TUESDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2009
New York Times: In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap
But after graduating from business school last year and not having much success garnering interviews, he decided to retool his résumé, scrubbing it of any details that might tip off his skin color. His membership, for instance, in the African-American business students association? Deleted.
“If they’re going to X me,” Mr. Williams said, “I’d like to at least get in the door first.”
Similarly, Barry Jabbar Sykes, 37, who has a degree in mathematics from Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, now uses Barry J. Sykes in his continuing search for an information technology position, even though he has gone by Jabbar his whole life.
“Barry sounds like I could be from Ireland,” he said.
That race remains a serious obstacle in the job market for African-Americans, even those with degrees from respected colleges, may seem to some people a jarring contrast to decades of progress by blacks, culminating in President Obama’s election.
But there is ample evidence that racial inequities remain when it comes to employment. Black joblessness has long far outstripped that of whites. And strikingly, the disparity for the first 10 months of this year, as the recession has dragged on, has been even more pronounced for those with college degrees, compared with those without. Education, it seems, does not level the playing field — in fact, it appears to have made it more uneven.
College-educated black men, especially, have struggled relative to their white counterparts in this downturn, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate for black male college graduates 25 and older in 2009 has been nearly twice that of white male college graduates — 8.4 percent compared with 4.4 percent.
Various academic studies have confirmed that black job seekers have a harder time than whites. A study published several years ago in The American Economic Review titled “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” found that applicants with black-sounding names received 50 percent fewer callbacks than those with white-sounding names.
A more recent study, published this year in The Journal of Labor Economics found white, Asian and Hispanic managers tended to hire more whites and fewer blacks than black managers did.
The discrimination is rarely overt, according to interviews with more than two dozen college-educated black job seekers around the country, many of them out of work for months. Instead, those interviewed told subtler stories, referring to surprised looks and offhand comments, interviews that fell apart almost as soon as they began, and the sudden loss of interest from companies after meetings.
Whether or not each case actually involved bias, the possibility has furnished an additional agonizing layer of second-guessing for many as their job searches have dragged on.
“It does weigh on you in the search because you’re wondering, how much is race playing a factor in whether I’m even getting a first call, or whether I’m even getting an in-person interview once they hear my voice and they know I’m probably African-American?” said Terelle Hairston, 25, a graduate of Yale University who has been looking for work since the summer while also trying to get a marketing consulting start-up off the ground. “You even worry that the hiring manager may not be as interested in diversity as the H.R. manager or upper management.”
Mr. Williams recently applied to a Dallas money management firm that had posted a position with top business schools. The hiring manager had seemed ecstatic to hear from him, telling him they had trouble getting people from prestigious business schools to move to the area. Mr. Williams had left New York and moved back in with his parents in Dallas to save money.
But when Mr. Williams later met two men from the firm for lunch, he said they appeared stunned when he strolled up to introduce himself.
“Their eyes kind of hit the ceiling a bit,” he said. “It was kind of quiet for about 45 seconds.”
The company’s interest in him quickly cooled, setting off the inevitable questions in his mind.
Discrimination in many cases may not even be intentional, some job seekers pointed out, but simply a matter of people gravitating toward similar people, casting about for the right “cultural fit,” a buzzword often heard in corporate circles.
There is also the matter of how many jobs, especially higher-level ones, are never even posted and depend on word-of-mouth and informal networks, in many cases leaving blacks at a disadvantage. A recent study published in the academic journal Social Problems found that white males receive substantially more job leads for high-level supervisory positions than women and members of minorities.
Many interviewed, however, wrestled with “pulling the race card,” groping between their cynicism and desire to avoid the stigma that blacks are too quick to claim victimhood. After all, many had gone to good schools and had accomplished résumés. Some had grown up in well-to-do settings, with parents who had raised them never to doubt how high they could climb. Moreover, there is President Obama, perhaps the ultimate embodiment of that belief.
Certainly, they conceded, there are times when their race can be beneficial, particularly with companies that have diversity programs. But many said they sensed that such opportunities had been cut back over the years and even more during the downturn. Others speculated there was now more of a tendency to deem diversity unnecessary after Mr. Obama’s triumph.
In fact, whether Mr. Obama’s election has been good or bad for their job prospects is hotly debated. Several interviewed went so far as to say that they believed there was only so much progress that many in the country could take, and that there was now a backlash against blacks.
“There is resentment toward his presidency among some because of his race,” said Edward Verner, a Morehouse alumnus from New Jersey who was laid off as a regional sales manager and has been able to find only part-time work. “This has affected well-educated, African-American job seekers.”
It is difficult to overstate the degree that they say race permeates nearly every aspect of their job searches, from how early they show up to interviews to the kinds of anecdotes they try to come up with.
“You want to be a nonthreatening, professional black guy,” said Winston Bell, 40, of Cleveland, who has been looking for a job in business development.
He drew an analogy to several prominent black sports broadcasters. “You don’t want to be Stephen A. Smith. You want to be Bryant Gumbel. You don’t even want to be Stuart Scott. You don’t want to be, ‘Booyah.’ ”
Nearly all said they agonized over job applications that asked them whether they would like to identify their race. Most said they usually did not.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2009
Study: Political Bent Affects How We View Skin Tone
NPR
November 23, 2009
Nell Greenfieldboyce
November 23, 2009
Nell Greenfieldboyce
A new study suggests that people's political views may affect how they perceive President Obama's skin tone, with liberals tending to "lighten" his skin and conservatives tending to "darken" it.
"Our beliefs, you know, in this case our political beliefs, can really have pretty profound effects on how we see the world," says Eugene Caruso, a researcher at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. "Our data suggest that people's beliefs affect how light or dark they perceive someone to be."
Testing Perceptions
He and his colleagues took different photos of then-candidate Obama and digitally manipulated them to alter just the areas of exposed skin. "So we sort of isolated the head and the hands of Obama and altered the skin tone to make it relatively lighter in tone or relatively darker in tone," Caruso says.
The research team then showed the altered photos, plus the unaltered ones, one at a time to undergraduate students and asked them to rate the photos in terms of how representative they thought each photo was of the candidate. They researchers also questioned the students about their political views.
Liberal participants were most likely to rate a lightened photo of Obama as being most representative of him, while conservatives were most likely to say that about a photo that had been darkened, according to their findings published in a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Perceived Lightness Tied To Votes
What's more, the researchers found that the degree to which someone saw a lightened photo as being representative of Obama was related to whether he voted for him a week later.
That was true even after the researchers controlled for political views and measures of bias against blacks, says Caruso. "Assuming that people had equal levels of political conservativism," he says, "the extent to which you rated the lightened photos as more representative was, over and above your ideology, also predictive of your voting intentions and your voting behavior."
The researchers also showed students digitally lightened and darkened photos of John McCain but did not find that political affiliation affected people's ratings of the photos.
The study's result "goes along with sort of these cultural ideas that we have about things that are light versus things that are dark as being either good or bad, positive or negative," says Keith Maddox, a psychology researcher at Tufts University who has studied how people perceive skin tone.
He says whether or not you agree with someone's political views apparently "can sort of change the way you perceive them, in a real physical sense."
He says it would be interesting to do a similar study with a conservative biracial candidate, to see if liberals would then "darken" the candidate and conservatives would "lighten" that same person.
Judging Unknown Candidates By Skin Color, Too
Caruso also says he recently has been looking to see if skin tone can affect people's level of support for a novel biracial candidate when people's political affiliation with that candidate is ambiguous.
