Tag Archives: Race issues

Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Beautiful Women of Color and White Privilege

It’s starting to feel like summer, and that means summer movies! We start this week’s diversity linkup with a post from Feministing pointing out the whitewashing of Jennifer Lopez in The Back-Up Plan.

Speaking of beautiful women of color, the newly-crowned Miss USA is a Lebanese American immigrant, Rima Fakih! It’s not clear if she’s the first Arab American or the first immigrant to win, but it is a movement toward a society in which all little girls can dream of being crowned for their beauty. Of course, we’re not there yet.

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Mixed Messages

Recently, I’ve read a couple books set in fantasy worlds that reverse the skin-tone power dynamic of our world: where dark-haired and dark-skinned people oppress and discriminate against paler, blonder folk. Both are fine books—The Shifter by Janice Hardy and Stealing Death by Janet Lee Carey—and neither oversimplify race relations or relies on our constructs of black and white in describing their characters and ethnic groups, but it does make me wonder about the message we’re sending to minority kids through books like these.

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Video Thursday: We speak Racist

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9ohsvJHkbY&w=475]

We’ll ignore the fact that they wouldn’t save money because they would lose their Federal transportation funding if they only offered the test in English. We won’t ignore that it’s racist; it’s barely-coded anti-immigrant rhetoric, and in the current political climate, anti-immigrant rhetoric is barely-coded anti-Latino rhetoric. And “If you want to live here, learn [English]” adds another layer: the implication that immigrants and minorities are lazy. Learning a new language and adjusting to a new culture are not easy things, and needing a driver’s license before needing English fluency is practicality, not laziness.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: History, Alternate Reality, and the Future

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Last Friday haiku
Thirty days of poetry
Ending with a verse.

Let’s start the week’s links with some history! It turns out that there have been biracial people for a long time, and we’re not just talking homo sapiens of European descent with those of African descent: a recent genetic study found evidence of interbreeding between early humans and Neanderthals. Pretty cool!

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Words thrown and words written

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Starting off with some despiriting news: in the wake of the Health Care Reform debate, several black congressmen, including John Lewis, have been called racial slurs and one was even spat on by protesters.

At Love Isn’t Enough, there’s a great piece on DNA and identity. It adds another layer to the discussions on being biracial and multiracial we’ve been having, because it looks at how little we know about our own personal genetic and racial makeup, but how much we know about our own personal cultural makeup.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Racial Identity, Reading, and Writing

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Spring is has reached New York! Here’s your weekly dose of links to ponder as you sit and bask in the sun.

Following up on last week’s links dealing with interracial writing in the speculative fiction community is Nisi Shawl, who hits home with a description of a panel on writing and racial identity at a recent convention: “Our fourth panelist had been raised as an American Indian and spent her life knowing absolutely that this was who and what she was. Then she discovered through genetic testing that her biological heritage is a mix European and Sub-Saharan African. No American Indian.” Fascinating stuff!

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Boys, Girls, and Government

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Yesterday we posted a video on the frustrations of biracial people being put into little boxes. Taking a very different view is Michele Elam, with a thought-provoking article about the pitfalls of “mark one or more races” on the census.

On her blog, author Shannon Hale takes a look at the lack of girls in children’s movies, the limited roles they play, and an appeal to parents: take your sons to movies with girl heroes. The same goes for books and the same goes for other types of diversity: give the children you know books with heroes who don’t look like them.

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