bigotry of low expectations
Bigotry of low expectations: Whites, Ready to be an Ally for Black Academics? Here’s How
- Acknowledge how power (meaning white supremacy, often described informally as “academic politics”) operates at our institutions and work, long term, to dismantle it. That means adopting specific, measurable ways to identify power and how you plan to be accountable and participate in campus change. Short-term, this process means teaching us how to navigate these dynamics. As studies (like this one) show, few Black, Indigenous, and other people of color hold positions in upper administration, which means that we are not even in the room when conversations are happening and decisions are being made that affect Bipoc faculty members and students. We need to be included in those conversations and decisions.
- Reject standardized testing. Lead the elimination of the SAT, ACT, GRE, and other structurally racist assessments and admissions policies that keep the number of Black and other racial-minority students low.
- Count our service work toward promotion. Advocate that Black faculty members receive credit toward tenure for recruiting, mentoring, and retaining students of color. Black academics and staff members are the reason that most Black students stay at predominantly white institutions. We should be rewarded for our student-retention efforts — and so should Black staff members (who are miracle workers).
- Stop playacting that you are clueless about your own privilege. Don’t forget about implicit bias, but let’s focus on the ways in which you are collaborating in the white, male, heterosexual, abled-bodied, middle-to-upper-class ideologies and systems at your institution. Acknowledge that you are sophisticated about your racism. You’re not fooling anybody. We see you, so stop it. Acknowledging privilege, biases, and/or racism is the first step toward being an ally. But taking that step while still knowingly and tacitly supporting, enforcing, and maintaining those problems is an even more insidious matter.
- Sponsor us, boldly. Discuss our achievements when we are not around, and don’t feel shy about letting “them” know that we truly are just as brilliant as you describe us to be. In some instances, just get out of the way and let us do what we are well prepared to do.
- Mentor us. Recognize that if you recruit Black faculty members, you are responsible for guiding us toward a successful tenure bid. That means proactively figuring out how to award tenure and/or promotion to Black academics, and documenting that process as a template moving forward. As antiracists, we believe that structural discrimination embedded in campus systems is what should be blamed for ineptness in demanding equity.
- Stop making a big deal about “pioneerism.” Being the first Black faculty member hired or tenured in X department, and breaking the racial barriers, is stressful and should not be celebrated as if it’s a big institutional achievement. In my first year as an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, a white colleague rushed up to me and said, “Do you know that if you get tenure, you will be the first Black woman to earn tenure at Peabody College? Isn’t that great?” Hell, no, that’s depressing! Don’t get me wrong, I was gratified to earn tenure in 2017, but I know I was not the only Black woman qualified to earn tenure. What about all the Black women who didn’t?
- Look in your own backyard. When you learn about the history of racism and our current racial-caste system, which you must do, don’t forget to investigate your family’s history, your school’s history, your job’s history, your neighborhood’s history, or your own property as part of that racist past as well. You are likely to unearth something about our ecosystem that has benefited from white supremacy.
- White women, this is just for you: No more Karens. The racially charged, passive aggressiveness of Karens creates tension and anxiety. Reflect on your own poor behavior, change it, point out when you see other Karens on the rampage, and challenge them to modify their bad behavior. Some white women may feel some form of gender allegiance with Black women, but the sheer number of Karens we’ve seen this year shows that white privilege is alive and well among white women.
- No more hiring a lone Black academic every four to five years. Employ cluster hiring as the model for recruiting and retaining Black faculty. Just like white faculty members have their crew, we need our posse as well. Hire three or more of us at a time. A critical mass of Black faculty members across each of the three academic ranks is crucial, but minimally, large departments need at least one full professor (one with an endowed chair would be even better), one associate, and one assistant professor. A built-in mentoring model to guide the careers of Black academics will help facilitate the tenure-and-promotion process and will lead to more-inclusive spaces.
- Show us the money. A 2017 study revealed that Black faculty members earn lower salaries, on average, than white faculty members — approximately $10,000 to $15,000 less a year. Reveal your salary and come ready to fight for ours. Let’s go to the chair or dean together and jointly make the case for fair and equitable salaries.