In one new study, his team used altered photos of a person described in the experiment as a candidate for a position with the Department of Education. People were shown either a darkened, lightened or unaltered photo of the fake candidate and then asked a few questions about their views on various issues facing the department.
All participants were told that the candidate agreed with them on half of the issues. But when asked if that candidate would get their support, says Caruso, "lo and behold, those who saw a photo with darkened skin accompanying the candidate's biography just a few minutes earlier reported that they were less likely to vote for this candidate."
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2009
Why do white people have black spots?
This is a short documentary made by Media that Matters allowing kids in Ghana to ask foreigners open questions. The entire film is great, but at 3:40 is where the kids start talking about identity.
You can watch it here.
You can watch it here.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2009
A Racial Divide Is Bridged by Recession
McDONOUGH, Ga. — During the housing boom, Henry County, a suburb of Atlanta, had its share of racial tension as more and more blacks joined the tens of thousands of others pouring in, creating a standoffish gap between the newcomers and the county’s oldtimers.
But the recession has begun to erase those differences.
Blacks and whites have encountered one another in increasing numbers recently in the crowded waiting rooms of the welfare office and at the food pantry, where many of both races have ventured for the first time. Struggling black-owned businesses are attracting the attention of white patrons.
Neighbors are commiserating across racial lines.
At the Division of Family and Children Services, Keasha Taylor, 36 and black, helped explain the system recently to a white mother. Ms. Taylor, who was there because her family had been evicted, told the mother, who was in line for food stamps, that a child with acute asthma might be eligible for Social Security.
“Right now, a lot of white people are in this situation,” Ms. Taylor said, recalling the conversation later. “We’re already used to poverty; they’re really not.”
Denese Rodgers, the county director of social services, who is white, has held several lunch meetings at A J’s Turkey Grill, owned by Diane Walker, a black woman, in hopes of helping business.
“It was in one of our abandoned strip malls, a forlorn looking kind of place, but when you walk in, it’s just pristine,” Ms. Rodgers said. “She’s doing everything right, it’s just not full.”
Peggy Allgood, a 54-year-old black woman who lost her job and four-bedroom house and is now living in a trailer park, said she had noticed the recession obliterating racial differences up and down the economic scale.
“It’s gotten to the point where everyone I talk to, their hours have been cut, their jobs have been cut,” Ms. Allgood said. “My neighbor, she’s white, she’s trying to find a job. She hasn’t had any luck.”
The recession hit Henry County, for years one of the nation’s fastest growing areas, at a time when it was already struggling to come to terms with startling demographic change. In 1990, the county was almost 90 percent white. Now, as its population has more than tripled to 192,000, according to 2008 census estimates, the white percentage of the population has shrunk to 60 percent.
The county’s elected government is still all white and Republican, and some leaders and newcomers alike have tried in various ways to make local board and governments more diverse. But nothing else has worked to remove barriers as quickly as economic hardship.
“There used to be a lot of racial tension here, but everybody knows that we need each other to survive this recession,” said Eugene Edwards, the president of the Henry County branch of theNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “People now, they seem to be starting to care for one another.”
Once fueled by construction, the county has been left by the recession with a blighted crop of abandoned white utility hookups, meant for new subdivisions, sprouted in the woods.
Last year, the Chamber of Commerce took a multiracial group of leaders to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, but such officially sponsored efforts at bonding have slowed.
“The recession has pretty much tied folks down to survival mode,” said Steve Cash, the executive director of the Henry Council for Quality Growth, who is white. “A lot of things that were happening before aren’t happening now.”
And a lot of things that were unheard of before are happening now. Women in Jaguars pull up to the local food pantry, and former millionaires hunker down in grand, unsellable homes.
One reason blacks have not gained more political power is that they are not heavily concentrated in any single area in the county — the cul-de-sacs carved out of farmland and pastures in the last decade became racially mixed enclaves for the upwardly mobile. Now, the foreclosure notices and uncut lawns in those same subdivisions reinforce the notion that everyone is in the same sinking boat.
Statistics also suggest that the recession’s burden is falling with similar force on both races. In June 2006, 55 percent of the families receiving food stamps were black, and 44 percent were white. Those percentages remain the same today, although the size of each group has increased by about 50 percent.
Unemployment claims follow that pattern: in January 2008, 49 percent of those who filed for unemployment were white, and 45 percent were black. In August 2009, 49 percent were white, and 48 percent were black.
Across the country, there have been many reports about the recession’s racial divide, as blacks have lost their jobs and houses at far higher rates than whites. But Henry County, about a 30-minute drive south of downtown Atlanta, has a very different profile from the rest of the nation. In Henry, the median income of black families, $56,715 in 2008, approaches that of whites, $69,728 (nationally, the average income gap was $20,000). Blacks in Henry County, many of whom are retirees from the North or professionals who work in Atlanta, are more likely than whites to have a college degree.
That does not mean that Henry County is a perfect laboratory of equality. Blacks made up a disproportionately high number of those seeking government assistance both before and after the slowdown. Since 2006, the number of blacks on Medicaid has more than tripled, outpacing the increase among whites.
And as in the rest of the country, blacks in Henry were more than twice as likely as whites to take out risky sub-prime mortgages, meaning more black families than white are struggling to keep their homes.
Keith and Kenya Rucker, who are black, recently declared bankruptcy in an effort to keep the home they bought for $155,000 with an adjustable-rate mortgage when they had two incomes, before Mr. Rucker lost his job as a restaurant manager. Both said they could not rely on family members for help with their ballooning payments.
“I’m not racist, but it’s harder for black men,” Mr. Rucker said, as his wife huddled with their 8-year-old daughter, KéUnica. Mr. Rucker, who is from Orlando, Fla., echoed many experts who say that middle-class blacks have fewer resources, either financial or social, to fall back on if they get into trouble. “Where I’m from,” he said, “every friend that I had is a drug dealer, locked up, on drugs or dead.”
But Dennis and Jenny Duncan, a white couple who once owned millions of dollars in real estate assets as former developers, felt equally stymied. Interviewed in the lavish home they built for themselves, they said the sheriff had just come to call and told them their belongings would soon be seized to satisfy debts. Unlike Ms. Rucker, neither has a college degree, making work difficult to find.
The idea that the recession is an equalizer has become accepted in Henry County. Both black and white residents were hesitant to say that either race had taken a greater hit. But Ms. Taylor, the black woman who dispensed advice at the county food stamp office, said there were some notable distinctions between blacks and whites.
“They’re a little weaker than we are at handling things like this,” she said, adding without rancor, “but I know they get more sympathy than we do.”
But the recession has begun to erase those differences.
Blacks and whites have encountered one another in increasing numbers recently in the crowded waiting rooms of the welfare office and at the food pantry, where many of both races have ventured for the first time. Struggling black-owned businesses are attracting the attention of white patrons.
Neighbors are commiserating across racial lines.
At the Division of Family and Children Services, Keasha Taylor, 36 and black, helped explain the system recently to a white mother. Ms. Taylor, who was there because her family had been evicted, told the mother, who was in line for food stamps, that a child with acute asthma might be eligible for Social Security.
“Right now, a lot of white people are in this situation,” Ms. Taylor said, recalling the conversation later. “We’re already used to poverty; they’re really not.”
Denese Rodgers, the county director of social services, who is white, has held several lunch meetings at A J’s Turkey Grill, owned by Diane Walker, a black woman, in hopes of helping business.
“It was in one of our abandoned strip malls, a forlorn looking kind of place, but when you walk in, it’s just pristine,” Ms. Rodgers said. “She’s doing everything right, it’s just not full.”
