Sexism in Racist Tones

December 7, 2012 By 17 Comments

Last spring UCLA was the site of a YouTube rant by a former student who was white non-Hispanic, about “Asians in the library” including her version of “Asian speak”- sociologists call this and other derogatory verbage against a group ethnophaulisms. Much of the work on the sociology of race focuses on the influence of the dominant group over subordinate groups; in the case of the US it usually refers to the influence of white non-Hispanics over non-whites. The Alexandra Wallace case is one of these. This is pretty straightforward racism and its significance is due in part to the public platform of YouTube used to convey her thoughts and feelings.

But I was reminded of the Wallace incident because it was implicitly linked to a more recent incident that seemed somewhat ambiguous. On Tuesday November 27th, the Vietnamese Student Union of UCLA had a banner in the student union building where (I think) each student organization has a space to promote their group. It goes unmanned for many hours a day. So on Tuesday morning some members of VSU found a paper with the words “asian women R Honkie white-boy worshipping Whores” tacked onto their banner.  The following day, a similar phrase was found scrawled in one of the women’s bathrooms in Powell Library. The question everyone is asking: who would do this?

Because Wallace was mentioned in the reporting, we’re led to believe that these are similar in nature. Maybe. Perhaps a white student may have done this but in this discussion by the online news site “The Young Turks” they suggest that it may be more complicated than our race-sensitive intuitions might suggest.

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Notably as they point out, the remark is not merely about race but about gender – it’s an attack on Asian American women. It specifically accuses them of “white-boy worship.” We have to agree with the news discussion and ask, why would someone white promote this? Instead we might consider turning attention to the complex matters of interracial dating, and the perceived differences in dating patterns among white and Asian college students. From this perspective, this incident is the ranting of a unique individual, probably Asian American, who feels frustrated about rejection (real or perceived) and externalizes his insecurity by making a public show of his emotions.

So this story does not actually seem similar to the Wallace story at all. The news reports also made mention of another incident at UCLA of anti-Latina sentiment earlier in February 2012. In that one, sexist language was used again with a racial tone. It was not enough to make an ethnophaulism against Latinos, it was specifically aimed at women, and most likely women’s agency in crossing racial lines (evidenced by the phrase “Meximelt”). At this level, perhaps the real issue is sexism. Certain ethnic minority males feel threatened by their female peers in the decisions they make regarding who they will and won’t date. Perhaps that is where the problem rests.

But we should ask further still: in a post-racial America, why would an ethnic minority male feel threatened by dating preferences that cross racial and ethnic lines? Perceived threat of this sort presumes a lack or loss of power by the threatened, and the available power by those they feel threatened by. In these two instances of public sexist-racist remarks, the perceived power of minority women to date outside of their ethnic community is the primary target. But implied in the messages too is a perceived threat of white males who date interracially. Why would white males be perceived as having more power than ethnic minority males? In a society that privileges white masculinity, some non-white males will be particularly sensitive to the difference (i.e. unfair treatment) they experience or perceive in their day-to-day lives. This combination of sexism and racism reflects what sociologists describe as intersections of power which cannot be reduced to one social category or the other. Both racism and sexism structure the kinds of language one uses to express hostility such as the cases we see here.

The upshot is that if both the anti-Asian and anti-Latina sexist remarks are reflective of irresponsible young non-white men, it works to create a climate of fear and insecurity for all. Perhaps that was the aim of those responsible for the rants, but in the end this doesn’t improve their chances at dating someone from their own culture-group. The effect of their behavior chills relations between men and women within these ethnic communities, and promotes distrust between ethnic minorities and whites. If this is the case, those responsible are basically saying “I want everyone else to suffer for the anger I feel from rejection.” In sum, while race is certainly a factor in these incidents involving defacing private, public or communal property, it cannot be decoupled from the sexism that work together in a matrix of inequality that privileges white masculinity.