- Ask us whether we consider you allies. A 2013 op-ed, “10 Things All Allies Need to Know,” provides a great list of traits of an ally. It also suggests that majority members can’t decide if they are allies. Only Black academics can determine if we are being effectively supported by white faculty members. So ask us. And believe what we say.
Black fragility: OSU: Derogatory terms against Whites ‘do not have the same impact’ as on minorities
Two blacks commit hate crime against whites.
OSU Director of Public Safety Monica Moll released a statement explaining that the department recognizes derogatory terms used against White people “do not have the same impact” they do on marginalized groups.
“The chief and I recognize that derogatory terms against whites do not have the same impact as they may to marginalized groups,” Moll told The Lantern. “We’re certainly not trying to say that they carry the same weight.”
Justin Trudeau unveils aid for Black-owned businesses and entrepreneurs
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s long-promised action to tackle systemic racism is starting to take shape with the announcement Wednesday of a program that will deliver up to $221 million in public and private funding for Black-owned businesses and entrepreneurs.
Several financial institutions — including major firms like the Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Montreal, Scotiabank, TD and CIBC — will also contribute up to $128 million to a new fund that will lend out sums ranging from $25,000 to $250,000 to Black-owned businesses and entrepreneurs.
Asians and whites excel in school and get high ACT / SAT scores so Judge bars University of California from all use of SAT, ACT scores in admissions.
“Nondisabled, economically advantaged, and white test-takers have an inherent advantage in the testing process,” Seligman said in his ruling.
Grading scale used in elementary and secondary schools in South Africa – over 30% and you pass
Instead of raising the bar, leftist ideas with their soft bigotry of low expectations and equality of outcome lower the bar.
From “WES” World education services wenr.wes.org
It’s soft bigotry to lower standards for minority kids
The soft bigotry of low expectations, and the idea that being kind and working hard is racist
The so-called “anti-racist” movement is inspiring a wave of ignorance and soft bigotry in American schools. I fear that Britain will be next.
Uncommon Schools – the world-renowned charter schools whose managing director, Doug Lemov, released the much celebrated Teach Like a Champion book – announced a sudden and complete change of direction this week in order to become “an increasingly anti-racist organisation” that promotes “social justice”.
What does this look like in practice? They will no longer enforce a policy encouraging pupils to listen in class; ties will no longer be a uniform requirement; pupils will be able to wear trainers instead of shoes; detentions will no longer be given out for “minor infractions”; all staff will be trained in unconscious bias; and teachers will be asked to “manage their own emotions in conflict situations”.
No doubt these changes are well-intentioned, but they also reinforce the prejudice of low expectations. The idea that black and minority ethnic students can’t be expected to listen to the teacher or to dress smartly is insulting enough, but to suggest that black people cannot be expected to behave and therefore shouldn’t be given detentions is outrageous.
This lunacy is already spreading across the Atlantic. Just this week, a lecturer in education from Brunel University London published a series of tweets berating Teach Like a Champion, claiming that for teachers to correct their pupils’ grammar is punitive, discriminatory and oppressive.
California Surfing Has a Serious Diversity Problem – SF Weekly
Surfing, despite its roots in indigenous Pacific Islander history, has been seen as a sport for straight white men for far too long.
America’s history of systemic racism plays a major role in discouraging people of color from taking up water sports, according to Chelsea Woody, co-founder of Textured Waves, a surf collective for women of color.
Danielle Black Lyons, another Textured Waves co-founder, and Woody, both understand that not seeing people who look like you in the water can be discouraging, but they are also persistent in encouraging people of color to paddle out.
Let’s reverse the races: “Seeing so many black people in one place can be discouraging”
Soft bigotry of low expectations; California wants to ease the bar exam so more black and latino people can become lawyers
For more than three decades, California has clung to one of the nation’s toughest testing standards for law school students hoping to practice law in the most populous state in the country.
But this month, the California Supreme Court, which oversees the state bar, agreed to lower the passing score for the exam, a victory for law school deans who have long hoped the change would raise the number of Black and Latino people practicing law.
