BLOGGER TEMPLATES - TWITTER BACKGROUNDS »

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Much ado about Israel

In Chapter Four, Prof. Salaita asks the question "is zionism racism?" To answer that question he analyzes the views of prominent zionists--some of whom are Jewish and some who aren't. During his discussion, he considers the location of the state of Israel--and I'm curous to hear from you: Does Israel have a right to exist? If so, under what conditions? If not, what happens to modern-day Israel?

As always, I look forward to your responses. When responding, please reply to a previous student's post and please provide evidence for your point of view!

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Steve's Space (Again)!

Hi All,

This will be a space where Professor Salaita can respond to our questions. Feel free to post a question simply by replying to this thread.

Do-gooders and Evil-doers

In chapter one Salaita describes America's view of the world as good vs. evil, with Arabs always being portrayed as "evil" and Americans always portrayed as "good." What do you think about this? Has the shift from the Bush administration to the Obama administration reconciled any of Salaita's concerns? Be sure to use evidence from the book and outside sources to support your responses. Feel free to locate web links for outside sources (such as online newspapers, journals, news stations) to support your argument. One such article for discussion can be found at:http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/gen.bush.terrorism/. Please note the date--five days after September 11th.

We've also looked at numerous political cartoons like this one below:


and this one:


Although, all of these were published before the Obama Presidency. I'm curious to hear your views on this!

Saturday, September 12, 2009

There's no such thing as (racist) Santa Claus

This week Newsweek released an excerpt of a very interesting study (with an albeit tabloid title: Is your baby racist?) about racism in children.

For next class, I'd like you to read the article here and then do the following in your journals:

1. bring 3 questions you have about the article--or questions that peeked your curiosity
2. list 3 passages or quotes that really grabbed you and briefly explain why you chose them.
3. And finally--I'd like you to share the article with your parents/guardians and have a discussion with them about the article. Some guiding questions: Did they talk to you about race when you were young? Why or why not? Is it appropriate to discuss race with young children? If so, what's the best way to do so? How do we cope with teaching children about race when we have competing black and white images of what fictional Santa looks like (sorry kids, he's not real!)?

Feel free to use the questions above or use your own and then:

4. write a reflection about the discussion you had with your parents. This should be about 1/2-1 page in your journals.

Hope you have fun with this!

Newsweek Article

Friday, August 28, 2009

Changing Racial Attitudes?

Researchers at Florida State University found some interesting results when studying racial bias towards African Americans in non-black students. Below you'll find the article, which I'd like you to read and comment on. Additionally--I'd like you to set aside 10 minutes so you can take the Implicit Association Test yourselves. Click on the link and scroll down to take the race test. You might want to take other tests as well. The test only measures attitudes towards white and black Americans--but I'd still like to hear about your results. Feel free to comment on either the test, your results, or both. Have fun!

www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-tc-nw-obama-studies-0823aug23,0,2982580.story
chicagotribune.com
Studies of racial attitudes grapple with Obama factor
After decades of exposure to all of those stereotypes -- the Aunt Jemimas and the gangsta rappers, the Willie Hortons and TV drug dealers -- this just wasn't supposed to be happening.
By Richard Fausset
Tribune Newspapers 
August 23, 2009
TALLAHASSEE, Fla.
The test results baffled Florida State University psychologist Ashby Plant. She checked and rechecked the figures. Something must be wrong, she told herself.

Plant and her colleagues had just administered a racial Implicit Association Test to 74 white college students. A common tool in psychology lab work, the test purports to measure the kinds of biases people may not admit, or even know, they harbor. It is one of the more troubling, and fascinating, realities in Plant's line of work that when the test is administered to whites, roughly 75 percent typically show some degree of anti-black bias.

But in this case, her subjects were displaying almost no bias against blacks. In fact, about 45 percent appeared to be favoring blacks over whites. "It made us stop dead in our tracks," she said. "I mean, this was unheard of."

It was spring 2008 -- a moment of mounting intensity in America's presidential race. It was also the moment when Plant found herself delving into a new subspecialty with few precedents in the social sciences.

Call it Obama Studies.

It is a line of inquiry pursued by a small group of researchers, most of them experts in the nature of bias and prejudice. Their goal is to bring some scientific rigor to vexing questions that continue to ricochet around American dining rooms, the kind that were only amplified this summer with the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.: How are racial attitudes changing, if at all, in the age of the first black president?

Plant and her colleagues began speculating that their surprising numbers had something to do with candidate Barack Obama. Perhaps, they would write later in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the students had been profoundly affected by repeated exposure to a man "whose qualities -- well-educated, motivated, articulate -- contradict the negative stereotypes of African-Americans."

So they began designing an experiment to test their hypothesis.

