a huuuge nerd. Probably got used to reading books from all those comics.

There are over 21,000,000 slaves alive today in this world, significantly more than at the height of the slave trade. It's a cause I am very passionate about and that hugely depresses me every time I stop to work toward its end

We're somewhat responsible for creating it, though. Consumers, that is.

 

[Mumei]

He might not reflect it in his writing, but Mumei is a huuuge nerd. Probably got used to reading books from all those comics.

Books preceded comics by about two decades.

Spoiler

And I am not huge. I am short and slightly built.

Damn Mumei. Tell me your reading secret. How do you read so much?

Spend a lot of time reading!

As for suggestions, you might enjoy Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities, Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights, or The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925.

Or something off the ever-expanding to read list:

1. Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970, by Luther Adams
2. Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era, by Saladin Ambar
3. Black Labor, White Wealth: The Search for Power and Economic Justice, by Claud Anderson
4. A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year After the Civil War, by Stephen V. Ash
5. Hate Thy Neighbor: Move-In Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing, by Jeannine Bell
6. Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, by Lerone Bennett, Jr.
7. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, by Ira Berlin
8. War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black
9. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas A. Blackmon
10. A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation, by David W. Blight
11. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, by David W. Blight
12. Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, by W.E.B. Du Bois
13. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, by W.E.B. Du Bois
14. Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, by Kevin Boyle
15. Parting the Waters: Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement 1954-63, by Taylor Branch
16. Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society, by Michael K. Brown
17. Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party & the American Indian Movement, by Ward Churchill
18. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism, by Patricia Hill Collins
19. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, by Patricia Hill Collins
20. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, by Angela Y. Davis
21. Women, Race, and Class, by Angela Y. Davis
22. Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies, by Michael C. Dawson
23. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War, by Charles B. Dew
24. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass
25. My Bondage and My Freedom, by Frederick Douglass
26. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, by Philip Dray
27. The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America's Most Progressive Era, by Douglas R. Egerton
28. Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists, by Lisa E. Farrington
29. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, by Barbara J. Fields
30. Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity, by Ann Arnette Ferguson
31. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, by Eric Foner
32. Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching, by Paula J. Giddings
33. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, by Paula J. Giddings
34. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920, by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore
35. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor, by Evelyn Nakano Glenn
36. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, by Thavolia Glymph
37. The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould
38. Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, by Christopher Hager
39. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, by Saidiya V. Hartman
40. Army Life in a Black Regiment: and Other Writings, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
41. Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960, by Arnold A. Hirsch
42. Black Looks: Race and Representation, by bell hooks
43. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, by bell hooks
44. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, by bell hooks
45. killing rage: Ending Racism, by bell hooks
46. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, by bell hooks
47. But Some Of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women's Studies, by Gloria T. Hull
48. Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision, by Peter H. Irons
49. Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown V. Board of Education, by John P. Jackson, Jr.
50. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, by Kenneth T. Jackson
51. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, by Matthew Frye Jacobson
52. A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men's History and Masculinity, The 19th Century: From Emancipation to Jim Crow, by Earnestine Jenkins
53. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, by Walter Johnson
54. Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America, by Charisse Jones
55. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, by Ira Katznelson
56. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, And The Black Working Class, by Robin D.g. Kelley
57. Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, by Paul Kivel
58. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, by Jonathan Kozol
59. The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, by Nicholas Lemann
60. The Betrayal Of The Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes To Woodrow Wilson, by Rayford W. Logan
61. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1990, by Manning Marable
62. How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society, by Manning Marable
63. Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy, by Gary May
64. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, by Danielle L. McGuire
65. The Negro's Civil War, by James M. McPherson
66. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movements: Black Communities Organizing for Change, by Aldon D. Morris
67. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
68. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, by Mark A. Noll
69. Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, by Mary Pattillo
70. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901, by Heather Cox Richardson
71. Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation, by Beth E. Richie
72. The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, by Gene Roberts
73. The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans, by Kathy Russell
74. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
75. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture, by Siobhan Somerville
76. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, by Thomas J. Sugrue
77. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, by Thomas J. Sugrue
78. Up from Slavery, by Booker T. Washington
79. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, by Harriet A. Washington
80. Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy, by Bruce Watson
81. Punishment and Inequality in America, by Bruce Western
82. Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity, by Tim Wise
83. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion, by Peter H. Wood
84. The Strange Career of Jim Crow, by C. Vann Woodard

 

[Battersea Power Station]

oh go to hell you bastard

 

[kaioshade]

This thread is depressing as hell. Thinking about my own experiences and situations, made me realize just sitting by and trying to forget them was the wrong thing to do. So many times have i thought to myself now, "i should have said something".

Not a good feeling.