Peggy Allgood, a 54-year-old black woman who lost her job and four-bedroom house and is now living in a trailer park, said she had noticed the recession obliterating racial differences up and down the economic scale.
“It’s gotten to the point where everyone I talk to, their hours have been cut, their jobs have been cut,” Ms. Allgood said. “My neighbor, she’s white, she’s trying to find a job. She hasn’t had any luck.”
The recession hit Henry County, for years one of the nation’s fastest growing areas, at a time when it was already struggling to come to terms with startling demographic change. In 1990, the county was almost 90 percent white. Now, as its population has more than tripled to 192,000, according to 2008 census estimates, the white percentage of the population has shrunk to 60 percent.
The county’s elected government is still all white and Republican, and some leaders and newcomers alike have tried in various ways to make local board and governments more diverse. But nothing else has worked to remove barriers as quickly as economic hardship.
“There used to be a lot of racial tension here, but everybody knows that we need each other to survive this recession,” said Eugene Edwards, the president of the Henry County branch of theNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “People now, they seem to be starting to care for one another.”
Once fueled by construction, the county has been left by the recession with a blighted crop of abandoned white utility hookups, meant for new subdivisions, sprouted in the woods.
Last year, the Chamber of Commerce took a multiracial group of leaders to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, but such officially sponsored efforts at bonding have slowed.
“The recession has pretty much tied folks down to survival mode,” said Steve Cash, the executive director of the Henry Council for Quality Growth, who is white. “A lot of things that were happening before aren’t happening now.”
And a lot of things that were unheard of before are happening now. Women in Jaguars pull up to the local food pantry, and former millionaires hunker down in grand, unsellable homes.
One reason blacks have not gained more political power is that they are not heavily concentrated in any single area in the county — the cul-de-sacs carved out of farmland and pastures in the last decade became racially mixed enclaves for the upwardly mobile. Now, the foreclosure notices and uncut lawns in those same subdivisions reinforce the notion that everyone is in the same sinking boat.
Statistics also suggest that the recession’s burden is falling with similar force on both races. In June 2006, 55 percent of the families receiving food stamps were black, and 44 percent were white. Those percentages remain the same today, although the size of each group has increased by about 50 percent.
Unemployment claims follow that pattern: in January 2008, 49 percent of those who filed for unemployment were white, and 45 percent were black. In August 2009, 49 percent were white, and 48 percent were black.
Across the country, there have been many reports about the recession’s racial divide, as blacks have lost their jobs and houses at far higher rates than whites. But Henry County, about a 30-minute drive south of downtown Atlanta, has a very different profile from the rest of the nation. In Henry, the median income of black families, $56,715 in 2008, approaches that of whites, $69,728 (nationally, the average income gap was $20,000). Blacks in Henry County, many of whom are retirees from the North or professionals who work in Atlanta, are more likely than whites to have a college degree.
That does not mean that Henry County is a perfect laboratory of equality. Blacks made up a disproportionately high number of those seeking government assistance both before and after the slowdown. Since 2006, the number of blacks on Medicaid has more than tripled, outpacing the increase among whites.
And as in the rest of the country, blacks in Henry were more than twice as likely as whites to take out risky sub-prime mortgages, meaning more black families than white are struggling to keep their homes.
Keith and Kenya Rucker, who are black, recently declared bankruptcy in an effort to keep the home they bought for $155,000 with an adjustable-rate mortgage when they had two incomes, before Mr. Rucker lost his job as a restaurant manager. Both said they could not rely on family members for help with their ballooning payments.
“I’m not racist, but it’s harder for black men,” Mr. Rucker said, as his wife huddled with their 8-year-old daughter, KéUnica. Mr. Rucker, who is from Orlando, Fla., echoed many experts who say that middle-class blacks have fewer resources, either financial or social, to fall back on if they get into trouble. “Where I’m from,” he said, “every friend that I had is a drug dealer, locked up, on drugs or dead.”
But Dennis and Jenny Duncan, a white couple who once owned millions of dollars in real estate assets as former developers, felt equally stymied. Interviewed in the lavish home they built for themselves, they said the sheriff had just come to call and told them their belongings would soon be seized to satisfy debts. Unlike Ms. Rucker, neither has a college degree, making work difficult to find.
The idea that the recession is an equalizer has become accepted in Henry County. Both black and white residents were hesitant to say that either race had taken a greater hit. But Ms. Taylor, the black woman who dispensed advice at the county food stamp office, said there were some notable distinctions between blacks and whites.
“They’re a little weaker than we are at handling things like this,” she said, adding without rancor, “but I know they get more sympathy than we do.”
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2009
Little “Obama Effect” on Views About Race Relations
Gallup.com
October 29, 2009
ATTITUDES TOWARD RACE NOT SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVED FROM PREVIOUS YEARS
PRINCETON, NJ -- A majority of Americans, 56%, believe that a solution to America's race-relations problem will eventually be worked out -- a figure that is roughly the same as those Gallup found in the years prior to last fall's historic election of Barack Obama as president.
Responses to this long-standing trend today are almost exactly where they were in December 1963, when Gallup first asked this question. Fifty-five percent of Americans in 1963 were hopeful that a solution to the race-relations problem would eventually be worked out. Now, some 46 years later, the "hopeful" percentage is an almost identical 56%. In short, despite all that has happened in the intervening decades, there is scarcely more hope now than there was those many years ago that the nation's race-relations situation will be solved.
Still, the similarity between attitudes in 1963 and 2009 masks a good deal of movement on this measure in the intervening years.
"Among blacks, optimism about an eventual solution to race-relations problems has decreased since last summer, from 50% to 42%."
The all-time low point for the "hopeful" alternative -- 29% -- came in October 1995, shortly after a Los Angeles jury acquitted O.J. Simpson of murder. By 1998, views that a solution to race problems would eventually be worked out had improved slightly, to 41%, and they increased still more, to 50%, by 2002. By last summer, when there was general recognition that a black man, Barack Obama, would receive the Democratic nomination for president, the percentage of Americans believing in an eventual solution to the race problem had risen to 58%.
Gallup conducted a one-night poll on Nov. 5 of last year, the day after Obama's electoral victory over John McCain. The percentage of Americans giving the positive alternative to the race-relations question in that survey jumped to 67%.
Now, about a year after Obama's election, optimism that a solution to the country's race problem will eventually be worked out has settled back down to 56%. This certainly remains higher than in a number of previous years, particularly at points in the 1990s. But the current reading is not significantly improved from the sentiment that prevailed in more recent years prior to Obama's election.
Blacks continue to give much more negative responses to this question than do whites. The majority of whites are optimistic that a solution will eventually be worked out; the majority of blacks disagree.
Among blacks, optimism about an eventual solution to race-relations problems has decreased since last summer, from 50% to 42%. In fact, the current 42% is essentially the same percentage that Gallup measured among blacks on several previous occasions.
Equal Job Opportunities?
A second Gallup trend question asks if blacks have as good a chance as whites "in your community" to get any kind of job for which they are qualified.
In the current poll, 79% of Americans say blacks have equal employment opportunities. This is technically the highest positive response measured to date, albeit just two points higher than what Gallup measured in the 1998 survey. Compared to last summer, the current figure represents an increase of eight percentage points.
There has been significant change on this measure over the last four and a half decades. In March 1963, when Gallup first asked this question, less than half of Americans (43%) said blacks had equal opportunities in terms of jobs. In the summer of that year, the percentage of Americans who perceived that there was equal opportunity for blacks dropped to the all-time low of 39%.
