Tag: Racism

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It’s Not the Taj, It’s the Tour Guide: Some Musings on a Trip to India

Taj-Mahal

Almost exactly two years ago, I had the wonderful opportunity to accompany a group of my students to India for a course designed to specifically examine how notions of “justice” operate in an Indian context. As you might imagine, we saw literally hundreds of noteworthy things. With time, though, I have mentally sifted through some of these memories of what went on during our travels and realized that the most poignant moments of analysis came from events that no one had planned. Continue reading “It’s Not the Taj, It’s the Tour Guide: Some Musings on a Trip to India”

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The Well-Intentioned Racist

Target practice for guns

As Americans today celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, many of us continue to grapple with how to contextualize and understand the recent deaths of several young black American men at the hands of the police. This need to explain is thrown into even starker relief with the very recent story that black men’s photos are being used for target practice by the North Miami Beach police department. The chief of police insists that this is a case of “poor judgment,” not racism, because those officers taking aim at the targets are themselves multi-racial, and because other races are portrayed in other targets. As one might expect, however, at least one of the black men whose face became a target is not personally reassured, saying, “Now I’m being used as a target? … I’m a father. I’m a husband. I’m a career man. I work 9-to-5.”

It may seem quite paradoxical to discuss a “well-intentioned racist,” but arguably, there is usually no other kind. I am often amazed by how we expect that racism (or discrimination, more generally) is something committed by self-described bigots. Like many others who study and teach about social dynamics, I frequently tell my students that prejudicial behaviors and attitudes are not only ubiquitous, but also quite mundane — they are simply the old recipe of one part distinction and another part essentialization — and they are used to stir the stew of social power. Continue reading “The Well-Intentioned Racist”

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Of Planks and Specks and Ice Cream Trucks

a black and white photo of people waiting in line for an ice cream truckI recently wrote a post on living in Alabama, and the way it can be frustrating when those from elsewhere in the country adopt the moral high ground and judge us while exempting themselves from the same criteria. My point was that while, yes, there’s a number of complexities associated with the U.S. south when it comes to such topics as the history of race relations, they are hardly unique to this part of the country. Continue reading “Of Planks and Specks and Ice Cream Trucks”

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Who Are You? I’m an Alabamian

“Who Are You?” is an ongoing series that asks members of Culture on the Edge to reflect on one of their own many identities (whether national, gendered, racial, familial, etc.), theorizing at the same time the self-identification that they each chose to discuss.

When, back in early 2001, I got the job as Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama I was working at what was then called Southwest Missouri State University, in Springfield, MO, and I recall sending out an email to my friends and colleagues in North America and Europe, to let them know that I’d soon be moving. Many wrote back their congratulations, of course, but I noticed a curious thing: unlike my Canadian and European friends, many of my U.S. colleagues’ congratulations came with what I read as subtle qualifications, equivocations, maybe even an unwritten sigh or two. For, sooner or later, they’d write something like, “Alabama? Really?” or “Wow. Well, good luck.”

It seemed that while others had read the part about becoming a department chair or moving to a major state university, others couldn’t get past the part about moving to Alabama. Continue reading “Who Are You? I’m an Alabamian”

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Oh, the Humanity…

edgedailyshowAs I tried to suggest in a post last week, concern over dehumanizing the people we study has long struck me as a pseudo-problem, i.e., a problem of scholars’ own making, inasmuch as I think that we worry about this only for those with whom we already agree, with whom we already share some affinity. In a word, the fact of the concern is an example of our own identification practice/interests up and running. For all others, we, as scholars, are likely in tacit agreement that we are not trying to convey or conserve their self-perceived meanings or some ethereal quality that they apparently share with us but, instead, trying to figure out how in the world they could even think or act in the way that they do (i.e., in such cases the people we study are a puzzle to be solved and not a pristine human value to be protected from the prying eyes of outsiders), given that their actions or beliefs are so patently odd or curious or wrong or unethical or illegal or immoral.

To us, that is…. Continue reading “Oh, the Humanity…”

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There She Is…

Nina-Davuluri_2672797b

“[Nina Davuluri‘s] victory did inspire some disturbing posts on Twitter; people were upset that the honor was given to an Arab, which of course she is not. Supporters of the Miss American pageant were very upset themselves, and why shouldnt they be: all this racism was ruining their sexism.”

– Peter Segal, host of National Public Radio’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” (listen here)

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“She Fit That Profile”

colvinToday is the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered during the now famous March on Washington. To mark that date, Culture on the Edge asks: Do you know who Claudette Colvin is?

For if we’re marking anniversaries, which are part of a discourse on origins, after all — anchoring the present as significant inasmuch as it is somehow related to an authoritative, annually commemorated past — then, given this blog’s critique of how we usually think about identity, there might be something interesting to learn by taking a moment today to look at how we today talk about that period in U.S. history that we now know as the civil rights movement. Or, more specifically, to ask how we pick our origins points and the anniversaries that we celebrate, and what these choices about the past have to say about who we think ourselves to be today? Continue reading ““She Fit That Profile””