Just yesterday in Microcenter, dealing with some subtle nonsense.

 

[mckmas8808]

I found this article on racism and how it can creep in to medical science. And how people's preconceived notions of race can be applied to racist thinking of the times. It also talks about how science at times can dismiss our social understanding of race and can also remove the environmental upbringing of people to answer questions it's trying to answer

In 1864, the year before the Civil War ended, a massive study was launched to quantify the bodies of Union soldiers. One key finding in what would become a 613-page report was that soldiers classified as "White" had a higher lung capacity than those labeled "Full Blacks" or "Mulattoes." The study relied on the spirometer—a medical instrument that measures lung capacity. This device was previously used by plantation physicians to show that black slaves had weaker lungs than white citizens. The Civil War study seemed to validate this view. As early as Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he remarked on the dysfunction of the “pulmonary apparatus” of blacks, lungs were used as a marker of difference, a sign that black bodies were fit for the field and little else. (Forced labor was seen as a way to “vitalize the blood” of flawed black physiology. By this logic, slavery is what kept black bodies alive.)

The notion that people of color have a racially defined deficiency isn't new. The 19th century practice of measuring skulls, and equating them with morality and intelligence, is perhaps the most infamous example. But race-based measurements still persist. Today, doctors examine our lungs using spirometers that are "race corrected." Normal values for lung health are reduced for patients that doctors identify as black. Not only might this practice mask economic or environmental explanations for lower lung capacity, but the logic of innate, racial difference is built into things like disability estimates, pre-employment physicals, and clinical diagnoses that rely on the spirometer. Race has become a biologically distinct, scientifically valid category despite the unnatural and social process of its creation.

In her recent book Breathing Race into the Machine, Lundy Braun, a professor of Africana studies and medical science at Brown University, reveals the political and social influences that constantly shape science and technology. She traces the history of the spirometer and explains its role in establishing a hierarchy of human health, and the belief that race is a kind of genetic essence. I spoke with her about the science of racial difference, its history, and its resurgence.

Shaban: Baxter did a separate study of black Union soldiers that showed no difference in lung function, right? His findings conflicted with Gould’s.

Braun: Yes. And what’s interesting there, it gets to the tension between knowledge produced by qualitative and quantitative research: Quantitative data is stripped of context. Gould’s was just numbers assembled into a table. He hardly comments at all. His work looks very, very objective, and very scientific.

Shaban: Why have environmental or socioeconomic explanations for differing lung capacity never been taken seriously over some innate racial factor?

Braun: There have been scientific studies showing that people who live around high pollution areas have lower lung capacity. High pollution areas also map onto minority status. Why we have chosen both in the U.S. and internationally to focus on race to the exclusion of social class, I can only speculate. One piece of the story is that the accumulation of scientific research around a particular idea can make it hard to dislodge. With the spirometer, having the correction factor actually built into the machine makes racial assumptions invisible.

This is a problem not just with lung capacity measurements but with health inequality more generally. There’s vastly, vastly, vastly more research on genomics than on the social determinants of health. Part of the problem is the infrastructure of science. What kinds of questions are considered scientific?
​

http://m.theatlantic.com/health/arc...creeps-into-medicine/378618/?single_page=true

 

[NEO0MJ]

Books preceded comics by about two decades.

Spoiler

And I am not huge. I am short and slightly built.

Oh you jokester you （￣ー￣）

I found this article on racism and how it can creep in to medical science. And how people's preconceived notions of race can be applied to racist thinking of the times. It also talks about how science at times can dismiss our social understanding of race and can also remove the environmental upbringing of people to answer questions it's trying to answer

That's horrible. I read about those skull measurements but not the lung capacity studies.

 

[Blackstarhat]

There are over 21,000,000 slaves alive today in this world, significantly more than at the height of the slave trade. It's a cause I am very passionate about and that hugely depresses me every time I stop to work toward its end

Yeah technicaly it never ended in america the 13th amendment states this. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

In other words you can be a slave if you are convicted of a crime.

 

[NEO0MJ]

In other words you can be a slave if you are convicted of a crime.

So that's why prisoners are used as cheap labor.

 

[LiveFromKyoto]

We're somewhat responsible for creating it, though. Consumers, that is.(

Everybody wants to talk about social justice issues on social media, but someday very soon we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that in doing so we're all complicit with the institutionalized slavery that produces smartphones and sneakers and laptops overseas.

This BBC news report focuses on the Pegatron iPhone factory, but similarly crooked Foxconn has been contracted by every major technology firm, from Sony, Nintendo & Microsoft, to Amazon, Google, Toshiba and Dell:

http://bbc.in/1zBuJV8

IDs confiscated so people can't leave. 18 days straight on 12-16 hour shifts. People falling asleep on their feet. The floor boss yelling at them to stay awake, or they'll fall asleep on a live wire & die.