There was a sea change in attitudes by the time Gallup next asked the question, in 1978, with 67% of Americans in the summer of that year agreeing that blacks had equal opportunities. Sentiment remained at roughly this level through the mid-1990s, and then rose to 75% in 1997 and 77% in 1998.
Here again, as was the case for the broad question about eventual solutions to the race-relations problem, Americans' attitudes today are positive, but not dramatically or significantly higher than at various points prior to Obama's election.
Blacks are decidedly more pessimistic about equal job opportunities for blacks than are whites.
A large majority of whites say blacks have as good a chance as whites to get any type of job for which they are qualified. Blacks, on the other hand, are divided in their views. The current perceptions among blacks of the job situation for blacks represents an improvement from recent years, although at one point in 1995 -- after O.J. Simpson's acquittal -- blacks were slightly more optimistic than they are now.
Racism
A third Gallup trend asks Americans about racism against blacks in the U.S. At the beginning of last summer -- after Obama had essentially clinched the Democratic nomination -- 56% of Americans agreed that there was widespread racism against blacks in the U.S. That percentage has now dropped to 51%. The slight drop over the last 20 months has occurred to some degree among both blacks and whites.
There has been a slight uptick (from 41% to 44%) in the percentage of Americans who perceive widespread racism against whites in the U.S. Again, the overall increase reflects increases among both blacks and whites.
Bottom Line
Despite the election of the first black president in U.S. history, Americans' optimism about a solution to the race problem in the U.S. and their views about the prevalence of racism against blacks are not substantially more positive now than they have been in previous years. In fact, optimism about race relations is now almost identical to where it was 46 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question.
Blacks remain significantly more negative than whites about their status in society and about the potential for an eventual solution to the race problem. The data do not suggest that blacks have become disproportionately more positive than whites as a result of Obama's election as president.
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Survey Methods
Results are based on telephone interviews with 1,521 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Oct. 16-19, 2009, including an oversample of 408 blacks, consisting of 102 interviews done as part of the random national sample and 306 interviews with blacks who had previously participated in national Gallup polls and agreed to be re-interviewed at a later date. The data from the national sample and re-interviews are combined and weighted to be demographically representative of the national adult population in the United States and to reflect the proper proportion of blacks in the overall population. For results based on this sample of national adults, the maximum margin of error is ±3 percentage points.
For results based on the sample of 408 blacks, the maximum margin of error is ±6 percentage points.
For results based on the sample of 933 non-Hispanic whites, the maximum margin of error is ±4 percentage points.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2009
Play the Race Card
Play the Race Card
Why avoiding the issue doesn't help.
Published Sep 19, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Sep 28, 2009
Let me say this clearly so there are no misunderstandings: some of the protests against President Obama are howls of rage at the fact that we have an African-American head of state. I'm sick of all the code words used when this subject comes up, so be assured that I am saying exactly what I mean. Oh, and in response to the inevitable complaints that I am playing the race card—race isn't a political parlor game. It is a powerful fault line in a nation that bears the scars of slavery, a civil war, Jim Crow, a mind-numbing number of assassinations, and too many riots to count. It is naive and disingenuous to say otherwise.
So when Idaho gubernatorial candidate Rex Rammell jokes about hunting the president or South Carolina GOP activist Rusty DePass calls an escaped gorilla one of Michelle Obama's ancestors, it's racist. Which, in case of confusion, is the "ideology that all members of each racial group possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially to distinguish it as being either superior or inferior to another racial group." (That's from the Oxford English Dictionary, but leave the Brits out of this.) When "Tea Party" leader Mark Williams ap-pears on CNN and speaks of "working-class people" taking "their" country back from a lawfully elected president, he is not just protesting Obama's politics; he is griping over the fact that this country's most powerful positions are no longer just for white men. No, I do not believe that everyone who disagrees with Obama is racist. But racists do exist in this country, and they don't like having a black president.
Did anyone think it would be otherwise? There were always going to be aftershocks in an Obama presidency. Landmark events that change the paradigm between black and white people don't happen without repercussions—some are still complaining about Brown v. Board of Education. Black skin has meant something very specific in this country for hundreds of years. It has meant "less than," "not as good as," "separate than," and even "equal to." It has never meant "better than" unless you were talking about dancing, singing, or basketball. Obama represents "better than," and that's scary for people who think of black people as shaved gorillas.
So color me a little offended when the "mainstream media" suddenly discovered that there might be a racial element to the attacks on Obama. Maureen Dowd's Sept. 13 column in The New York Times is a perfect example: "I've been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer—the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids—had much to do with race." But at least she did acknowledge it. A Times piece just a day earlier explained why Obama is so unpopular in Louisiana and somehow managed to omit race as a factor. It took 20 paragraphs for a Politico column titled "What's the Matter With South Carolina?" to mention race. This hesitancy to even speak of racism widens the divide between readers and the journalists who are supposed to be covering the world as it is, not as they want it to be. It also explains, at least in part, the popularity of alternative news sources like The Daily Show or the Huffington Post that love to identify racist double-talk.
I had actually been looking forward to the aftershocks of an Obama victory. Maybe I'm the one who's naive, but I thought of the election of the first African-American president as the ultimate teachable moment. I wasn't expecting a holiday. But almost anything, really, would be better than all this "post-racial" and "Kumbaya" crap we're being peddled. Even though Oprah and Will Smith are beloved by Americans of all hues, they are still exceptions in a country where judging people based on the color of their skin is a habit we've yet to break.
I get it. Race issues are scary. There are few souls brave enough to say what they think about race relations outside the privacy of their homes or the anonymity of the Internet. But rather than deal with the discomfort of talking about race, we've continued to follow outdated rules about what words can be said by whom or, even worse, to stay silent. As if not speaking of racism will somehow make it go away. Silence, even the well-meaning kind, rarely wins an argument. It just allows the lunatic fringe to fill the vacuum in the public debate. And this reluctance doesn't help the effort to achieve racial equality, it hurts it.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2009
DC Fundraiser a Success!
First of all, thank you to everyone who attended for making our fundraiser so successful! And to those of you who couldn´t make it to the event but supported us in other ways, thank you, also!
Well, it was a bit stressful trying to put on this fundraiser with just one week in DC beforehand, but with the help of a bunch of wonderful friends and colleagues, we pulled it off. We asked three experts on race and racism to introduce the topic, and then had readings from our collection of narratives.
Dr. Sharon Moses, a visiting professor in the Anthropology Department at AU, was our first speaker. She shared incite on how race is lived in America
Our advisor and professor of Anthropology at AU, Dr. Brett Williams, spoke next and highlighted the pertinence of this project. Radhika Miller, a civil rights attorney in DC, spoke about structural racism and the importance of all communities coming together to fight racism.
The volunteers readings sample narratives did an amazing job. We selected sixteen interviews from our preliminary research—we attempted to get the widest range of views and backgrounds—and the readers really stepped into these characters so much more deeply than I expected. It was especially impressive considering the material—not easy stuff to put your voice behind in many cases. The monologues express very personal perspectives and controversial opinions.
Something I had particular trouble with was the language used in some of the monologues. Aditi and I read through the monologues aloud many times before the event, and every time we found it difficult actually let “the N word” leave our lips. (I don´t even want to write it!) We would either say, “the N word” in place of what was written, mumble, or bleep ourselves. Once we divided up the monologues for readers, I realized the narrative I would be reading included the word… twice. I don´t think I´ve ever actually said this word, and now I would have to say it… loud, articulated, and in front of an audience. I felt anxious.
When later we talked with some of our readers whose narratives also included the word, we found that they were also having trouble saying it, and asked if they could use some substitute. But our interviewees use of this word is a part of their story, and as uncomfortable as we were with using it, we needed to.
