A Way to Understand American History

An original version posted on 3/10/2010 as "Time Is Right For New Social Studies Education after LAUSD Incident" @ Examiner.com

Three teachers at Wadsworth Elementary school in South Los Angeles were suspended for allegedly having students carry pictures of troubled former football player OJ Simpson, basketball player Dennis Rodman, and female impersonator RuPaul during a Black history month parade.

The Black history month parade is an annual event. Each class chose figures from the school-approved list, which dates back to 1985. While OJ Simpson was already on the list, Dennis Rodman, and Rupaul were allegedly written in via pencil.

First, second, and fourth grade students carried pictures of these controversial figures during the parade.

Despite having a remarkable college and professional football career, OJ Simpson has had numerous brushes with the law. He is currently serving time after being convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping in 2008.

Dennis Rodman, a former professional basketball player had been a public icon in the 1990s. Since his career officially ended in 2005, he has made appearances on celebrity shows and has had minor skirmishes with the law.

RuPaul has been a big hit within the entertainment industry as an actor, musician, and filmmaker. He has made numerous guest appearances on television, movies, and print media, and currently hosts the reality television show RuPaul's Drag Race. While he himself has had little public controversy, his entertainment personality is associated with lesbian, gay, and transgendered issues, which in the context of marriage has drawn national controversy.

The suspended teachers, who are white, have not been identified.

The controversy came in a Black History month that saw furious public debates over racism at UCSD and many other college campuses. Click here to read "Public debate over racism erupts after student theme party". Also, click here to read "Recapping the aftermath of Compton Cookout and sugggestions for change"

Perspective: Little sympathy for the teachers

The fact that someone, likely the three adult teachers would write in RuPaul and Dennis Rodman shows more than a conscious effort to make some sort of statement.

Making such a statement by using such an impressionable population as a vehicle to this message in an already tense climate where 5,200 LAUSD jobs are on the line, they should have fully anticipated the consequences. Click here to read "California's Public Education in Peril"

Sorry, no sympathy for those teachers here.

"Teaching is the art of changing the brain" says Biologist James Zull.

If these were true educators as opposed to the currently-employed hacks they appear to be, the focus would have been built on getting children to understand why or why not a Black history month is needed.

Based on the boldness of the statement they made, it doesn't appear that they have had that dialogue. They instead taught disrespect for peoples' cultures and traditions.

Their actions make you wonder what they've been telling these children all along and what other political views have bled over into their work.

We need to perceive of American history as a "family album"

I think if those teachers were grounded in a more critical understanding of history, I would be comfortable with them teaching again. If the Compton Cookout invitation writer was grounded in a more critical understanding of history, he wouldn't have so ignorantly tied Black history month with the ghetto culture.

History is not one big cluster of rote indisputable facts, names, and dates.

If I can make a metaphor about history in general, it is this: history is a series of pictures and albums strung together to make a coherent storyline to determine present and future courses of action.

Pictures and albums aren't meant to capture every angle. Sometimes they're blurry, sometimes they're clear. Sometimes the pictures are very representative of a person, sometimes they aren't.

Pictures capture points in history and are endlessly interpreted and judged, regardless of the original intent or focus of the photographer.

We say that in this age of Obama we want to look past race and have it be of minimal consequence. If we want to minimize that difference, the histories we tell students need to integrate people of color.

If we are to minimize the importance of ethnic or racial history months, like Black History month or Asian Pacific History month, we need to look at American history the same way we look at a family album.

Family members who are missing or are otherwise given scant attention in the album feel excluded and less likely to participate in family activities.

The "family album" works best if we equally represent all members of the American family.

Black Americans, many whose ancestors have been in the United States longer than many other Americans only have representatives in the metaphorical album involved in rebuffing slavery and asserting civil rights. It is as if civil rights was the only issue they were interested in.

In the American family album, we already have many landscape photos of people of color, not just black people, as if they are one monolithic entity.

For example, the average 4th grade social studies textbook about California will talk about the great Indian tribes. We only get a landscape picture of them.

We learn that the Chumash were expert canoe builders and had their own system of government. We do not get any sense however that there were any great Chumash individuals who initiated anything of significance. We do not learn of individuals with strong characteristics and traits.

These metaphorical landscape photos contrast sharply to the detailed protraits of white American individuals. In schools, museums, popular culture, we will get plenty of metaphorical and figurative photos of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington --- their mythical characteristics and traits, and most importantly achievements illustrated through popular fables.

With a focus on individual characteristics, we perceive of these individuals having made a difference for everyone. Because they made such a widespread difference, they can rightfully occupy the same place in history as entire groups of people. This feeds the social perception that white Americans do things that make a difference for everyone and are still the driving force behind any kind of decisionmaking.