And they're just the most high-profile. There are several more insidious forms of multi-generational debt slavery in places like India, and de facto enslavement of illegal migrant workers and sex workers here in the first world.

 

[ibyea]

And of course, science also has a dark history when it comes to experimenting on slaves and black Americans. Anyone ever heard of J Mario Sims? He developed gynecological techniques that even to this day save lives. The horrific price? Human experimentation on slaves, dozens of surgery without anesthesia, and without consent.

 

[Blackstarhat]

So that's why prisoners are used as cheap labor.

Yes and its also why america has the highest prison population.

 

[theignoramus]

Im reading Racism Without Racists right now and it's refreshing to see the arguments I read on Neogaf and hear other places exposed and (brutally) dismantled.
"Black people should demonstrate more personal responsibility", "I didnt own slaves, the past is the past" "black people complain about racism too much"

I notice the interview subjects from that book constantly point out (often quite angrily) that slavery was over a hundred years ago as they attempt to justify their opposition to reparations or affirmative action. And almost none of them acknowledge the racist policies that occurred through the twentieth century, through the 60s,70s, and 80s.

The book has some understated humour to it as well when it highlights the awkward, incoherent and contradictory responses from the interview subjects.

 

[Piecake]

...

Jesus, that is a long to-read list on one subject. I'll definitely refer back to that if I need some ideas.

Do you have any suggestions on what books to read for a good overview of the Civil Rights Movement? I also found Parting the Waters, but I would prefer a one volume work that focuses on the Movement, and not a work that is 3 volumes that focuses on King. Any suggestions?

I was honestly surprised that I had trouble finding a book that fit my requirements...

 

[Mumei]

Jesus, that is a long to-read list on one subject. I'll definitely refer back to that if I need some ideas.

Do you have any suggestions on what books to read for a good overview of the Civil Rights Movement? I also found Parting the Waters, but I would prefer a one volume work that focuses on the Movement, and not a work that is 3 volumes that focuses on King. Any suggestions?

I was honestly surprised that I had trouble finding a book that fit my requirements...

I honestly don't know. I haven't read that much specifically about the Civil Rights Movement; best I could suggest is looking at the titles I listed and seeing if any of them sound promising. :x

Spoiler

The total to-read list is currently 1644 books

Im reading Racism Without Racists right now and it's refreshing to see the arguments I read on Neogaf and hear other places exposed and (brutally) dismantled.
"Black people should demonstrate more personal responsibility", "I didnt own slaves, the past is the past" "black people complain about racism too much"

I notice the interview subjects from that book constantly point out (often quite angrily) that slavery was over a hundred years ago as they attempt to justify their opposition to reparations or affirmative action. And almost none of them acknowledge the racist policies that occurred through the twentieth century, through the 60s,70s, and 80s.

The book has some understated humour to it as well when it highlights the awkward, incoherent and contradictory responses from the interview subjects.

Yay, impressions!

I had much the same reaction. It put into words what had bothered me about the arguments - that they were all connected by the same worldview but I didn't know how to articulate what I thought I was seeing.

 

[Amir0x]

Spoiler

The total to-read list is currently 1644 books

sooo... you're basically going to need like five lifetimes at the rate you're accumulating reading backlog

 

[mckmas8808]

Nice and simple VOX article displaying from many different resources how the war on drugs is racist.

1) Black people are arrested for drugs at disproportionate rates

White and black people report using drugs at similar rates, according to the latest data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. There's some variance from drug to drug: white people report more often using cocaine, heroin, and hallucinogens, while black people report more marijuana and crack cocaine use.

A 2009 report from Human Rights Watch found black people are much more likely to be arrested for drugs. In 2007, black people were 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than white people.Human Rights Watch found more than four in five arrests in the war on drugs are for mere possession, while the rest are for sales. That suggests police are targeting drug users, not traffickers.

3) Mandatory minimum sentences target a drug more often used by black people

Mandatory minimum sentences were established in the 1980s when politicians touted the so-called crack epidemic to show off tough-on-crime stances. But these sentences are set in a way that could target black drug offenders more than white drug offenders.

Take, for instance, the mandatory minimum sentence threshold for crack versus cocaine. Someone would need to possess nearly 18 times more cocaine than crack to get a five-year mandatory minimum sentence.

Black people use crack at higher rates than white people, while white people use cocaine at higher rates than black people. So the tougher sentences on crack make it much easier for law enforcement to come down on black drug offenders.