After holding virtual meetings with law school graduates and deans, the state’s highest court this month permanently lowered the passing score, allowed for law school graduates to work temporarily under supervision with provisional licenses during the pandemic and permitted graduates to take the bar exam remotely in early October.
To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions
Blind auditions, as they became known, proved transformative. The percentage of women in orchestras, which hovered under 6 percent in 1970, grew. Today, women make up a third of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and they are half the New York Philharmonic. Blind auditions changed the face of American orchestras.
But not enough.
American orchestras remain among the nation’s least racially diverse institutions, especially in regard to Black and Latino artists. In a 2014 study, only 1.8 percent of the players in top ensembles were Black; just 2.5 percent were Latino.
To White People Who Want to Be ‘One of the Good Ones’
There are a lot of reading lists being passed around among us whites. Besides books on racism and antiracism, there are documentaries to watch, conversations to unpack, privilege to be examined and a foreboding sense of work to be done.
We are determined to do that work and determined to let everyone know we are doing it. This work is deemed necessary so we can become better allies for black people in the fight for racial justice. There are so many anguished conversations among white people taking place right now about what to write on our protest signs, about that time we said that thing to a black friend and it changed the energy in the room, about whether rewatching the movie “The Help” counts as progress.
There is a frantic race to catch up, and that’s got to be the correct instinct, right? I mean, look at this moment in history. I swear, if I don’t do it right I’ll ask to speak to my own manager.
However, when I pause for a second I get a sneaking feeling that my ego is involved. I catch myself wanting to be “one of the good ones,” and I have to laugh at myself. Who exactly do I imagine is paying attention to me? Is somebody out there doling out points? Black people are being killed in broad daylight by the police, by actual representatives of the state, and I am fretting over the wording of an Instagram post.
One powerful lie that we were born into is that white people deserve different, better lives than anyone else.
NY Times fake news: Lumping all white people into one homogeneous group; check. Blaming all white people for the sins of a handful of them; check. Parroting lies about police shooting statistics; check.
Salon writer thinks peaceful protests are the same as riots: I can’t get past the differences between the Minneapolis BLM protest and anti-lockdown protests
The vast majority of protesters weren’t violent and none were armed. But Minneapolis police showed up ready to rumble. News photos show the cops pouring out of vehicles fully clad in riot gear and as soon as a handful of protesters committed minor acts of property damage and threw some water bottles (the Star Tribune reports that peaceful protesters pleaded with others to stop the vandalism), cops used that as a pretext to shoot tear-gas canisters into the crowd.
Could it be that cops knew that these very peaceful BLM demonstrators will riot, so they were ready. And they were right. Minneapolis had a massive riot, multiple stores and buildings were looted and burned to the ground.
But what I can’t get past — and judging from the reactions on social media, I’m not alone — is how wildly different that scene played out compared to the astroturf anti-lockdown protests staged in various state capitals across the country over the past month or so.
In places like Lansing, Michigan, and Columbus, Ohio, right-wing protesters have showed up literally armed to the hilt, carrying assault rifles and menacing state legislators who were simply trying balance public safety and the economic needs of their citizens. In Michigan, protesters literally stormed the state capitol and stood in the galley with guns, in an obvious effort to intimidate the politicians below.
Could it be that those white people with guns pose no threat? There was not a riot, no looting, no damage done.
No doubt liberals are in danger of letting conservatives drag them into a nitpicky, line-by-line debate over what constitutes “peaceful protest” and who started what in Minneapolis. But there’s no reason to get into that.
“Disregard reality, use feelings”
Fake News New York Times: It’s Not Obesity. It’s Slavery.
Some of the experts had devoted their entire careers to addressing questions surrounding racial health inequities. Years of research, and in some instances failed interventions, had left them baffled. Why are black people so sick?M
My answer was swift and unequivocal.
“Slavery.”
I meant what I said: The era of slavery was when white Americans determined that black Americans needed only the bare necessities, not enough to keep them optimally safe and healthy. It set in motion black people’s diminished access to healthy foods, safe working conditions, medical treatment and a host of other social inequities that negatively impact health.