We were overwhelmed by the response to our fundraiser. Afterward, people were so excited to talk to us about the project, ask us questions, and to get involved in whatever way they could. Honestly we weren´t expecting so many people to offer their help, and now we are thinking about ways we can get more people involved.
So now starts the fieldwork stage. I will be in Rochester , New York Morgantown , West Virginia , in November, and next semester I´ll be in New Orleans and Miami
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2009
Anti-Obama = Racism?
From San Francisco Chronicle:
The race "conversation" has bubbled up again, disguised as political opposition to President Obama's domestic policy agenda (health care reform, economic recovery).
As I noted in an earlier post (New National Sport: Bash Obama), I wondered whether the vitriol coming from the extreme right-wing screamers was racism cloaked in accusations of the president advocating a "socialist" agenda or of him being foreign-born or a Muslim.
Let me stipulate at the outset: I do not believe that everyone who opposes President Obama on health care, the economy, or anything he wants to do is a racist. That is patently ridiculous.
To repeat myself: it is fair game to criticize his political agenda, and plenty of folks -- right, center, and left -- are doing so enthusiastically and passionately.
But I do believe that some of the most hate-filled complaints about the president are either consciously or subconsciously racist.
Former President Jimmy Carter is someone who knows American racism because he is a southerner. His life experience is a keen example of a person who has risen above the ugly racism embedded in the history of the American south.
Carter believes that South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson's recent "you lie" outburst at President Obama was racially motivated. Carter's opinion is worth thinking about.
As some African American commentators have said in recent days, the Joe Wilson kerfuffle and the broader hate-filled anti-Obama messages should be evaluated in the context of American race history (slavery, the Civil War, the Jim Crow south following the Civil War, slaughter of native Americans, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, anti-Mexican acts, the 1924 immigration laws that favored European immigration, Japanese American internment during World War II, etc.).
Oh, that's old stuff, history. We're beyond that now, some Americans might think. And, hey, we elected a black guy for president just last year!
So we did, and some of us declared America now to be "post-racial," whatever that means.
I was even naively hopeful that Barack Obama's election signaled a profound social attitudinal change in our nation's ugly racial history.
To be sure, American race relations have improved. But we've not yet reached a racial Nirvana. Maybe we never will, human beings being what we are.
The reason I believe the race "conversation" is our most difficult is because it is so sensitive, so emotional, so fraught with anger, bitterness, misunderstandings, and inadequate vocabulary, and can be so painful and filled with fear that many attempts to talk about racial matters end with hurt feelings or without satisfaction or with empty platitudes.
You might even wonder why this Chinese guy -- me -- is even writing about this "conversation" when he (me) and folks who look like me aren't even involved.
Well, I and my Asian brothers and sisters are involved, as are Latinos and all others who are not black or white.
Too often, the American race "conversation" is thought to be only between white and black folks. That is so yesterday.
In California, it's always been a Technicolor palette. Now the country is apparently only beginning to wake up to the fact that the national race "conversation" is multi-hued and multidimensional.
The "multi" nature and not just a black-white "bi" nature makes the "conversation" even more difficult. And I don't think it's going to go away soon, especially now that Barack Obama is our president.
Right-wing extremists, whether the talk-radio blabbermouths or the scared, small-thinking ordinary citizen, will continue to beat an anti-Obama drum hiding behind supposedly legitimate "policy" and "principled" differences.
Naive me, however, is hoping we can truly engage in a constructive and ultimately healthy racial "conversation" that doesn't devolve into hate and bigotry.
Note: You might notice that I put quotation marks around the word conversation. That is so because I feel that this so-called conversation is often just talking past one another, not a true conversation in which the involved parties are listening to one another and actually learning something from one another, while having a good time, ev
ANTI-OBAMA = RACISM?
The most difficult national "conversation" isn't about health care, the federal deficit, the economy, or the Afghanistan war. It's about race.The race "conversation" has bubbled up again, disguised as political opposition to President Obama's domestic policy agenda (health care reform, economic recovery).
As I noted in an earlier post (New National Sport: Bash Obama), I wondered whether the vitriol coming from the extreme right-wing screamers was racism cloaked in accusations of the president advocating a "socialist" agenda or of him being foreign-born or a Muslim.
Let me stipulate at the outset: I do not believe that everyone who opposes President Obama on health care, the economy, or anything he wants to do is a racist. That is patently ridiculous.
To repeat myself: it is fair game to criticize his political agenda, and plenty of folks -- right, center, and left -- are doing so enthusiastically and passionately.
But I do believe that some of the most hate-filled complaints about the president are either consciously or subconsciously racist.
Former President Jimmy Carter is someone who knows American racism because he is a southerner. His life experience is a keen example of a person who has risen above the ugly racism embedded in the history of the American south.
Carter believes that South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson's recent "you lie" outburst at President Obama was racially motivated. Carter's opinion is worth thinking about.
As some African American commentators have said in recent days, the Joe Wilson kerfuffle and the broader hate-filled anti-Obama messages should be evaluated in the context of American race history (slavery, the Civil War, the Jim Crow south following the Civil War, slaughter of native Americans, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, anti-Mexican acts, the 1924 immigration laws that favored European immigration, Japanese American internment during World War II, etc.).
Oh, that's old stuff, history. We're beyond that now, some Americans might think. And, hey, we elected a black guy for president just last year!
So we did, and some of us declared America now to be "post-racial," whatever that means.
I was even naively hopeful that Barack Obama's election signaled a profound social attitudinal change in our nation's ugly racial history.
To be sure, American race relations have improved. But we've not yet reached a racial Nirvana. Maybe we never will, human beings being what we are.
The reason I believe the race "conversation" is our most difficult is because it is so sensitive, so emotional, so fraught with anger, bitterness, misunderstandings, and inadequate vocabulary, and can be so painful and filled with fear that many attempts to talk about racial matters end with hurt feelings or without satisfaction or with empty platitudes.
You might even wonder why this Chinese guy -- me -- is even writing about this "conversation" when he (me) and folks who look like me aren't even involved.
Well, I and my Asian brothers and sisters are involved, as are Latinos and all others who are not black or white.
Too often, the American race "conversation" is thought to be only between white and black folks. That is so yesterday.
In California, it's always been a Technicolor palette. Now the country is apparently only beginning to wake up to the fact that the national race "conversation" is multi-hued and multidimensional.
The "multi" nature and not just a black-white "bi" nature makes the "conversation" even more difficult. And I don't think it's going to go away soon, especially now that Barack Obama is our president.
Right-wing extremists, whether the talk-radio blabbermouths or the scared, small-thinking ordinary citizen, will continue to beat an anti-Obama drum hiding behind supposedly legitimate "policy" and "principled" differences.
Naive me, however, is hoping we can truly engage in a constructive and ultimately healthy racial "conversation" that doesn't devolve into hate and bigotry.
Note: You might notice that I put quotation marks around the word conversation. That is so because I feel that this so-called conversation is often just talking past one another, not a true conversation in which the involved parties are listening to one another and actually learning something from one another, while having a good time, ev
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2009
Boy, Oh, Boy
Boy, Oh, Boy
WASHINGTON
The normally nonchalant Barack Obama looked nonplussed, as Nancy Pelosi glowered behind.
Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.
But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!
The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts.
The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.
I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.
I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.
But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.
“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson.
“In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength. My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’ ”
Barry Obama of the post-’60s Hawaiian ’hood did not live through the major racial struggles in American history. Maybe he had a problem relating to his white basketball coach or catching a cab in New York, but he never got beaten up for being black.