Filed Under: Jerry Park Tagged With: , , , 17 Comments

Racial Exclusion and Selective Inclusion: One Student’s Observations

November 2, 2012 By 4 Comments

Since I teach an undergraduate course on racial, gender and class inequality I am always on the lookout for new examples that are pertinent to students’ experiences. The biggest story in terms of race in higher education is the possible shift in affirmative action during college admissions based on a case by a white female student who did not gain entrance at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m still awaiting more news on how this will end so I will save this discussion for another time. It’s these larger systemic solutions of addressing systemic racial and gender inequality in the past that is more difficult for students to understand than the everyday racism that has a certain immediate feel. At the same campus where these deliberations are taking place, reports have emerged of minority students being “bleach-bombed”- this refers to the experience of being hit with a balloon filled with bleach. Incidences like these receive reasonable attention and they reflect new ways in which racial antipathy is projected today.

Baylor of course is no exception to this, and I unfortunately don’t pay enough attention to the student newspaper to realize how often issues of racism occur here. Most of it doesn’t make the news understandably. When you’ve been called ethnic slurs or experienced subtle (and not so subtle) discrimination from a prof or classmate, the immediate solution is to brush it off, soldier on, and don’t make a big deal of it. So for many minority students this is a learned response that traces back to earlier schooling and probably a talk or two with concerned adults who have struggled with these same issues themselves. What amazes me more is when I hear students like sophomore Asiah Phillips utter a phrase like, “I have had no issues with race until I came to Baylor.”

To give a little context, Baylor first-year students are required to attend chapel services twice a week, and in one of these sessions special speakers come in to share their reflections on a topic or issue that the organizers deem important. Given the requirement for first-years to attend this function, any talk here commands an audience of several thousand new students. So Ms. Phillips had an enormous opportunity to share her thoughts on a topic that is of interest to me, but was not of interest to her, until she came to Baylor.

If you’re in a hurry, move to the 20 minute marker where her talk begins.

Her first observations were about awareness of institutional exclusion and what we might call token institutional inclusion. (Caveat: Ms. Phillips doesn’t use these terms in her talk, I’m taking her narration to exemplify these concepts.) For Asiah Phillips and other Christian students who were raised in non-white-evangelical-influenced church contexts, chapel worship experiences are jarring. “Where’s my type of praise?” she asks. As of her third semester she recalls no African American faculty; moreover all 15 faculty she has had were white.

Her elation in participating in Homecoming festivities was tempered by the realization that she could not find another person who resembled her racially based on a casual glance of her social surroundings. Notably (and this is partially what I mean by token inclusion), the only black faces she saw at Homecoming were the victorious athletes parading through the main procession. “Where were the rest of us?” she asks. “What about people like me?” For many minority undergrads and their parents Ms. Phillips experiences and interior reflections resonate deeply:

“So after various parents asked my mom if her son played football here or if her daughter ran track, I got tired. Is the only way people can fathom me going to school is if I’m an athlete? Why can’t I be here on academic scholarship like you? It seemed like people here didn’t treat me just like I was any other person.”

The other example she provides of token racial inclusion is of the notable presence of non-student minorities working in campus service capacities. She says: “It’s hard being in an institution where it seems that the only people that look like you push brooms and make cafeteria food.”

And if that were not enough, we might also add the personal experiences she has with peers outside the classroom:

“I can still remember nights when I went out with my friends, and I would be dressed up to go to a party, and I would be stopped at the door because there were “no blacks allowed.” In 2012 that is crazy to me, that I am still judged and taken aback because of the color of my skin. Shortly after, she notes too that she’s been the recipient of epithets including the n-word, and even the word “slave.”

In sum, Asiah Phillips sees and hears no examples of her Christian religious heritage, she sees minorities in campus-wide events largely on display alongside other noted white students, she is presumed by others to be a student-athlete (rather than a conventional academic student); her main examples of same-race non-student adults on campus is that of the blue-collar workers in service, and none in the professorate. I might add also, none in the administration. This is a recipe for alienation, and it has consequences for the culture of a university, the kinds of mindsets that will represent that culture when they graduate. I would predict that minority students who experience the kind of alienation that Ms. Phillips shared in her talk will likely:

-be aware of racial power imbalances in their day-to-day encounters in multi-racial settings,

-lack confidence that white-dominated institutions and white actors within them will identify with her,

-believe that cultural practices and traditions begun by white Christians will go largely unchanged

-believe that the pathway to middle class standing is not obtained by getting a PhD and teaching at a university.