Serious scientific inquiry into the nature of prejudice largely has been the domain of social psychologists, who study the way people interact with, think about and influence one another.

The discipline tends to focus on big-picture questions ("What are the motivational sources of prejudice?") and hyper-specific biological observations (for example, the role of certain brain regions in race-based fear responses).

But with Obama's victory -- in a country where, 50 years ago, nearly half of white voters would not consider voting for a black candidate -- a number of researchers have turned their attention to the influence of one man.

Thus far, some of the most widely discussed test results have been contradictory. If there has been an "Obama effect" on racial consciousness, it's not clear yet what it is.

Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, conducted studies that suggested exposure to Obama's convention speech and election helped black students close an achievement gap with whites on a verbal aptitude test.

But in another study, a New York University researcher found that thinking about Obama had no discernible effect on black students' test scores.

At Stanford University, researchers led by graduate student Daniel Effron found what might be called a reverse Obama effect. In their studies, white Obama supporters showed favoritism for whites over blacks in hypothetical situations -- perhaps because by supporting Obama, they felt bestowed with nonracist "moral credentials" that made them more comfortable siding with fellow whites.

Plant, 40, is white, and some of her memories growing up in Baltimore involve unpleasant encounters with the realities of race, like the awkwardness of watching a stereotype-riddled TV show with her black best friend.

Over the years as a social psychologist, she has corralled hundreds of undergraduates and other volunteers into various university psychology labs to be virtually plumbed and prodded.

Last year, she enthusiastically supported Obama for president although, she said, "having studied prejudice for so long, I have to admit that at times I doubted" a black man could win.

To determine if Obama had accounted for a true change of mind, Plant and her main collaborator, University of Wisconsin psychologist Patricia Devine, would have to overcome a problem that has shaped the course of their field more than any other in recent years: how to record people's racial attitudes when it has become taboo to openly voice prejudices.

One key tool is the Implicit Association Test. Plant and her team didn't think they could show that Obama was the sole cause of lower bias: It would be difficult to isolate his influence, given all the stimuli out in the world. But the researchers thought they might be able to at least show a correlation via a two-part test.

In the first part, 229 University of Wisconsin students, all nonblack, were given Implicit Association Tests and then asked, among other things, to list five thoughts that came to mind when they considered black people. Once again, the students, as a group, failed to show much anti-black bias.

Researchers then noted if the participants listed any "positive black exemplars" -- for instance, Obama, Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks. They found that students who listed a positive exemplar showed less bias on the test.

That alone was interesting, but was Obama the one reducing the bias scores? That required navigating around a big problem: "How do you know that somebody's thinking of Barack Obama when they're exposed to black people," said Plant, "without explicitly asking about Barack Obama?"

Their solution was to call in 79 nonblack students for an experiment at Florida State. They, too, were given an IAT. Separately, the researchers exposed them, subliminally, to the words "black" and "white" by flashing them on a computer screen for 55 milliseconds each. (The effectiveness of such subliminal "priming" in advertising remains in question, but psychologists have used it effectively to influence people's responses in lab settings for decades.)

The students then were shown a succession of letter groupings, some real words and some nonsense strings of letters, and asked to pick out the real ones. Some of the real words were crime-related. Other words were government related, such as "politician" or "president."

This exercise would test how quickly the students were able, when primed with the word "black," to pick out the positive, government-style words that were associated with Obama, as compared with the negative words.

The researchers compared the results of the subliminal exercise to the IAT results. In essence: Those who responded more quickly to government-related words when primed with the word "black" also showed less implicit prejudice.

The researchers concluded that Obama's rise seemed to have influenced "the underlying associations at least some people carry around in their minds about black people."

They also warned of drawing "overly strong conclusions," and, in fact, Brian Nosek, the University of Virginia researcher and psychologist who co-manages Project Implicit, said an analysis of 479,000 people tested online in recent months showed little evidence of changes in racial attitudes that can be attributed to Obama. Still, Nosek said he expects that the first black president will change Americans' deepest racial attitudes. "It's just that we don't know yet what those changes will be," he said.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Beer Summit Cures What Ales You!

In a heralded meeting of the "Big Four" not seen since the likes of FDR, Charles De Gaulle, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin brewed it up at the end of World War II, President Obama and other members of Racegate 2009 met for beers on the White House lawn on July 31.

Why were these powerful men meeting (if you don't know by now, you've been living on another planet)? Well, it all started on July 16th, when prominent Harvard professor Henry Louis gates Jr. was arrested at his home after returning from a trip to China. The professor, who is black, wrestled his front door open with the help of a driver because the door was jammed. A passerby called police thinking a possible burglary was occurring and a confrontation ensued between Gates and Sgt. James Crowley. Gates was ultimately arrested for disorderly conduct.