Now he’s at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension. Even if he and the coterie of white male advisers around him don’t choose to openly acknowledge it, this president is the ultimate civil rights figure — a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.
For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.
The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson.
“A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we’re part of the union,” said Don Fowler, the former Democratic Party chief who teaches politics at the University of South Carolina. He observed that when slavery was destroyed by outside forces and segregation was undone by civil rights leaders and Congress, it bred xenophobia.
“We have a lot of people who really think that the world’s against us,” Fowler said, “so when things don’t happen the way we like them to, we blame outsiders.” He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree. Shades of John C. Calhoun!
It may be President Obama’s very air of elegance and erudition that raises hackles in some. “My father used to say to me, ‘Boy, don’t get above your raising,’ ” Fowler said. “Some people are prejudiced anyway, and then they look at his education and mannerisms and get more angry at him.”
Clyburn had a warning for Obama advisers who want to forgive Wilson, ignore the ignorant outbursts and move on: “They’re going to have to develop ways in this White House to deal with things and not let them fester out there. Otherwise, they’ll see numbers moving in the wrong direction.”
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2009
Dems see race factor for Obama foes
 | |
Dems see race factor for Obama foes | |
| AUSTIN – Eight months into Barack Obama’s presidency, as criticism of his administration seems to reach new levels of volume and intensity each week, the whispers among some of his allies are growing louder: That those who loathe the nation’s first African-American president, and especially those who would deny his citizenship, are driven at least in part byracism. It’s a feeling that’s acutely felt among those supporters of Obama who are themselves minorities. Conversations with Democrats at an otherwise upbeat Democratic National Committee fall gathering here, an event largely devoted to party housekeeping, reflected a growing anger at what many see as a troubling effort to delegitimize Obama’s hold on the office. “As far as African-Americans are concerned, we think most of it is,” said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), when asked in an interview in between sessions how much of the more extreme anger at Obama is based upon his race. “And we think it’s very unfortunate. We as African-American people of course are very sensitive to it.” Johnson is a somewhat-reserved, nine-term member of Congress, more gracious southern lady than racial bomb-thrower. She enjoyed a warm personal relationship with fellow Texan George W. Bush when he was in the White House and fondly recalled their ability to get along, divergent politics aside. But she said the disdain for this president, especially sharp in her home state, had reached a point where it had become necessary to speak out. “It’s hurting the spirit of this country,” Johnson said, citing concerns about what the rest of the world may think about a powerful nation where a significant segment of the population does not accept their elected leader as legitimate. Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, agreed with his colleague that elements of the opposition can’t accept the reality of a black president. “There’s a very angry, small group of folks that just didn’t like the fact that Barack Obama won the presidency,” Honda said, adding: “With some, I think it is [about race]. Said Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) about the race factor: “There are some issues that have been swept under the rug and we’re not witnessing them come out.” But it's still a sensitive enough issue that the party doesn’t broach it directly. Virginia Governor and Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine used a speech Friday to single out those conservative critics whose hostility toward President Obama goes deeper than just opposing his policies — but without mentioning that which many in his party believe drives the anger. “Republican leaders…rose up to say that he did not deserve honorary degrees from colleges that were giving him degrees last spring, members of Congress, Republican members of Congress, are spreading bogus rumors about where the president was born, and they whipped up opposition all across this country when President Obama wanted to give a speech to our nation’s schoolchildren to tell them to take responsibility, study hard and stay in school,” Kaine said here at the party’s fall meeting. He demurred when asked later whether this often-personal criticism is rooted in contempt for a president who happens to be black. Other Democrats, not as constrained by the office they hold, are more outspoken about what they see as the racism aimed at Obama. “We think all of it is!” exclaimed Gwen Dawkins, a Democratic activist from Michigan and retired state employee when asked to what degree the fervent opposition to Obama was driven by his skin color. Dawkins also touched on a common, if mostly privately-held, frustration in the African-American community—that with exceptional difficulties at home and abroad, Obama is bearing a significantly heavier burden than most presidents and his naysayers would prefer him to founder so as to validate their fears about a black president. “Black people have lived under white presidents since day one,” Dawkins observed, “So would you give him a chance?” Donna Brazile, a longtime Democratic strategist and a DNC vice-chair declined to, as she put it, “put all the president’s opponents in a box,” with regard to their motivation. But she said more and more average African-Americans are approaching her with grave worries about Obama. “They’re worried sick about his safety,” Brazile said. “When they see some of these statements, the guns at his rallies, some of the hate talk on TV and radio, there’s a natural tendency because of the wounds that built up for centuries without being addressed to worry. It’s a natural concern for them to worry.” Obama himself is cagey about the question of race-based opposition and, throughout his brief tenure, has gone to some lengths to downplay the consequences of his race. He and his advisers avoid screaming, or even whispering, racism for fear of how it will come off with those white voters who may be open-minded but also don’t want a president in the Sharpton-Jackson mold. The administration has been burned when Obama did step out of his usual post-racial posture to touch the nation’s true third rail. When Obama declared at a nationally-televised news conference this summer that the Cambridge police officer who arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates had acted “stupidly,” polls showed many whites uneasy about that judgment. The conflagration, in part driven by a race-consumed news media, blazed for days, obscuring the president’s healthcare reform push and dying out only after Obama brought together the cop and the professor for a détente at their much-ballyhooed beer summit. “I don’t think the president believes that people are upset because of the color of his skin,” said White House Press Secretary and Obama confidante Robert Gibbs on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday. It's in both parties' interest to keep the race issue from consuming the debate. Democrats, already facing considerable opposition to their ambitious agenda, fear angering centrist white voters who may be turned off by open accusations of racism. And Republicans, trying to rebuild their party and discard the image of a white male club, surely don't want their own legitimate policy criticisms of the president to be obscured and degraded by those on the right whose contempt for Obama may indeed be fueled by race. Republicans see an important distinction between Obama critics who are genuinely worried about his tax, spending and national security policies and those whose fears go beyond the president’s liberalism. But for some Democrats, it’s difficult to make that distinction when conservative marchers take to Washington bearing images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Obama that read, “He had a dream, we got a nightmare,” and when a Southern congressman shouts at Obama while he addresses Congress in a demonstration of disrespect never seen when a white president spoke in that hallowed hall. Kaine, like his close friend the president, a post-baby boomer who has thought considerably about race but is politically smart enough to downplay the issue, largely avoided the question after his speech here Friday. “There’s anxiety and I assume that there’s a lot of reasons for it,” Kaine said initially, trying to avoid a news-making declaration while also not denying what many of his party brethren believe is plain on its face. He settled on this: “Something is going on there. I can’t figure it all out. I’m not a psychologist. But my goal is to beat it and to continue to put the facts on the table and count on the American public [who] when you make it plain, I think they understand what’s right and they go with you.” Brazile said there was little upside in Obama’s administration weighing in on the racial debate. “You cannot have a conversation when the elephant in the room begins to dance,” Brazile said. “For the White House to exhaust their political capital to make this a teachable moment – as they did with Gates and [Sergeant James] Crowley -- would be hugely distracting. The president should continue to focus on jobs and healthcare.” She added: “Everything in his in-box is already marked urgent.” |
Drugs, Murder, Race, and Harvard
Drugs, Murder, Race, and Harvard
Chanequa Campbell rose from Brooklyn's gritty Bed-Stuy neighborhood to the pinnacle of the ivy league. Then somebody died in her dorm.