Even before Covid-19, black Americans had higher rates of multiple chronic illnesses and a lower life expectancy than white Americans, regardless of weight. This is an indication that our social structures are failing us. These failings — and the accompanying embrace of the belief that black bodies are uniquely flawed — are rooted in a shameful era of American history that took place hundreds of years before this pandemic.
Black people eating unhealthy foods is not their fault, it’s the racist white people and society’s fault.
Dreasjon Reed, McHale Rose outrage. Hundreds blocked traffic in Indianapolis to protest the police-involved shootings of 2 black men.
- INDIANAPOLIS — Friends and family of Sean Reed are remembering him after his death was live streamed on Facebook. “He was talking to me on the live,” Jazmine Reed, his sister, said. “And he was like ‘Sis I’m sorry.’ And I’m like ‘Brother what are you doing? We can’t think for them.'”
- Indianapolis police chief talks to Dreasjon Reed’s family in emotional face-to-face exchange “Ya’ll be murdering us black people for years,” Jamie Reed, Dreasjon’s father said to Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Chief Randal Taylor. “What’s going on? What’s the investigation? What’s going on?”
- ACLU standing up for these criminals Paige Fernandez, policing policy advisor with the American Civil Liberties Union, issued the following statement: “We mourn the loss of Dreasjon Reed as police yet again have robbed another Black man of his life. …fatal officer-involved shootings continue to ravage communities, particularly those of color. These police killings are not one-off incidents and are not the result of a few bad apples, but rather emblematic of the systemic problems that pervade our policing institutions.
Black, Latino people break social distancing rules, get arrested. NYC politicians cry racism.
According to the NYPD, there have been 374 social distancing-related summonses issued since COVID-19 restrictions were put in place six weeks ago. Of that number, 304 of the summonses have been issued to black or Latino people.
That follows news that 35 of 40 people arrested in Brooklyn between March 17 and May 4, were black. Across the city, where there were 120 social distancing arrests, 68% of the people were black, 24% Latino and 7% white.
“That’s abysmal,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said during a Zoom meeting news conference Friday. “This is not the federal government. This is not Donald Trump.”
California State University Fresno hosts blacks-only student retreat – to promote inclusion
California State University Fresno recently held a three-day student retreat for black students that aimed to foster inclusion and help incoming African American students adjust to college life and get involved in the campus community.
The inaugural “Harambee Student Retreat,” which took place Aug.14 through Aug 17, was free to participating students, who enjoyed housing, meals, workshops and activities meant to help aid in the “successful transition of incoming African American/Black students to Fresno State,” the university’s website states.
According to the university’s website, topics broached at the retreat included information on how to receive assistance with financial aid and housing, as well as how to develop leadership skills and find a job.
Canadian Government Gave a $500,000 Grant to a Guy Filming a Puppet to Spread Coronavirus Information to Indigenous Communities
A Manitoba researcher is using part of his $500,000 federal grant to not only study how COVID-19 is affecting Indigenous communities but also to help them survive it.
One of the first projects Steph McLachlan commissioned is a public health video delivered in Cree by a raven puppet.
“We’ve kind of hit a sweet spot, which is finding something that’s useful from a health perspective but has value in itself in terms of something that’s funny and relevant from a cultural perspective,” said McLachlan, a professor in the University of Manitoba’s Department of Environment and Geography.
If coronavirus doesn’t discriminate, how come black people are bearing the brunt?
I wanted to believe the comforting thought that, when it comes to coronavirus, we are all in this together.. That knowing we’re all equally at risk, we’re pulling together in the same direction, bearing the strain equally.
The false nature of this belief was initially most obvious in relation to class. Once the lockdown was imposed, a gulf very quickly opened up between those on full salaries working on laptops from home, fretting about having to cancel Easter holidays, and those living hand to mouth, fretting about how to feed their children and avoid being made homeless.
Government advice revealed its ignorance of how many people actually live. How do you self-isolate when you live in cramped or shared accommodation? How do you reduce shopping trips to once a week when you have little or no storage space? And if you do want to go to the park or do an extra shop, you now risk not only infection, but coming into contact with the police, some of whom are zealously taking advantage of their new social control powers.