Given that Ms. Phillips grew up and attended schools that were more diverse and inclusive students, and given that (along with most other graduates) will likely work in a diverse environment, I would also predict that she will compartmentalize her experience at Baylor as a “white Christian” school. These predictions focus mainly on how I think a young person might react in the absence of other factors that Ms. Phillips also noted. Asiah Phillips views herself as a Christian, a person of a particular faith tradition that conveys a belief in universal love of others. It is this belief that fuels her pursuit of racial affirmation and greater inclusivity. Notably she sees this issue of love and racial inclusion as a matter of spiritual calling.

Second, Ms. Phillips has counterexamples which she must balance with the other realities that she’s faced. She says that

“I’ve been lucky enough to have white friends who don‘t treat me any different than anybody else because they love me and they don’t see a difference just like I don’t see a difference.”

While she has witnessed numerous examples of exclusion, selective inclusion, and downright discrimination, she has also experienced friendship with white peers. And while there’s no direct mention of this, the very fact that the chaplain’s office, also largely staffed by whites, included this talk in their program suggests that not all white institutional actors will sweep such stories off to the side.

One final observation. I think that Asiah Phillips’s talk reflects a strategy that many will find uncomfortable, even though her fundamental belief is shared by all. Several times she notes that race doesn’t matter to her, and it didn’t until she came to Baylor. If we ask most Americans today whether racial inequities are justifiable, most would also say no. But here’s the difference. For many Americans, the solution to the thorny matter of racial inequities is to not talk about it. For others, like Asiah Phillips, the solution to reducing racial inequities is to talk about it, and indeed she has bravely, and lovingly done so.

Filed Under: Jerry Park Tagged With: , 4 Comments

The Promise and Peril of Christian Solidarity: Lynching in the Christian South

September 8, 2012 By 6 Comments

In between teaching and professional conferences, I have recently embarked on a few trips to interview African American Christians in a large city for an ongoing study of how religion matters (or doesn’t) for everyday workers and entrepreneurs. In the process of meeting a wide array of churchgoers, I listened at length to the personal histories that informed their views on work and faith.

What struck me in some cases was the agrarian memories that quite a few folks recalled. They recounted stories of growing up on a farm in the rural South or visiting relatives regularly in those environments. Their parents were some of the first generation to enter into the big city. When I think back to the stories in my family, they resemble these same trajectories except that they took place in South Korea rather than the US. I think my father’s family still lived in one of the rural areas but he and most of his siblings had moved into Seoul or another large city. In the case of my father, he left the country entirely. He met my mother (who had left Korea as a single woman) in New York City and they moved together to Jersey City, NJ. These similarities suggest to me that many Americans and immigrants can likely relate to one another in the patterns observed in their family histories.

But even having similar rural origins doesn’t do justice to some of the profound differences that blacks faced in the South during the late 19th to earlier 20th centuries compared to whites and Asian immigrants. Southern rural blacks were not on equal footing with rural whites on access to a number of important institutional supports: adequate healthcare, reasonable housing, proper educational facilities and instruction. Many may have worked as hard (if not harder) than their white peers but the returns on that work were not always the same nor was their much legal recourse in the event of an injustice. The book, Slavery by Another Name by Douglas Blackmon, and the subsequent documentary, chronicles the kind of world that many of the grandparents of the men and women I interviewed lived through. It was the world of the Jim Crow South with formal and informal rules that circumscribed social life for African Americans after emancipation. Rural southern blacks (particularly men) would be arrested on trumped up charges in what is described as a “convict lease system” which effectively re-enslaved them for the benefit of white American society.

Under such conditions, it is not surprising that if there was an institution in which southern blacks had leadership, a sense of control, and community with fellow blacks, such an institution would hold a great deal of support and encouragement for a besieged people. Such is the institution of the black church. Indeed in the stories I heard, it was clear that the church had a significant role in the lives of the grandparents of the people I interviewed. The tie of the local black church in the midst of informal slavery, unequal treatment, and barriers to accessing basic institutional supports was critical for many. To borrow co-blogger Margarita Mooney’s book title, faith helped make them live.