Published Jul 18, 2009
Prep For Prep is an organization that identifies and prepares bright poor kids to attend New York City's elite private schools. Judged by college admissions, it is a great success. Prep for Prep sends a slightly higher proportion of its graduates (about a quarter) to Ivy League schools than such traditional Ivy spawns as Groton or St. Paul's. It currently has 40 kids at Harvard, more than Choate or Hotchkiss. Chanequa Campbell, 21, a native of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and a member of Harvard's class of 2009, was regarded as a model Prep for Prep student. In May 2005, at Prep for Prep's annual Lilac Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Campbell spoke to a thousand guests, many of them wealthy bankers and lawyers, about overcoming the challenge of living in two worlds. At home, she said, she was sometimes regarded as "too white." At school, she said, she was sometimes regarded as "too black." But with the support of Prep for Prep, she found a sense of community and a sense of self-worth. She said she was proud to both be "in the 'hood" and going to Harvard. She received a standing ovation.
On June 4, Campbell was scheduled to receive her Harvard diploma in sociology at a traditional ceremony in the leafy neo-Georgian courtyard of Kirkland House, one of Harvard's undergraduate residences. The day would come as final validation of the faith that others had in Chanequa, and that she had in herself. About 20 members of Chanequa's family were expecting to attend.
But on May 18, a 21-year-old African-American male, a non-Harvard student named Justin Cosby, was shot in the Kirkland House basement, in what was reported to be an attempted drug rip-off gone wrong. Cosby later died of his wounds. Three young black men, none of them Harvard students, were implicated in the shooting. At a press conference, the local district attorney, Gerard Leone, also linked two Harvard seniors to the men: Brittany Smith and Chanequa Campbell. (One of the men charged in the murder was reported to be Smith's boyfriend.) He did not elaborate on the connection, but the "common denominator," said the D.A., was "drugs." The story was widely reported in the national press.
Within a few days of the shooting, both Smith and Campbell were told by Harvard to leave campus and were denied their diplomas, at least for now. Their belongings were shipped after them. Campbell testified before a grand jury on May 20. Her lawyer, Jeff Karp, told NEWSWEEK, "This is a classic case of guilt by association. I can confidently say she won't be charged." The lawyer says Campbell was off taking an exam when the shooting occurred, and Campbell has publicly denied Internet rumors that she dealt drugs. It does not appear that she will be charged in the case, though the investigation is ongoing. Citing privacy issues and a desire not to interfere with an ongoing criminal probe, Harvard has maintained a studied silence about the whole affair. Smith, who also has not been charged with any crime, has not commented.
Campbell's connection to the men involved in the shooting is murky. It may be that she was guilty of nothing more serious than socializing with some of them. But the case has been played in the press as part tragedy, part morality tale, with dark insinuations about the long reach of underclass culture. For Campbell, the incident has been the source of emotional and physical pain. Her would-be rescuers are heartbroken by her fall from grace, but that's not the way she sees it. She scoffs at the suggestion that she brought the 'hood to Harvard. She is proud of her roots and wants to hold on to them; she just doesn't want to be typecast.
After making some ill-considered remarks to the press, blaming Harvard for singling her out because she was black, and dressed and spoke "in a certain way," Campbell has largely avoided speaking to reporters. But she sat down with a NEWSWEEK reporter at an Italian restaurant on the edge of Bed-Stuy. She arrived wearing a crisp oxford cloth shirt, heavy gold jewelry, and expensive designer sneakers. She was at first wary, then warm, but her eyes narrowed when she thought the questioning veered toward stereotype. She talked about her life and seemed eager to clarify misconceptions about her that have appeared in the press, but she declined to discuss the case and asked not to be quoted directly because she fears fueling the story and alienating Harvard. From this interview, and interviews with people close to her, it is possible to describe her remarkable but tortuous path. The portrait that emerges is of a young woman who is often strong and ebullient, but who suffers from serious, at times crippling, self-doubt—who is determined to go her own way, but is not quite able to free herself of the expectations and assumptions of others.
Campbell's early life centered on the somewhat ramshackle house on Lafayette Street owned by her grandmother Virginia Campbell. It has been a house filled mostly with women—Virginia Campbell's six daughters and their 13 children, of whom Chanequa was the eldest. Chanequa's aunts are noisy, opinionated, and funny. Her father has been mostly absent—in and out of prison. The family is close but chaotic. (Virginia Campbell's husband was murdered in 1984.)
From childhood, Chanequa was a bright student who won prizes and recognition at school. In fifth grade, she was selected for Prep for Prep's 14-month training program, taking extra classes in the summer and after school. Erin Duffy, one of her teachers at Prep for Prep (and still her mentor and close friend), recalls that Chanequa seemed frightened and angry and almost got into a fight on the bus on her first day. But at Prep for Prep, she appeared to blossom. Chanequa was the first person ever selected for the Samona Society, a recognition awarded by Prep for Prep for children who most powerfully grasp the possibilities of their own education.
At Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, which Chanequa attended from seventh grade through high school, she was a standout student and athlete, popular with all social groups. NEWSWEEK asked a number of her classmates what she was like. "I would say proud," replied Dan Curbelo Zeidman (Packer '05, Williams '09). "A pride that came from knowing that she was doing her best. There was definitely a sense of, 'I know where I want to go and I'm going to get there. I'm going to give my best, and that's going to be enough to get me into a place like Harvard.' "
She got into Harvard and all 14 colleges she applied to. She won a National Merit Scholarship for high test scores and scholarships from The New York Times and Coca-Cola for overall achievement. She was drawn to a small liberal-arts college in California. She liked the relaxed atmosphere, the supportive feel of the students. Instead, she went to Harvard, not so much because she really wanted to, but because she wanted to show that someone from Bed-Stuy could make it at the nation's best-known brand-name university.
Although as a high-school student she increasingly came across as outgoing and confident, Duffy, her friend and adviser from Prep for Prep, observed that at some deeper level she remained "a frightened and lonely child" who seemed to be "looking over her shoulder" at times, "wondering where all these opportunities were coming from." She was "a little leery, yet so generous in her spirit that she was a valued mentor to younger students and a trusted colleague to adults," says Duffy.
In her senior year at Packer, Chanequa had a falling-out with her mother. Chanequa's mother is not poor. She has held a steady job with New York state, and there was always money for clothes and the occasional trip to Florida. But her mother was not like the hovering parents of other Packer students. Chanequa was raised to be independent and to shrug off adversity. Even with a partial scholarship, her mother and aunts had to sacrifice to pay Chanequa's fees at Packer. But the adults around her, who expected her to meet her responsibilities on her own, never asked if she had done her homework.
Chanequa had to learn to live on both sides of New York's vast social and wealth divide. As a young teen, she attended her first Chanukah at a classmate's apartment in the Fifth Avenue luxury building where Tina Fey lives. She did not, however, often invite her friends to visit her home in Bed-Stuy, and she never asked for permission to go on expensive trips with her classmates, recognizing it might be hurtful to her family, who could not pay her way. There may have been some mother-daughter rivalry involved. Her mother did not have her daughter's opportunities, but in some ways was just as driven. While Chanequa was at Harvard, her mother went back to school, earning a master's degree.
The tension between mother and daughter was exacerbated by what Chanequa saw as a lack of sympathy on her mother's part. Suffering from severe pain in her joints, Chanequa was diagnosed in April 2003 with lupus, an auto-immune deficiency that causes the body to attack itself. Not knowing the severity of Chanequa's illness, her mother told her to tough it out. An aunt finally insisted that Chanequa see a doctor, though it was her mother who then took time off work to go with her to her treatments. (Chanequa's mother declined to comment.)
