On moving the race conversation forward
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I make no secret about being a fan of Jay Smooth's. I regularly use his video commentaries about race and other social justice issues in the classroom.
"Jay Smooth" is the deejay moniker of John Randolph, who founded and hosts New York City's longest running hip-hop radio program "Underground Railroad" on Pacifica Radio station WBAI-FM. He's a blogger at hiphopmusic.com, and Ill Doctrine, and probably best known for his widely distributed video commentary "How To Tell Someone They Sound Racist"
I'm always looking for new tools to use to encourage thoughtful discussion about race, racism and racial relations, and browsing Jay Smooth alerted me to the report issued this year by Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation, entitled "Moving the Race Conversation Forward" which is something I recommend you read and pass on to others if you haven't read it already.
The report:
analyzed nearly 1,200 newspaper articles and transcripts from cable TV outlets from 2013, and found that two thirds of race-focused coverage either emphasized alleged individual racism or prioritized voices that dismissed the persistence of racism as a significant force in our country today.
The report refers to this kind of coverage as “systemically absent” content, in contrast to “systemically aware” content that at least highlights policies and practices such as racial profiling or voter suppression that lead to racial disparities. As the latter term is defined, the media didn’t have to explicitly use terms like “institutional racism,” “structural racism” or “systemic racism” to be classified as “systemically aware,” but even with this low bar, the performance was poor.
You can download the two sections of the report separately.
Part One includes:
Content analysis of mainstream media: Two-thirds of race-focused media coverage fails to consider how systemic racism factors into the story, instead typically focusing upon racial slurs and other types of personal prejudice and individual-level racism.
Seven harmful racial discourse practices, which reinforce the common misconception that racism is simply a problem of rare, isolated, individual attitudes and actions: Individualizing Racism, Falsely Equating Incomparable Acts, Diverting From Race, Portraying Government as Overreaching, Prioritizing (Policy) Intent over Impact, Condemning Through Coded Language, and Silencing History.
Mainstream media coverage of race and racial issues shapes much of how our citizenry thinks about, reacts to and discusses these issues, from the NY Times, FOX, CNN and MSNBC, to local papers. As bloggers and blog readers we often react to this coverage, as well as reporting on the same stories. The report gives us insights into how we can do better too.
The second half of the report looks at actions.
Part Two features case studies and profiles of recent interventions and initiatives advanced by the racial justice field to challenge mainstream discussions of race and racism, and the negative policy impacts that dominant frames and narratives have on people of color. They include: Drop the I-Word, Migration is Beautiful, ALEC on the Run, Fruitvale Station, and Ending the Schoolhouse-to-Jailhouse Track.
Jay Smooth introduces the report:
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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All Americans without healthcare nears six-year low. Black Enterprise: Uninsured Rate Drops Among Blacks, Low-Income Workers Under Obamacare.
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African Americans were the hardest hit during the economic downturn experiencing the greatest job losses, and as result, the lost of their health insurance. The number of unemployed and uninsured African Americans swelled between 2008 and 2013.
Now it seems that the President’s healthcare reform under the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) has reversed some of the damage.
The number of Americans without health insurance dipped to its lowest in nearly six years, according to a new Gallup poll. Uninsured rates declined the most among blacks and lower-income Americans. The uninsured rate for lower-income Americans dropped 3.2 points to 27.5%, while the uninsured rate for blacks fell 3.3 points to 17.6%. Overall, about 15.6% of American adults lacked health insurance in the first quarter of 2014, down from a high of 18% last summer.
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Carol H. Williams Advertising looks to give Oaktown a new image. Black Enterprise: Oakland Taps Black Ad Agency to Rebrand City.
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Over the years, Oakland has gained a bad reputation as being a city that’s rife with crime, a metropolis that pales in comparison to its more glamorous neighbor, San Francisco. But in a city that’s some 28% African American, it will be a black-owned firm that will lead the charge in remaking Oaktown’s image.
On April 2nd, a campaign intended to show a new direction for Visit Oakland, the city’s tourism marketing organization, was launched with Carol H. Williams Advertising Inc. (No. 7 on the BE Advertising Agencies list with $15 million in revenues) at the helm.
The challenge is contending with media reports that highlight the historically blue collar city’s seedy side.
“There’s a lack of awareness of what’s available in Oakland and Visit Oakland would like to rebrand Oakland into what it is – an attractive travel and business destination and thereby spur economic activity and sources of revenue like hotels and retail and all those good things,” says Carol H. Williams, CEO and Chief Creative Officer of the agency.
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A retired Major League Baseball player explains how he's trying to turn an upsetting encounter with the police into an opportunity for dialogue. The Atlantic: I Was Racially Profiled in My Own Driveway.
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It was an otherwise ordinary snow day in Hartford, Connecticut, and I was laughing as I headed outside to shovel my driveway. I’d spent the morning scrambling around, trying to stay ahead of my three children’s rising housebound energy, and once my shovel hit the snow, I thought about how my wife had been urging me to buy a snowblower. I hadn’t felt an urgent need. Whenever it got ridiculously blizzard-like, I hired a snow removal service. And on many occasions, I came outside to find that our next door neighbor had already cleared my driveway for me.