Yes, school teachers will say a little something about Fredrick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Harriet Tubman, but they get painted as people merely responding to their own social problems. They are not perceived to have these mythic personalities, lacking illustrative stories and fables that could relate to people outside of the black community.

Not learning that individuals of color can take on mythic personalities as well fosters a widespread social perception that people of color act only in accordance with their racial or ethnic groups. As a result, many white Americans assume that people of color have allegiance first and foremost to their racial or ethnic group. From this point, everything they do can be perceived as responding to problems within their own little groups.

Black history month, like other ethnic history and heritage months are an attempt to show that black Americans have interests other than civil rights, and innovations. They should be celbrated because they are likely not going to be any other time.

The idea of Black history month comes from a history of segregation and discrimination which omitted the role of blacks in influencing American culture. Celebrating the month and people in it is celebrating of people overcoming a struggle.

To place less importance on Black history month or other ethnic history months, we need to make a firm commitment towards a "family album history."

The family album history should attempt to reveal a sense of interaction or trading of influence within the different demographics of American history. It isn't a story of extraordinary individuals, presidents, political figures, but a story of networks of individuals, mere human beings wielding their power through their connections with other people as they saw fit.

The Answer to the Weight of Stereotypes on Test Performance: Get Amnesia!

An original version posted on 4/4/2009 as "Stereotype Threat, Obama Effect, and Social Memory" @ AMMMO

It's a question I've been interested in since I read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel when he compared his academic knowledge of biology with the knowledge of "uneducated" healers. It's a question that evolution, Darwinism explained away by saying that colored people were closer to apes than "normal", "regular" white humans.

So...

The question: Why aren't brown, black, yellow people the ones coming up with scientific and technological innovation?

Why do disparities in educational attainment, test scores, income persist between racial and ethnic demographics persist? Why aren't people seeing that this is their opportunity to pull themselves up by the bootstraps?

Most saliently, most importantly, and straight to the point, are people of color inherently retarded or something that they can't do simple stuff like go to college and earn middle-class income jobs?

Those questions act as reinforcements of a documented social psychological phenomena called the Stereotype Threat.

Countering the stereotype threat, in comes research on a phenomena called the Obama Effect, described here by the Situationist, reported first via the NY Times:

[R]esearchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

...In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Exam, and administering it four times to about 120 white and black test-takers during last year’s presidential campaign.

...On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered about 12 of 20 questions, compared with about 8.5 correct answers for blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, and just after his election victory, black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap “statistically nonsignificant,” he said.

Even though it's a very small sample and over a small time period on one test, it's something to be looked at and hopefully taken into account with our mega-informocracy and online social networking.

The claim is that Obama's position as the most powerful man of one of the most powerful nations on the planet and his identity as the product of a multi-racial demographic primed the African-American testtakers for confidence. The idea is that those clips of Obama, a positive achievement by an individual who is categorized within "African-American" seem to work subconsciously on its viewers' confidence and is directly correlated to their improvements in their scores.

With priming figuring prominently in this study, this should bring up the question of what everyday media from the school to the public and popular discourse primes students from historically disadvantaged demographics to think the way they do.

This brings up questions of social memory: what do demographics internalize and take with them as somewhat important when they take the test? What kind of baggage do they carry with them? How does that baggage manifest itself in the unconscious and implicit memories?

Trailing off my posting on identity and amnesia, I'm thinking that if members of the African-American demographic did not carry with them the socially-constructed and reinforced, yet unconscious meme that they were inherently intellectually inferior in the first place, there wouldn't be as many gaps.

It seems like there would need to be a mass social amnesia about that meme.

Masculinity and Being a Young Ethnic Male at Los Angeles Academic Conferences, Public Lectures, and Public Basketball Courts

An original version posted on 5/28/2010 as "Masculinity and Being a Young Ethnic Male in Los Angeles Academic Conferences, Public Lectures, and Public Basketball Courts" @ AMMMO

In my quest to pinpoint my real, definitive academic interests to determine my career path, I've observed around 60-70 lectures, conferences, symposiums in the past 4 years all across LA and across many topics of interests.

Topics of these lectures, conferences, and symposia have ranged from the possibility of opening a street car on Broadway in Los Angeles to 3-day conferences on transcultural psychiatry. There were random interest talks I attended just for the fuck of it, like the one about freeing the mustang, or a conference on the History of the Pacific. I went to a bunch of public policy panels dealing with health care, higher education access, local government. I was very interested in the histories of everything from sciences to Los Angeles. I went to Caltech for random neuroscience-related discussions. All of this was basically just food to feed my thinking, which I'd hope to use later in my career.