Crack and cocaine are pharmacologically identical drugs. The difference is crack is mostly smoked, while cocaine is traditionally snorted. Smoking can make the effect more potent, faster acting, and potentially unhealthier, but both drugs essentially have the same effects in the long-term.

http://www.vox.com/2014/7/27/594078...a-legalization-pot-weed-racism-new-york-times

It's amazing how transparent all of this is. I'd say if any reasonable person read this thread, all the charts, and 1 or 2 books listed by Mumei they'd walk away looking for a protest to march in. The way America talks about freedom and rule of law, you'd think more people would want to change all of this to make it a fairer country.

 

[Amir0x]

Nice and simple VOX article displaying from many different resources how the war on drugs is racist.


http://www.vox.com/2014/7/27/594078...a-legalization-pot-weed-racism-new-york-times

It's amazing how transparent all of this is. I'd say if any reasonable person read this thread, all the charts, and 1 or 2 books listed by Mumei they'd walk away looking for a protest to march in. The way America talks about freedom and rule of law, you'd think more people would want to change all of this to make it a fairer country.

Oh excellent. Do you mind if I use this for OP? I always ask before doing it haha.

 

[NEO0MJ]

Nice and simple VOX article displaying from many different resources how the war on drugs is racist.


http://www.vox.com/2014/7/27/594078...a-legalization-pot-weed-racism-new-york-times

It's amazing how transparent all of this is. I'd say if any reasonable person read this thread, all the charts, and 1 or 2 books listed by Mumei they'd walk away looking for a protest to march in. The way America talks about freedom and rule of law, you'd think more people would want to change all of this to make it a fairer country.

That's horrifying. Wasn't it the government itself that allowed crack to be sold to poorer neighborhoods?

 

[Amir0x]

That's horrifying. Wasn't it the government itself that allowed crack to be sold to poorer neighborhoods?

It's a controversial subject to this day from the research I've done. The best I can conclude is that the government was not the primary source of the crack/coke epidemic in this country in the late 70s and 80s, but that there were several cases where the government had direct involvement with people/organizations that were drug trafficking (for political expediency sake, not because they wanted crack in the USA) such as with the Iran-Contra affair and in Nicaragua with rebels opposed to the Sandinista National Liberation Front and, by extension, directly helped their organizations with the drug trade.

 

[Piecake]

Virginia's Redeemers gerrymandered cities so as to ensure Democratic control, reduced the number of polling places in black precincts, empowered the legislature to appoint local governments, and barred from voting all those who had failed to pay a poll tax or been convicted of petty larceny

-Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution by Eric Foner

That sounds oddly familiar...

 

[RBK]

Great info throughout the entire thread. Thanks to all who have contributed.

I can relate to this quote specifically in some many ways, especially with my current life situation:

If you live 20 miles from New York City and your friend lives 200 miles from New York City, given equal traffic conditions and weather conditions, who will make it to New York City first?

Ok, that's easy. Now, let's say we go further.

Let's say we break your friends car down a bit, so it's barely running. And then we make sure that we strategically place police throughout the route, so that the person gets pulled over a few times. And then let's say we give your friend a map with wrong directions, so they intentionally get lost. And don't forget they're still 200 miles away.

How many of these people driving to NYC are going to give up trying to get to the city? A lot. Some will still make it. Others will have their car break down and get frustrated; someone else will get too angry after they get stopped by the police for the fifth time; someone else will give up when they end up getting lost. The end result after this crucible of obstacles is that your friends given these conditions are a whole lot less likely to make it to NYC.

A white person who is born into privilege literally 'earns' for free a billion different free passes in a society which is built around opening doors for them. They 'earn' what they get, but they 'earn' it within the structure of a society who has made it a crapload easier for them. It doesn't mean it will still be absent difficulty for them all, it doesn't mean everyone of them will be successful. It just means a whole heckuva lot more are going to make it through the filter.

 

[mckmas8808]

Oh excellent. Do you mind if I use this for OP? I always ask before doing it haha.

No problem.

 

[Piecake]

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/3/7485853/mass-incarceration-map

Interesting gif that shows which states are in the mass incarceration lead

 

[AyaisMUsikWhore]

That Vox article was very insightful and huge evidence to show how racism plays a huge part into perception in specific crimes. I'm slowly trying to pick up on my social learning so this thread, once again is awesome.

 

[FalsettoVibe]

Good thread. Subscribed.

 

[Htown]

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/3/7485853/mass-incarceration-map

Interesting gif that shows which states are in the mass incarceration lead

yo what the fuck happened in texas between 1992 and 1993 holy shit

 

[Piecake]

yo what the fuck happened in texas between 1992 and 1993 holy shit

That got me interested to find out, but google failed me miserably, so I have no idea.

 

[FlowersisBritish]

yo what the fuck happened in texas between 1992 and 1993 holy shit

"Prison's became privatized" said my friend when I told her about that gif.