Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation’s pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling.
In 1900, the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, predicted that the “problem of the twentieth century” would be the “problem of the color line,” the unequal relationship between the lighter vs. darker races of humankind. Although Du Bois was primarily focused on the racial contradiction of the United States, he was fully aware that the processes of what we call “racialization” today - the construction of racially unequal social hierarchies characterized by dominant and subordinate social relations between groups - was an international and global problem. Du Bois’s color line included not just the racially segregated, Jim Crow South and the racial oppression of South Africa; but also included British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial domination in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean among indigenous populations.
FAYETTEVILLE, Georgia (CNN) — Privilege can be a dangerous thing. It releases you from the task of thinking about things that others must. I am an African-American male and I am privileged. Not on race; but on gender, education, religion, income and many other areas.
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Until we as Americans change course, grow a spine, teach true history that is inclusive of all races and replace these fallacies and half-truths with reputably documented facts, our citizenry will continue to be relegated to racially segmented ideology instead of history.
Read his commentary here:
Commentary: Time for dialogue on race is now - CNN.com.
The Supreme Court narrowed the scope of the Voting Rights Act this week when it ruled that it does not require states to create so-called crossover districts. The regrettable 5-to-4 ruling overturns two of the act’s central goals: protecting minority voting rights and moving the nation toward a more colorblind future.
In crossover districts, minorities are not a majority, but they have enough voting power that they stand a good chance of electing a candidate of their choosing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/opinion/11wed2.html
Maggie Anderson drives 14 miles to buy groceries, which might seem curious given that she lives in bustling Oak Park, Ill. She and her husband, John, travel 18 miles to a health food store in Chicago for vitamins, supplements and personal care products. They drive some distance for gasoline too.
The reason? They want to help solve what they call “the crisis in the black community.” They want to buy black.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-buy-black10-2009mar10,0,7809327,full.story
The NAACP filed lawsuits Friday against two of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders — HSBC and Wells Fargo — alleging “systematic, institutionalized racism” in their subprime lending.
“We have targeted these banks because we have gone through what we can get our hands on, and it seems like there’s a real problem here,” NAACP CEO Benjamin Jealous told CNN.
Jealous said the group wants “transparency.” “We want to see the books,” he added. “We are not seeking damages; we just want them to fix the problem.”
Both companies denied the allegations.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/03/13/naacp.lawsuit/
Barry Rand has had a long, successful career as the man in the grey flannel suit. But when he looks in the mirror, he sees “a son of the ’60s.”
“My life has always been about service and social change,” Rand says.
That’s what AARP, the nation’s leading advocacy group for people age 50 and older, was looking for when it tapped Rand, a former Xerox executive and civic leader, to succeed William Novelli as CEO….
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-03-12-aarp_N.htm
“Founded in 1958, AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization that helps people 50 and over improve the quality of their lives.” - http://www.aarp.org/
From age 8 through his years as a Stanford University student, Dr. Charles Ogletree, the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law at Harvard University, labored in the fields with his migrant-worker parents.
Read more about Charles Ogletree’s work on issues of immigration:
Pushing for a More Inclusive University.
Stanford doctoral candidate, Rhonda Goodman, shared with the Humanities Center her research on art and slavery. She also presented her work at AAAS’s January 16, 2009 Diaspora Table.
“Rhonda Goodman, a Stanford doctoral student in art and art history and a Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellow at the Humanities Center, has studied the little-known artwork for messages that reveal the social and political attitudes of the time. She focused her research on the way artists portrayed slave auctions, in particular….”
Read more:
How antebellum artists used their work to protest slavery.
Despite the election of President Barack Obama, many longtime scholars whose work intertwines with race disagree that the country has reached a post-racial period.
WITH BARACK OBAMA ENSCONCED AS THE nation’s first Black president, plenty of voices in the national conversation are trumpeting America as a post-racial society — that race matters much less than it used to, that the boundaries of race have been overcome, that racism is no longer a big problem. “It’s smack down to think America is still all about racism,” says Dr. John McWhorter, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow. “Racism is not Black people’s main problem anymore. To say that is like saying the earth is flat.”
Read more…
The Obama Era: A Post-racial Society?.