Who goes to these things?

As far as conferences and symposia go, it's professors and graduate school students. Middle-aged and older people blended in with young people.

As far as public lectures, it's also mostly middle-aged - older white people and perhaps a contingent of younger people, depending on the topic or school project.

When you take race and ethnicity into consideration, however, there aren't too many people who fit my demographic in these spaces: the young ethnic male, AKA the people who are more likely to be in prison than in school and get accused all the time of being gang members, particularly the blacks and Latinos. Being a Chino, I'm not harassed to the extent that they usually are, but on a handful of occasions, police have wanted to know what I, a 20-something year old college grad (completely unbeknownst to them), was doing in the middle of the day out of [high] school and instead on sidewalks or Metro stations. Sadly, neither academics nor long-term employers have not matched the level of police curiosity in me when out and about.

My demographic's absence was most glaringly apparent at a very small conference at USC on the history of the Pacific and when I was attempting to sit-in on an Albert Einstein symposia at Caltech.

I stuck out like a sore thumb --- a young, hip-hop habitus-ed (i.e. wearing baggy clothes), teenage-looking, no-monied kid walking amongst accomplished, middle-aged or hipper, on-the-ball younger white people with an occasional dropping of smarter, smugger ethnic females. It's not like I'm trying to antagonize people by wearing baggy clothes, it's just kind of how my clothes are and have been.

In settings like this with the exception of ethnic studies' events, it was a constant mental battle of questioning whether I belonged. Without that feeling of "belonging" or "ownership/expertise in a field", I felt a social anxiety about talking about anything and so I just kinda sat through a lot of these events indulging in my note-taking. I only asked questions if I was really really really compelled to, and even then I was quite scared doing it.

Questions of "belonging" or "ownership/expertise" are not as glaring however when I take off the academic thinking cap and go play basketball in Eagle Rock on Fridays or Sundays. Playing basketball at a public park, I'm exchanging elbows with the very young ethnic males absent from these aforementioned lectures, conferences, symposia.

This is pretty much the only demographic at many public parks and basketball courts around LA. That's our domain.

I remember an idea from The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down about how gender and power dynamics for Hmong immigrant families change once they migrated to the US. Generally, in the old country, the eldest man in the family would be the highest status individual while the youngest female would be at the bottom.

However, in the US, the dynamic of eldest being the most respected would be flipped on its head. The youngest female Hmong would likely be the highest status individual. Meanwhile, poor grandpa would be lowest because he's not likely to speak English and can't really participate in the workforce.

What this example shows seems reflective of a larger trend I've noticed: ethnic males are having a hard time breaking into positions of upward mobility.

At non-ethnic studies academic and public lecture functions, I am and have always been looking for other males of color to be like "aye, what's happening cuz" with. Latinos are somewhat hard to tell, but the ones that I kick it with don't seem to match the social habits of the ones I might see at the conferences. I've only seen like 2 black dudes at all the academicky non-ethnic-studies-related conferences. I was damn near shocked and mentally celebrating to see a dreadlocked black guy attend the transcultural psychiatry conference, but understood his plight when he interacted with almost no one. At that same conference, I also saw my very first Filipino who wasn't me, but actually ended up not being affilated with the conference and all and was some kind of CSUN Business douchebag.

In contrast to this absence, ethnic women are a pretty fast emerging group of academics. Maybe it's because they tend to be more flexible in the US as far as broadening their careers to different things. Maybe males have a more rigid way of doing things which is harder to jibe with the cultural norms in America.

Sometimes on the court I'm thinking, what we as ethnic males are all doing, besides playing basketball. In my basketball group, I know one engineer, one freshly-minted nurse, a tutor, a few bank employees, and the self-employed alpha player taking accounting classes. Not the worst, but still not in positions of power (i.e. policy-making --- politics and knowledge-making --- academia). It feels like we have a glass ceiling.

Why is this all important?

Well, I think that human beings in general tend to make life decisions based on their social groups and networks of influence. Whatever is "normal" around you becomes almost a glass ceiling, difficult to break out of for groups of people and possibilities limited. With limited possibilities means less representation in important legislation, and decisions about what gets counted as knowledge.

I wonder what keeps us from getting into these positions of upward mobility. Are we either one of or either too practical, too egotistical, too impatient? If we are, what makes our groups like that, especially in academia?

Conversation on Race and Barack Obama

An original version posted on 3/25/2008 as "Conversation on Race and Barack Obama"@ throwascrewinit.blogspot.com






Barack Obama's speech on race was one of the big highlights of his remarkably successful 2008 Presidential campaign.

