Blacks should be thankful for legacy of slavery

“But, on a current note, if slavery was the price that a modern American’s ancestors had to pay in order to make one an American, one should get down on one’s knees every single day and thank the Lord that such price was paid. To the extent that America — or New Jersey — ever owed any kind of debt to anyone, that debt was more than repaid through the blood and suffering of 650,000 federal soldiers who died or were wounded during the war provoked by slavery. No one today need feel the slightest guilt, as no one today participated in the wrong.”

- Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll (NJ-R)

Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy raises legal questions

The announced pregnancy of Jamie Lynn Spears -- the 16-year-old children's television star and younger sister of beleaguered pop star Britney Spears -- is casting new light on how states deal with the thorny issue of consensual sex among teens.

Spears, the star of Nickelodeon's "Zoey 101," told OK! Magazine that she's pregnant and that the father is her 18-year-old boyfriend.
There has been no public talk of criminal prosecution in the case. Consensual sex between the two may well have been legal, depending on where and when it took place.

But critics of the nation's statutory rape laws say that laws that are ignored in some cases can be used to put other teens in prison and land them on sex-offender registries.

"You have a disturbing disparity in how these laws are enforced," said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University. "I have no problem at all with nailing adults who sleep with children, but I have a problem with the prosecution of teenagers in consensual relationships.

"What this case should focus the nation on is having a more evenhanded approach to these cases." [CNN] continue reading

A White Christmas Indeed!

So, the wife decides to buy some classic Christmas-related movies for the children and the issue of the song White Christmas comes up. I tell the wife to pick up a copy of White Christmas starringBing Crosby and Danny Kaye for both the song White Christmas and a fun scene on a train when Danny Kaye and Rosemary Clooney sing the song Snow. The wife gets to Best Buy, forgets what movie and asks the salesman for the movie where Bing sings White Christmas. Said dude gives wife a copy of Holiday Inn (where Bing also sings White Christmas). Easy mistake, no harm no foul, right?

EXCEPT, I’ve only seen Holiday Inn in re-runs on commercial TV, which means a substantial bit has been cut out. Specifically, a substantial part was cut out of Bing Crosby in Blackface. Imagine my surprise when I step away from a light holiday moview to get a drink for my 3 year old, only to come back to Louise Beavers and pickaninnies singing about Lincoln freeing the slaves. WTF? Where’d that come from?

Turns out that with the notable exception of Turner Classic Movies, which keeps the scene in for historic purposes, most people who have seen that movie only on television have no idea whatsoever that the blackface scene exists. It was edited out years ago. Aside from the the crows in Dumbo, it stands out as one of the most offensive scenes I’ve seen in movies. It took a good minute to even register what I was seeing and cut the thing off.

Not like I was a big Bing fan before. He always seem to have something dark hidden under the more visible boring. He was really only tolerable in films paired with actors with better personalities - Astaire, Kaye, Hope, Sinatra, even David Bowie in that Christmas special. But you know, couldn’t that box have come with a Warning: Explicit Cooning label or something? Gee Bing, thanks for the Christmas surprise. Bamboozled again. Punk. [EbonyJet]

Quotable

“If there’s more than one black person in the movie, it’s an urban romantic comedy, an urban thriller - it’s just a flipping movie. The way kids think, the demographic they pander and chase - they don’t care."-Gabrielle Union

Revealed: scientist who sparked racism row has black genes

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist who provoked a public outcry by claiming black Africans were less intelligent than whites has a DNA profile with up to 16 times more genes of black origin than the average white European.
An analysis of the genome of James Watson showed that 16 per cent of his genes were likely to have come from a black ancestor of African descent. By contrast, most people of European descent would have no more than 1 per cent.
"This level is what you would expect in someone who had a great-grandparent who was African," said Kari Stefansson of deCODE Genetics, whose company carried out the analysis. "It was very surprising to get this result for Jim."
The findings were made available after Dr Watson became only the second person to publish his fully sequenced genome online earlier this year.

Dr. Watson was forced to resign his post as head of a research laboratory in New York shortly after triggering an international furore by questioning the comparative intelligence of Africans. In an interview during his recent British book tour, the American scientist said he was "inherently gloomy about the prospects for Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really".
The Science Museum in London cancelled a lecture by him, while the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, branded his comments "racist propaganda".

Other scientists working in the field of molecular biology quickly distanced themselves from the comments, saying that it was not possible to draw such conclusions from the work that had been done on DNA.

The study of the DNA of Dr Watson – who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine – adds another twist to the controversy surrounding the American scientist's comments.

In addition to the 16 per cent of his genes which were identified as likely to have come from a black ancestor of African descent, a further 9 per cent were likely to have come from an ancestor of Asian descent, the test indicated. [Indpendent]

Older white women join Kenya's sex tourists

Bethan, 56, lives in southern England on the same street as best friend Allie, 64.
They are on their first holiday to Kenya, a country they say is "just full of big young boys who like us older girls."

Hard figures are difficult to come by, but local people on the coast estimate that as many as one in five single women visiting from rich countries are in search of sex.

Allie and Bethan -- who both declined to give their full names -- said they planned to spend a whole month touring Kenya's palm-fringed beaches. They would do well to avoid the country's tourism officials.

"It's not evil," said Jake Grieves-Cook, chairman of the Kenya Tourist Board, when asked about the practice of older rich women traveling for sex with young Kenyan men."But it's certainly something we frown upon."