It’s a rare thing to see research on religion in the most prestigious journals of sociology, much less one that focuses on religion and race. A sociological study that covers religion and race using Census data from over 50 years back is perhaps one of the rarest finds around. Such was Amy Kate Bailey and Karen A. Snedker’s examination of lynching patterns and religion in the South during the beginning of the 20th century and since it appeared in the venerable American Journal of Sociology, it also appeared in my “Top 11 of ’11” post.

Lynching is one of those practices that many of us as Americans haven’t reckoned with, and its impact in the memories of many African Americans persists to this day. Perhaps you didn’t know this, but one of Billie Holiday’s most famous songs (written by Abel Meerpool) “Strange Fruit” details this practice; listen to it and check out the lyrics.

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According to Bailey and Snedker, at least 2,500 blacks were lynched in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, roughly one per week for 50 years. One per week. Imagine being a part of a visible minority community and hearing of someone killed by a mob made up of the dominant group nearly every single week. It’s important to remember that lynching was and is a means of social control. It was a demonstration of power. By killing one person in a bloody spectacle, the group in power conveys a message to others (particularly to blacks) that they are in control, and they will exercise that control through random yet coordinated acts of violence. Some describe this as domestic terrorism. Strikingly a fair number of lynchings were actually photographed and reproduced on postcards to be traded with other lynch fans around the country. One of these is pictured here from Waco, TX, the main city of my institution.

Lynch advocates were quite often religious, specifically Christian. Their brand of faith placed whites at the top of a racial hierarchy with blacks at the bottom. Chillingly, the practice of lynching, according to Bailey and Snedker, was a “fully ritualized, solidarity-enhancing event” (p.850). In other words, killing a human being through lynching helped bond the group together, often to reinforce their beliefs in racial superiority, justified through religious language. This happens in part because of the tacit cooperation of churches that legitimize such acts of violence in their practices of creating community.

The authors proposed 3 hypotheses concerning the role of religion and lynching. They predicted that when there is religious diversity (or pluralism), lynching will increase since the diversity of religions poses a threat to some communities that have strong boundaries. Second they proposed that the greater presence of African American churches will also be linked to a higher incidence of lynching. Finally, in counties with a large mixed-race church population will exhibit lower lynching rates.

Using data from the only 3 years in which the US Census recorded religion (1906, 1916, 1926), along with over 2800 documented lynching cases in that same time frame, they found support for these three hypotheses. Greater religious diversity (i.e. Christian denominational diversity) and the greater presence of African American denominations in a given southern county was linked to greater incidence of lynching in every decade in the former, and 2 out of 4 decades in the latter. The larger presence of mixed-race denominations lowered lynching in all four decades (see p.862-863). Subsequent analyses suggest that the strongest of these three characteristics is religious diversity. It’s curious to think about what this might have looked like in real life. Imagine a county that was predominantly white Baptist. White Methodists, Anglicans, and Catholics along with Missionary Baptists start new churches in that same county. As this diversity picks up, so do the lynchings. As a means of setting themselves apart, and to symbolize their power in the area to these newcomers, the lynchers (who are mostly white Baptist in this example) wind up killing blacks in this bloody ritual. Interestingly, where interracial church groups appear, lynching levels drop.

These findings leave a lot for reflection on the impact of church participation. For some the church was a space for some in the dominant group to justify the brutal and unequal treatment of racial minorities. For others, the church was the strongest institution that advocated for those racial minorities. And in a few rare instances, the church was a community of believers of both the dominant and minority groups.

The experience of lynching is not only the subject of historical sociology. Lynching has recently been argued as having theological significance. Theologian James Cone recently published a work that surveys the significance of lynching in African American culture and its overlay with the significance of the Christian symbol of the cross. In both instances a man treated unjustly is hung from a tree or the main product of trees. What powerful imagery in comparing these practices. In doing so Cone reappropriates the significance of lynching as a symbol not only of white supremacist terrorism but also as a reflection of a Christian South that subconsciously replicates the Passion by re-enacting the ritual of human sacrifice to atone for the sins of the people. It suggests empowerment of marginalized African American Christians, particularly those whose ultimate end mirrored that of Jesus. Putting these parts together, the stories of faith, family life in rural America, and racism have helped me better understand the role of the black church to many African American Christians.

Filed Under: Jerry Park Tagged With: , , 6 Comments