Black People Eat Shitty Food; Get Diabetes, Heart Disease, Disproportionately Die From Coronavirus. Liberals: “This is systemic racism, classism”
Moreover, it appears that those dying of COVID-19 are disproportionately the poor and people of color, attesting to systemic inequality in the United States. This is not merely a manifestation of systemic racism and classism. It reveals a lack of situational awareness about the trajectory of the pandemic itself, which will seriously undermine containment.
The Unbearable Whiteness of Hiking and How to Solve It
Minorities don’t want to go outdoors = white people’s fault.
So what is keeping people of color from participating in outdoor recreation and enjoying its benefits? As activist and author Glenn Nelson writes, “Because the outdoors remains a largely white domain, it is up to white America to invite communities of color in, to enlist us as allies.” Here are a few proven strategies for outings leaders (and well-meaning white folks) who want to be part of the solution.
The National Museum of African American History & Culture outlines what “whiteness” is including things like delayed gratification, decision-making, the nuclear family, self reliance, objective rational thinking, hard work, respect for authority and more
The Smithsonian webpage, which is maintained by the federal government, includes an astonishingly racist graphic titled, “Aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture in the United States.”
These “aspects and assumptions” include but are not limited to “rugged individualism,” respect for authority, being polite, and even punctuality. The graphic continues, claiming that white people place a premium on hard work, competitive drive, the “nuclear family,” objectivity, the “scientific method,” self-reliance, and hope.
The obvious implication here is that nonwhites (blacks, Latinos, Asians, and others) are monolithic, lawless, impolite, selfish, lazy, apathetic, irrational, backwards, dependent, and hopeless.
Original: https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness
The Bigotry of Social Justice – Reality of Inequality all over the world – Debunking the myths of “white privilege” or “systemic racism”
Economist Thomas Sowell, who just turned 90, has devoted a great deal of attention over his career to analyzing inter-group differences occurring around the world and across many centuries. The trilogy he wrote in the 1990s—Race and Culture; Migrations and Culture; and Conquests and Cultures—is his most comprehensive examination of the issue. His conclusion is that wide, persistent disparities are a fact of life in every heterogenous society. If all disparate socioeconomic outcomes are bad (except, perhaps, for purely random ones) then the pursuit of justice requires constantly reducing and ultimately eliminating every such disparity. According to Sowell, however, this supposed ideal is in fact contrary to the operation of every large, complex society known to the disciplines of history and anthropology.
He offers so many particulars that it becomes clear the supply is infinite. A century ago, for example, Jews were 6% of Hungary’s population and 11% of Poland’s, but accounted for the majority of physicians in each country. Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority, about 5% of the population, owns some 80% of the nation’s invested capital. In the multinational Austro-Hungarian empire, 75% of Serbo-Croatian adults were illiterate in 1900, as were 40% of Poles, but only 6% of Germans.
Among the large number of immigrants who came to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, those from northern Europe were more likely to come from cities, where an extensive division of labor made it both necessary and possible to acquire specialized skills. Those from southern and eastern Europe usually came from rural areas lacking such opportunities. As a result, immigrants from Mediterranean and Slavic countries had incomes that were only 15% as large as those who came from Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. By the same token,
Japanese and Mexican immigrants began arriving in California at about the same time and initially worked in very similar occupations as agricultural laborers. Yet a study of a school district in which their children attended the same schools and sat side-by-side in the same classrooms found IQ differences as great as those between blacks and whites attending schools on opposite sides of town in the Jim Crow South.
Why do such large disparities exist? Discrimination is a factor, Sowell says, but not the only one, the biggest, or one that operates in a simple linear fashion. The groups most discriminated against, in other words, are not always or even usually the most disadvantaged, and the groups doing the discriminating are not necessarily the most advantaged.
If discrimination were the sole or decisive factor explaining group disparities, argues Sowell, we should expect the descendants of African slaves in Haiti to be far better off than the descendants of African slaves in the United States. Haiti, after all, has been an independent nation for two centuries, in which the huge black majority has been politically and economically dominant. In the U.S., blacks are a minority, slightly more than one-eighth of the population, subjected to various forms of discrimination since the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery. And yet, he writes, “it is Haitians who are the poorest and American blacks who are the most prosperous in the [western] hemisphere—and in the world.”