Things got really interesting after the arrest. The story had little publicity until it was picked up by the Associated Press (AP) a few days later. Afterwards the story spread across newspapers, the web, and TV like wildfire. Pundits, pastors, police, and a wide variety of talking heads all took sides on the issue and offered their opinions. So did President Obama, after giving a nationally televised speech about healthcare.

The end result? Gates, Crowley, Obama and Vice President Biden all got together for beers and hugged it out. Case closed right?

Well, I'm curious as to what you think. I'd like you to research some stories on the web and newspaper about this incident. Was Crowley racist? Was Gates' reaction appropriate? Was Obama's? What lessons can we take away from all this? And what about the 911 caller--Lucia Whalen--who was vilified as a racist for describing "two black men" breaking into a house (police recordings later revealed she did not mention race at all, but that did not stop leading pundits from criticizing her at the time)? Was Obama's beer summit an appropriate response?

Please be sure to respond to at least one other writer's post, and be sure to check spelling and grammar before publishing. I look forward to your posts!

To see the original police reports of the Gates arrest, click here

To read Gates' original account of the incident, click here.

Here is the first AP report about the incident

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Always Running Chapter 6

Hi all,

Here's the blog questions for Chapter 6. Please be sure to fully answer the questions and respond directly to a at least one other post (after the first post).

QUESTIONS:
Rodriguez seems to bookend his chapters with themes. What is the theme of Chapter 6? What evidence do you have?

Choose a standout quote or scene that you feel best represents the chapter (provide a p. #). Describe why you chose that quote/scene.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Chapter Five: Sex in the barrio

Hi all,

I apologize for the late posting. Replying to this post will be optional (those posting will receive full homework credit, those who don't will not be penalized--consider this "free" points).

Its probably safe to say that the theme of Chapter Five is sex. There's a lot of it...in many forms. What is Rodriguez trying to say about love and sex in the barrio?

Monday, January 5, 2009

Somebody Scream Chapter 13 Questions

Hi all--feel free to respond to just one, or as many as you wish--please spell check and keep your responses as thoughtful and detailed as possible!

1. We know there are many rappers out there who claim to be Hip-Hop artists. Who really is hip-hop--and why?

2. Many rappers use their popularity and wealth to help poor black people (certain rappers rallying to help victims from Hurricane Katrina come to mind), but do the messages of misogyny, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and finally--getting rich at all costs actually help keep people in poverty--rather than lift them out of poverty?

3. Will Hip-Hop music eventually run its course like Rock N' Roll of the 1950s or electro-pop of the 1980s--or will it continue to grow and become a greater powerhouse in the future of the music industry?

Friday, January 2, 2009

9 Muslim passengers kicked off of flight after remark

Valid??

WASHINGTON – Nine Muslim passengers were kicked off a flight from Washington, D.C., to Florida after other passengers reported hearing a suspicious remark about airplane security.

AirTran Airways spokesman Tad Hutcheson called the incident on the New Year's Day flight from Reagan National Airport to Orlando, Fla., a misunderstanding, but defended the company's response. He said the airline followed federal rules and did nothing wrong.

One of the Muslim passengers, Kashif Irfan, told The Washington Post the confusion began when his brother was talking about the safest place to sit on an airplane.

"My brother and his wife were discussing some aspect of airport security," Irfan said. "The only thing my brother said was, 'Wow, the jets are right next to my window.'"

Irfan told the newspaper he thought he and the others were profiled because of their appearance. The men had beards and the women wore headscarves, traditional Muslim attire.

Irfan, 34, is an anesthesiologist and his brother is a lawyer. Both live in Alexandria, Va., with their families, and were born in Detroit. They were traveling with their wives, Irfan's sister-in-law and Irfan's three sons, ages 7, 4 and 2. A family friend also was traveling with the group to a religious retreat in Florida.

Federal officials ordered the rest of the passengers from the plane and re-screened them before allowing the flight to depart.

The family was upset that AirTran didn't allow the Muslim passengers to book another flight. They eventually made it to their destination on a US Airways flight.

"The FBI agents actually cleared our names," Inayet Sahin, one of the family members kicked off the flight, told CNN. "They went on our behalf and spoke to the airlines and said, 'There is no suspicious activity here. They are clear. Please let them get on a flight so they can go on their vacation,' and they still refused."

Hutcheson said the passengers were given a full refund and are welcome to fly on AirTran now that the investigation is complete.

Hutcheson and a federal Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman said the pilot was right to postpone the flight.

"At the end of the day, people got on and made comments they shouldn't have made on the airplane, and other people heard them," Hutcheson said. "Other people heard them, misconstrued them. It just so happened these people were of Muslim faith and appearance. It escalated, it got out of hand and everyone took precautions."

One of the passengers removed, Abdur Razack Aziz, said he will consider a lawsuit.