In the spring of her senior year in high school, the tensions between mother and daughter reached a breaking point. Chanequa moved out of her mother's house to her grandmother's, a few blocks away. Campbell clearly loves and respects her mother very much, and acknowledges that she bears some of the responsibility for the discord in their relationship.
Harvard became Chanequa's surrogate home. Though elite and academically rigorous, Packer has a student culture that is more supportive than at some cutthroat private schools. (Packer eighth graders attend a "Nurturing the Soul Day.") Harvard, on the other hand, is a large and diverse university. It can be, at least for some students, a coldly competitive place. If they wish, black students can find a welcome in several black organizations, but these groups have their own complex social stratifications and conformities. More than half of Harvard's 600 or so black students are from Africa or the Caribbean, and many African-Americans have families rooted in socially elite clubs and organizations like Jack and Jill, and Boulé. The head of the Black Students Association reprimanded some freshmen for wearing parkas, instead of preppy peacoats, to the winter formal. Chanequa, quick to go her own way, responded by arriving at another formal in a full-length white fur coat. An eclectic dresser, Chanequa wears sneakers designed by Gucci and Prada. Some students are called "incognegro," Harvard slang for blacks who don't embrace their racial identity. Chanequa was disdained by some as "too black," too street-tough.
Toward the end of freshman year, feeling alienated at home and at school, Chanequa suffered a mental breakdown. At about this time, according to The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, she got in trouble with school authorities for forging a check for $300. Campbell would not discuss the incident.
She worked at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street after her sophomore year. Harvard has more than a few rich kids, especially from New York, and Chanequa felt pressure to cash in: there was an assumption by her family in Brooklyn that she would become wealthy. She found herself resenting the privileged "legacies" (children of alumni) and their easy connections. She decided that finance was not her calling. She was more excited by travel—and visited 14 countries, thanks partly to financial support from Harvard (she also held a number of paid part-time jobs around the university). She spent her entire junior year abroad and was particularly taken with Italy, which she has visited 13 times and where she now has a boyfriend, a model who is half Italian, half Ghanaian.
At Harvard, she had a few close friends of very different backgrounds. At one extreme was Honor McGee, whose mother is a white Harvard grad who writes for The New York Times and whose father is a black Harvard grad and executive at HBO. (When McGee tried to run for a position with the Black Students Association, a debate ensued over whether she was "black enough.") At the other end of the social spectrum was Brittany Smith, who came from a poor background in Harlem. Chanequa and Brittany had known each other in high school, but became close only in their senior year at Harvard. They worked office jobs together for a Harvard student agency, and made extra money as waitresses for a catering company that put on parties for wealthy Cambridge residents. The two women sometimes hung out in Chanequa's room at Kirkland House.
In April of this year, the Black Students Association sent around "senior superlatives" on the organization's listserv. Campbell was named "Most Likely to Be America's Most Wanted." Hurt, Campbell sent her friends in the Association of Black Harvard Women an e-mail: "So few people in this community actually KNOW me or HAVE met me or EVER interacted with me … this is Harvard, why would we wish ill on anyone? I can take a joke but it seems the equivalent of who is the most likely to be hit by a car."
This was before the shooting incident. Afterward, there was a notable lack of support for Campbell from other blacks at Harvard. These young people were in an awkward spot—embrace Chanequa and risk being tarred by association with her; reject her and be accused of selling out. But many felt the circumstances of the shooting, and the publicity surrounding it, would make life more difficult for all black kids at Harvard. The shooters and their victim somehow had gained entry to Kirkland House, which requires an electronic identification card. One black senior, who declined tobe identified discussing a sensitive subject, pointed out that young black men at Harvard have long complained that other students, fearful of intruders, won't open the door for them when they forget their IDs. "Now they never will," said this student.
Campbell did not win much sympathy from the larger Harvard community, and she disappointed her Prep for Prep supporters, when she told The Boston Globe that she had been unfairly banned from Harvard because, as she put it, "I'm black and I'm poor and I'm from New York." She later said that she had been quoted out of context. "I did not say that Harvard is racist," she said.
Chanequa's family was disappointed to miss the triumph and pomp of Harvard graduation. Chanequa decided to have a graduation party anyway—"celebrating what I EARNED," she said on the e-mail invitation. The party, held in early June at a community center in Bed-Stuy, was not much fun for her. She had been in the hospital suffering from stomach pains that have defied diagnosis. Arriving at the party at midnight, she was vomiting and left after an hour. She is worried about losing her Harvard-provided health insurance, which expires soon, and upset about her 12 boxes of belongings, which somehow disappeared after Harvard shipped them to her home in Bed-Stuy. She says she is worn down by battling the preconceptions of others, though she realizes there is no escape—she saw news of the Harvard shooting in the London Times and in publications from Italy to Australia. Somewhat dreamily, she speaks of revolutions brought about by youth for the good of all. Recently, she took off for Italy with a one-way plane ticket. But she still hopes, someday, to get her Harvard degree.
With Aku Ammah-Tagoe, Jeremy Herb, and Dan Loeterman
LA Times's Music Blog: Kanye's outburst racially motivated?
THE L.A. TIMES MUSIC BLOG
MTV Video Music Awards: Was it Kanye being Kanye, or was his outburst something more?
September 13, 2009 | 10:56 pm
In Monday's Calendar, the Times' pop critic Ann Powers discusses the MTV Video Music Awards. An excerpt and link to the full piece is below:
At least the shocker this year was related to music.
The MTV Video Music Awards are always willfully chaotic, keeping alive the myth of pop as the provenance of rebels by placing a bunch of moderately edgy celebrities within a festive environment and fueling the mood with sexy performances, off-color jokes and "incidents" that are often staged, but good for a thousand Twitter tweets. One of these mostly bogus controversies usually goes a bit deeper, hinting at real issues of identity, status, personal power and self-expression -- the sticky stuff from which pop music is, in fact, made.
When Kanye West jumped up during Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for best female video Sunday night, put his hand over her microphone and declared that Beyoncé's losing "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" clip was "one of the best videos of all time," he did a stupid thing. He seemed like a bully inexplicably targeting an honors student, and he further damaged his rather unstable reputation without managing to make his point clear.
A couple hours later, Beyoncé received the Moonman trophy that MTV's execs had designated for her -- every superstar gets one, apparently, in this predetermined coronation of pop's latest prom court of ingenues and enduring hotties. Ever the lady, she ceded her thank-you time to Swift, who emerged seemingly quite prepared for the moment and gave a totally inconsequential speech. (She was really grateful to her video director and her fans.) It was a nice gesture of female solidarity in the face of West's boorish and, yes, macho move.
But let's consider what might have motivated West's outburst. Swift was the bestselling artist of 2008, according to Nielsen SoundScan. She's transcended her base in country music to become a top 40 juggernaut and, arguably, the current face of young female America. Beyoncé is a slightly older superstar who's also topped plenty of sales lists; like Swift, she makes chart-toppers strongly rooted in a specific genre that appeal to a wider audience. Her home base is R&B, and, through her marriage to Jay-Z and her brilliant singing style, she's strongly connected to hip-hop.
Perhaps West, who later apologized, felt that Swift's little love story mirroring the current plot of the new prime-time hit "Glee" genuinely wasn't as deserving as Beyoncé's Bob Fosse-inspired volcanic eruption of a dance routine, which has inspired thousands of tributes by fans, including Justin Timberlake and Barack Obama. Maybe he was miffed that this young black pop queen's heels were being nipped at by a blond Ivory Girl whose fans tend to look quite a bit like her.
Is that reading too much into the situation?
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