The social justice jihad against socioeconomic disparities is not only infeasible but also pernicious, leading inevitably to resentment, envy, and discord. If white privilege explains virtually everything about how whites come out ahead of blacks, how can “Jewish privilege” not explain how Jews come out ahead of Gentiles? How can “Asian privilege” not explain the educational and economic advantages that Americans of Asian ancestry enjoy over whites, blacks, and Hispanics? After all, the social justice framework demands summary rejection of the idea that there are reasons other than racism why some groups, including ones that have endured virulent bigotry within living memory, get along better in the modern world than other groups.
Whites account for 15% of all NYC students and 24% of those at the specialized schools, which means that they’re three-fifths again as likely to get into the specialized schools as you would expect if placement were determined through a city-wide lottery. Asian students, however, are 16% of all NYC pupils but 62% of those in the selective schools: there are nearly four times as many Asian students in New York’s specialized high schools as simple demographic proportions would predict.
Thus, a coherent but also absurd way to blame racism for the small number of black and Hispanic students at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science would be to hold that New York’s whites have devised an admissions process that is far more beneficial to Asians than to whites because white racism is so pathological that its highest priority is to harm blacks rather than help whites.
To ascribe all moral and practical responsibility for disparities adversely affecting blacks to white racism requires insisting that higher rates of criminal behavior and out-of-wedlock births among blacks, to mention the two likeliest causes of chronic poverty, are either inconsequential or themselves the result of white racism. To take that position, however, is to contend that the minimal decencies and competencies we demand of everyone else are somehow an unwarranted expectation for this one victimized group. In the words of economist Glenn Loury (who, like Sowell, is black):
You’re telling me that people have to run up and down the street, firing guns out of windows and killing their brethren because we didn’t get reparations for slavery handed over to you yet?… And you’re telling me that that explains or somehow excuses or cancels out the moral judgment that I would otherwise bring to bear against any other community in which I saw this happening?
This contempt for blacks—the all-but-explicit belief that respecting blacks requires, as it does for children or the mentally disabled, making excuses and accepting otherwise unacceptable conduct—is not one of social justice’s fixable problems, but one of its integral features.
Excerpts from Thomas Sowell’s Race and Culture; Migrations and Culture; and Conquests and Cultures
- During the decade of the 1960s, for example, the Chinese minority in Malaysia earned more than a hundred times as many engineering degrees as the Malay majority. Halfway around the world at the same time, the majority of the population of Nigeria, living in its northern provinces, were just 9 percent of the students attending that country’s University of Ibadan and just 2 percent of the much larger number of Nigerian students studying abroad in foreign institutions of higher learning. In the Austrian Empire in 1900, the illiteracy rate among Polish adults was 40 percent and among Serbo-Croatians 75 percent– but only 6 percent among the Germans.
- Given similar educational disparities among other groups in other countries– disparities in both the quantity and quality of education, as well as in fields of specialization– why should anyone expect equal outcomes in incomes or occupations?
- Back in the fifteenth century, China sent ships on a voyage of exploration longer than that of Columbus, more than half a century before Columbus, and in ships more advanced than those in Europe at the time. Yet the Chinese rulers made a decision to discontinue such voyages and in fact to reduce China’s contacts with the outside world. European rulers made the opposite decision and established world-wide empires, ultimately to the detriment of China.
- There are other groups to whom none of these factors apply– and who still have had test score differences as great as those between black and white children in the Jim Crow South. Japanese and Mexican immigrants began arriving in California at about the same time and initially worked in very similar occupations as agricultural laborers. Yet a study of a school district in which their children attended the same schools and sat side-by-side in the same classrooms found IQ differences as great as those between blacks and whites attending schools on opposite sides of town in the Jim Crow South. International studies have found different groups of illiterates— people with no educational differences because they had no education– with mental test differences larger than those between blacks and whites in the United States.