Also, the health risks are stark in a country with an AIDS prevalence of 6.9 percent. Although condom use can only be guessed at, Julia Davidson, an academic at Nottingham University who writes on sex tourism, said that in the course of her research she had met women who shunned condoms -- finding them too "businesslike" for their exotic fantasies. [MSNBC] continue reading

The Choke Factor

Every sports fan has vivid memories of key occasions on which a favorite team or player has 'choked' under pressure. And every student who has ever taken a standardized test knows what that kind of pressure feels like. What makes for high-pressure situations, and how do they influence performance? In the last decade such issues have been explored by social psychologists researching the phenomenon of stereotype threat. Their work shows not only that pressure can compromise performance, but that this dynamic is more common among members of negatively stereotyped social groups. Why?

The classic demonstration of stereotype threat, in a 1995 paper by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, emerged from a series of studies in which high-achieving African American students at Stanford completed the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) under conditions where they thought either that the test was measuring intelligence or that it was not a test of ability at all. Intriguingly, these bright students did much worse when they considered it an intelligence test.. This, the researchers argued, was because "in situations where [a negative] stereotype is applicable, one is at risk of confirming it as a self-characterization, both to one's self and to others who know the stereotype." This tendency to perform worse when conscious of being in a group stereotyped as performing poorly is what is meant by stereotype threat.

This pattern of findings has been replicated with many different groups on many different dimensions of stereotype content. The work of the University of Chicago's Sian Beilock and colleagues, reported in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology (abstract or pdf download), follows that of many previous researchers in showing that if female students are made aware of a stereotype that men have greater mathematical ability than women, they tend to do worse on complex mathematical tasks than they do if they are not alerted to this stereotype. [SciAm] continue reading

Twenty Years Later: James Baldwin’s America Hasn’t Changed

Baldwin’s biographer and close friend, David Leeming, called his essays “prophetic,” as they articulated an eerily clear-eyed view of America’s peril at the hands of what, in Baldwin’s day, was politely called the “race problem.”
Perhaps Leeming has it right and Baldwin was a soothsayer. But a more plausible explanation is that Baldwin’s work remains contemporary because America’s racial caste system changed so little over the generations that his writing spans.

Baldwin considered race America’s poison pill. And he deftly portrayed Americans of all colors struggling to concoct their own individual antidotes—solutions that are temporary at best and always crazy-making because, at root, the problem is structural not individual.

Today, we still have not reached Baldwin’s understanding of race and racism. It remains a collective problem that we insist upon dealing with on an individual basis. As a result, even our greatest triumphs—the end of legal segregation, broadened opportunity for the slim black middle class—are undermined by broader forces.

In his first essay collection, 1955’s Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin describes an urban ghetto that since has changed only in aesthetic. “All over Harlem now,” he wrote, “there is felt the same bitter expectancy with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it.”

Then and now, reform efforts have failed to alter that bleak reality because they’ve made no fundamental changes. As Baldwin wrote, “Steps are taken to right the wrong, without, however, expanding or demolishing the ghetto. The idea is to make it less of a social liability, a process about as helpful as make-up to a leper.”

So today Baldwin’s Harlem still lingers atop the list of New York neighborhoods with problems ranging from dilapidated housing stock to communicable disease to food establishments that simply fail to pass health inspection. The same is true for other racially defined ghettos around the country.
What is different today is that few discuss race in Baldwin’s structural terms. Instead, we busy ourselves with word games.

We play gotcha with celebrities who use slurs, rather than noticing the morbid conditions African Americans are disproportionately asked to live within. We eagerly embrace commentators like Bill Cosby when they decry the way individuals have adapted to generations of ghetto life. But we nickel and dime any policy effort to change those conditions. We ban the N-word, and we leave the ghetto intact.

This neglect has the same impact today that it had when Baldwin dissected it in 1955. “All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand,” he wrote, “and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.” [RW]

They're sitting right next to us

At a recent meeting of the Boston University student organization Latinos Unidos, club president Stephanie Abregu wanted to tackle the issue of racism. She and the group's other officers kicked off the event by asking the two dozen guests - predominantly Latinos with a few blacks, whites, and Asians - a series of questions: Have you heard someone use a stereotype? Did you confront them about it? Did you respond with words or with violence?
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Then they invited students to share their experiences. Toward the end of the event, Jaime Hermonsillo talked about an incident that happened months earlier, two weeks into his freshman year. He had been sitting with friends, chatting about the colleges to which they'd applied.
"One girl said to me, 'Well, let's face it, the only reason you're here is because we need the statistics,' " he says. Hermonsillo, who attended Lake Forest Academy, a predominantly white boarding school outside his hometown of Chicago, told her he'd worked as hard as she had to get into college.
"Then she was like, 'Well, ummm,' " recalls Hermonsillo, 18. "She didn't know what to say. She didn't even apologize or anything."

The subject of racial and ethnic tensions on college campuses has become so topical that a November episode of "Without a Trace" kicked off with a white student calling his black peer an affirmative-action "charity case" during class. Tufts University's conservative student newspaper, The Primary Source, generated controversy a year ago when it published a Christmas carol titled "O Come All Ye Black Folk." Asian students at Boston College complain of drunken alumni and students who shout racial epithets as part of their football game celebrations.

In recent months, nooses, a centuries-old symbol of racial intimidation, have been found at the University of Maryland, California State University at Fullerton, Purdue, and Columbia. "Crossing the Border" and "Ghetto" parties, in which white students wear blackface or crawl under barbed-wire fences to get in, generate outcry when images from these events turn up on Facebook. The blog Vox ex Machina offers a "College Racism Roundup" of incidents on campuses nationwide.

The tensions, says Daren Graves, an assistant professor of general education at Simmons College, mirror a nationwide movement opposed to political correctness that's occurring in response to the advances of the civil-rights movement. [Boston Globe] continue reading