Never mind that our neighbor was an empty-nester in his late 60s with a replaced hip, and I was a former professional ballplayer in his early 40s. I kept telling myself I had to permanently flip the script and clear his driveway. But not today. I had to focus on making sure we could get our car out for school the next morning. My wife was at a Black History Month event with our older two kids. The snow had finally stopped coming down and this was my mid-afternoon window of opportunity.
Just as I was good-naturedly turning all this over in my mind, my smile disappeared.
A police officer from West Hartford had pulled up across the street, exited his vehicle, and begun walking in my direction. I noted the strangeness of his being in Hartford—an entirely separate town with its own police force—so I thought he needed help. He approached me with purpose, and then, without any introduction or explanation he asked, “So, you trying to make a few extra bucks, shoveling people’s driveways around here?”
All of my homeowner confidence suddenly seemed like an illusion.
It would have been all too easy to play the “Do you know who I am?” game. My late father was an immigrant from Trinidad who enrolled at Howard University at age 31 and went on to become a psychiatrist. My mother was an important education reformer from the South. I graduated from an Ivy League school with an engineering degree, only to get selected in the first round of the Major League Baseball draft. I went on to play professionally for nearly 15 years, retiring into business then going on to write a book and a column for The New York Times. Today, I work at ESPN in another American dream job that lets me file my taxes under the description “baseball analyst.”
But I didn't mention any of this to the officer. I tried to take his question at face value, explaining that the Old Tudor house behind me was my own. The more I talked, the more senseless it seemed that I was even answering the question. But I knew I wouldn’t be smiling anymore that day.
The author as a Chicago Cub in 2003, following through on a leadoff home run. (Reuters)
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Dear Pew, Saying “Yes, Obama is mixed race” is not the same as saying “No, he’s not black.” Racial Identity 101: You can be both. The Root: Americans Say Obama’s Not Black? How Pew Got This Wrong.
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Twenty-seven percent of Americans say President Barack Obama is black, while 52 percent say he's mixed race.
That's part of a newlypublished Pew Research Center report that has inspired jarring headlines like these about perceptions of the man commonly (formerly?) known as the first African-American president:
"Is Barack Obama 'Black'? A Majority of Americans Say No"
"Poll: Majority of Americans Say Obama Is Mixed-Race, Not Black"
The Washington Post calls the data "fascinating."
But it's actually not. The only thing fascinating (read: frustrating) is why Pew would force people to choose between these two options. By setting up "black" and "mixed race" as mutually exclusive, as it appears to have done in the "Obama: Black or Mixed Race" (emphasis mine) portion of its poll, it offered Americans a misleading choice that doesn't reflect their social reality, and certainly doesn't tell us anything new about how they see their president.
If participants were, in fact, forced to choose between the two options, knowing that Obama self-identifies as black and knowing, too, that he has a white parent and a black parent, it makes sense to assume that many people simply picked the most specific option: "mixed race."
That does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean they say "no" to his being black.
PEW RESEARCH CENTER
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Violent clashes broke out in Rio de Janeiro between the police and squatters when the authorities dislodged thousands of families from a newly formed favela focusing attention on the rising tension over surging rents and housing shortages. New York Times: Police Clash With Squatters in Rio de Janeiro Slum.
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Violent clashes broke out on Friday between police officers and squatters here when the authorities dislodged thousands of families from a newly formed favela, or slum, in a complex of abandoned commercial buildings, focusing attention on the rising tension over surging rents and housing shortages.
Just two months before Brazil is to host the World Cup soccer tournament in Rio de Janeiro and other cities, police officers used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the squatters at a decaying property in the city’s gritty northern zone owned by Oi, one of the largest telecommunications companies in Brazil.
The squatters fought back by pelting the police with rocks, tossing firebombs and setting buses and police vehicles on fire. Even when officers managed to assert control over the settlement after hours of clashes, the protesters turned to looting nearby banks and a supermarket.
One of the squatters, Nicole Evangelista, 22, said she had put down stakes at the complex just days ago. In a stunning example of how favelas coalesce in Rio, thousands of people had moved to the site this month, coordinating their moves over social media, building wooden shacks and calling their community the Telerj Favela, a nod to the state phone company that used to own the property.
Thousands of people had moved to the slum this month, coordinating over social media. A man fled on Friday. Credit Silvia Izquierdo/Associated Press
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Contributor
Sharing a meal is the sharing of the Heart and Soul. Heart and Soul though, is not some ethereal matter floating above and around the table; it is an ingredient that is emulsified and blended into the very substance of each dish. Acknowledging the tedium of preparing a meal, Lucille Clifton then shows how Heart and Soul are added. How the anguish, pain and redemption of Love and History, Family and Community, are flavors and scents that connect The All with Everything. How is Heart and Soul added?
It starts with...
cutting greens
curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black.
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and i taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.
-- Lucille Clifton
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