Race Files
“We live in a society that has so deeply internalized race, that race, and by extension racism, is at the very core of who we are as a people. As Americans, our history of racism is the story of us. Until we deal with that, we will never coalesce across the divisions that history has created.”
Read my latest article, “For racial healing, we need to get real about racism” on Transformation .
I generally avoid commenting on the racism and ignorance of Bill O’Reilly because my guess is that he just plays a bigot to get attention. It’s an ugly ploy. Just check out the video clip from his show I embedded below. While he rants about Asian American liberalism in Hawai’i, the footage that runs of a Waikiki street scene mainly features women in tight fitting clothes, shot from behind. It’s the kind of thing intended to make you look.
Racism for money is the worst kind of bigotry. It makes O’Reilly a tempting target, but I just don’t like to … Read more “The Bigotry Factor: O’Reilly and the Manipulation of the Model Minority Myth”
Reports of rapid demographic change in favor of people of color in the U.S. seem to have caused a reaction among many whites bordering on panic. Explosive increases in participation in white nationalist groups, the proliferation of vigilante border patrols, and the return of overt racism in mainstream politics all smell like fear to me. This reaction got me to thinking, why? Why are they so afraid of the possibility of becoming a minority?
Here’s my take. But first, a reality check. White fears are of becoming a minority are over-blown. As I’ve written elsewhere in this blog, whiteness has … Read more “Afraid of the Dark”
No, I don’t mean car blinkers. I’m referring to the kind of blinkers that are used to keep race horses looking straight ahead at the jockey’s goal while blinding them to the distractions on either side.
Racism blinkers us. It imposes a kind of tunnel vision, causing social problems to appear to be related to differences in race and culture (and not racism), while blinding us to the common roots of many of our problems.
The study conducted by the Pew Research Center on Asian Americans that I wrote about in my last post is a good example. In it, … Read more “Blinkered By Race”