As you might remember, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, someone Obama had clear ties with, made some remarks that didn't sit well with a lot of the big talking heads of America.

He cited various instances of US government deceit. He said that the government(s) lied about a gross number of things from Pearl Harbor to the treatment of Nelson Mandela.

He also cited various instances of the US government mistreating people of color. He cited the administration of the Tuskegee experiment, the internment of Japanese Americans, the taking of Indian lands, and the overall mistreatment of African-Americans throughout American history.

Essentially, the public and media had largely perceived him to be saying that America's bad kharma was simply coming back to haunt them. What Wright said in the sermons reflected back negatively on Obama. How could the American people a man whose spiritual leader hated America?

Hot on the campaign trail, Barack was pestered for a response to Wright's comments.

At first, he tried to distance himself. Apparently, he didn't hear of Wright's comments.

However, as the questioning heat up and it was no longer acceptable to say that he wasn't aware, he finally confronted Reverend Wright's comments in his dramatic speech "A More Perfect Union."

He condemned Wright's comments, but didn't condemn Reverend Wright the person. He explained before a national audience where Reverend Wright was coming from and bridged that with an anecdote about his white grandmother's own racial beliefs.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

The speech was as great synthesis and explantion of the touchy issue racial relations as you could expect from a politician.

Most of the media outlets covering the speech made me indifferent.

Then, there was one that dropped a ton of big red bricks of dumbass on me.

The tired LA Times columnist Jonah Goldberg with enough pomposity to fill a hot-air balloon.

Then there was one that got the neurons firing, the white matter connecting, the soul uplifting.
A piece by a quick-rising, quick-rhyming Blue Scholar.

Goldberg said that we already talk about race so much. He listed the things we already have dedicated to race: We have a Black history month, the movie "Crash", entire majors devoted to race, books about race, corporate diversity consultants. What more could we possibly need?

Goldberg represents talks as if that there aren't anymore race problems. Now that good ole Martin Luther King Jr. bravely fought against segregation, thus effectively ending racism as far as he was concerned, people of color are now just "creating or re-hashing problems."

In his world, race issues in regards are merely deliberate schemes to hustle billions of dollars from the good old American system. If it's a problem, people of color or at least the ones "making race an issue" by continually producing these books, producing these graduates of race and ethnic studies, and generally making a living off of emphasizing race.

In reality, it's actually been a very unhealthy passive-aggressive relationship between white folk and people of color.White people shit-talk folks of color. Folks of color shit-talk white people. Unless they agree to do it and/or happen to understand each others' humor, they just never actually do it in front of each other.

So where do the two sides meet?

Prometheus Brown, the eminent Blue Scholar, makes the simple but poignant point: racism is everyone's problem.

However, it's hard to see how it actually is everyone's problem.

The subject of race is only mentioned in media lock-in-step when it involves people of color, which gives the image that race is a one-street in which only people of color participate. Otherwise, for most white Americans, it's an issue that seemingly doesn't exist.

"Some people point to Obama’s successes as a sure sign that America has taken many steps forward in resolving its racial contradictions. But isn’t the fact that Obama gets singled out for his views on race a big red flag? Where do Clinton and McCain stand on this issue, and why haven’t they weighed in? Why is nobody asking them what they think about racism?"

The point I glean from all this is just that white folks and folks of color need to actually be engaged in conversation together about race, and not so polarized in their own circles discussing things. White folks reach out. Folks of color reach out.

It's an easy common sense solution, but not so in reality.

The question has been here way before Obama and will probably still be there after him, but the question is will there ever be any political or social will to ensure anything happens towards that dialogue?

Dynamics of the Perception of People of Color Sticking Together

An original version posted on 8/19/2003 as "Friendster: The Asian Thing to Do! :karate chop:" @throwascrewinit.blogspot.com

People of the same race, whether white, Asian, black, Latino generally stick together.

This tending of people within their racial groups whether white people or people of color towards each other is about developing a trust. People generally trust whoever looks like them, grows up around them. That trust and rapport is important in such a society as the urban United States because it helps connect strangers in an otherwise polarized, individualized, impersonalized society.

For example, when buying a car, my dad will automatically go towards the car salesman who happens to be Filipino. Not that he’s racist, but he can automatically and instantly build a connection with the salesman who happens to be Filipino by just speaking the native Tagalog.

The best way to eliminate dependency on race?

Connect with strangers. But that takes time. These stereotypes are something only gradual assimilation into society via more media exposure, and people of color acquiring powerful positions in society and bringing more visibility and confidence for youth of color to align themselves with.

Hopefully continued media exposure, and thus varied opinion and positions of authority can help dissipate the stereotypes that are associated with people of color.