Tag Archives: Immigration

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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: Melting Pots and Purity

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This week, we’re looking at the idea—the fallacy—of purity: racial purity, national purity, and cultural purity.

Let’s start with South Korea, which is experiencing a clash between its historical ideas of ethnic homogeneity and its increasing immigrant population. A New York Times article draws attention to both the prevalence of racism in South Korea and the new efforts that are being made to stem it. It also highlights how closely ideas of racial purity are tied to sexism.

England and the US have their own issues of purity, some of which Andrew Sullivan explores in Scratch white America and beneath it is black. As a born Englishman who moved to the United States decades ago, Sullivan shares how, to an outsider, the black influences on American culture are apparent in everything from music to books.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Changes in the Landscape

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It’s easy to think of racial groups as cultural monoliths: black culture is like this, Asian culture is like that. An article on culture clashes between recent immigrants from Africa and African Americans, many of them descendants of slaves whose families have been in the U.S. for centuries, reminds us of the complexity. It also opens a window into perceptions of blackness and Africanness, as when a recent African immigrant says of African Americans, “Those people, they don’t respect African people,” or when a black American says of a black African, “They think they’re better than black people.”

Continuing with the idea of blackness in America, Ta-Nahesi Coates brings us a beautifully written essay on blackness, obesity, segregation, and shame. I keep coming back to this line: “Segregation was a cocoon brimming with all the lovely variety of black life.”

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity

Every week, we’re going to be bringing you a roundup of interesting articles, commentary, and projects dealing with diversity—race, gender, immigration issues, discrimination, and people bridging cultural barriers.

Drumroll, please!

From the New York Times, a California hospital is working with Hmong shamans to improve care—body and soul—of the town’s Hmong immigrant population.

From Genreville, Josh Jasper discusses the problem of lazy sexism and racism, when women and minorities are excluded not due to conscious bias, but due to a lack of awareness and thought. “Oh, it just happens that all the good stories we found were written by men/white people/middle-class people.” That sort of thing. Also see a follow-up post and this bingo card of excuses for racism. It’s talking specifically about fantasy, but the same excuses get used in many other genres.

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