(no subject)
I love Newsweek's latest cover. Nice and witty, and for god's sake it's about time someone directly punched the naysayers with reality.
This week is International Blog Against Racism Week, and I kept putting off blogging until today (because I'm lazy as hell, I didn't blog for choice or against sexism earlier this year because I couldn't figure out what to say). And since we're leaving tomorrow for a four day trip to Michigan's Upper Peninsula (woo hoo northern backwoods!), today'll be the only day I can blog about something. *hits self*
So my post will mostly be about my observations as a white person who has just started paying attention to race issues. (Since before, being white, I didn't really care because it didn't affect me.)
For the past month or so, I've been going through all my magazines--old Girls' Life from middle school, Newsweek, Anime Insider--for ads and pictures and such to use in collages I made to put on my school supplies. I'm a dork like that. Anyway, I noticed that, in all of the magazines, only a handful of their ads featured people who weren't white or Asian. As in, I can count on one hand how many ads had people darker than a glass of milk. Thus, unfortunately, my collages are lacking in diversity. I have one picture of a black girl from Africa (the ad wasn't specific about what region she was from, just "Africa", which I'll get to in a bit), and the ad was for a humanitarian campaign to help poor people in that area. Apparently, the only reason to put black people in ads is if they *have* to, simply because nobody else lives where the ad is supposed to take place.
I've also noticed vast underrepresentation on TV. Commercials are getting better, but they're still overwhelmingly full of white people. The only ads with more POC than white people are the ones that are anti-gang and anti-violence and anti-gun, in which the POC are the ones who are in gangs, are violent and have guns. Yeah, that's real positive.
Then there are ads with token minorities. You know, one of each of the "other" and then a bunch of white people. Like, three white kids and then one black kid, one Latin@ kid, one Asian kid. Sometimes there's no Latin@ kid or no Asian kid, just two "other" kids. And I use "kids" because, generally, this method is used for products or services directed at children.
After that, there's reality TV (which I've been watching a lot of lately). This actually came up on last night's episode of Top Chef. Tre (the only black contestant on the show) said, of the guest judge Govind Armstrong, "he's also African-American, which you don't see a lot of nowadays in the cooking industry" (quoted verbatim, couldn't find the video of it). And for each season of Top Chef so far, there's only been one black contestant per season. So, in a sense, Top Chef does kind of show the reality--that there aren't a lot of black people that far up in the cooking industry. But in other shows--What Not to Wear, Trading Spaces, other shows on TLC--you'll be hard-put to find more than three episodes with POC. And What Not to Wear and Trading Spaces have at least four seasons under their belts! I'm an avid watcher of both (Trading Spaces because I loooove interior design, What Not to Wear so I can write a nasty essay about it someday), and I've see less than five episodes of each show that had POC in them. Nobody on the WNTW staff is an ethnic minority. And only two of the designers on Trading Spaces are POC. All the carpenters are white. Come on, TLC! The world is not made up of white straight cisgendered people only!
Returning to the "Africa = one big country with only one culture" thing I mentioned earlier, there was an episode of either Decorating Cents or Design on a Dime (I can't really tell them apart, they both have silly puns in their names) in which a woman had decked out her house in an "African" theme. Because, as we all know, Africa is like Australia and is both a continent and a country. The people who were helping her redecorate it so that it was a more functional room with the same theme kept referring to it as "African", while the woman who decorated it originally seemed to at least have a specific region in mind. One of the people on the design team stuck to calling it "ethnic", which I thought was a lot better suited than "African", especially considering that the guy who went around to do the shopping paid no attention to tribe, culture or region and just grabbed what he thought was "African-themed-looking". The Sims did something similar--they have an "African" set that has "African" sculptures and such. Not Afrikan. African. When will people learn that Africa is not only just as diverse in culture as Europe, which we never lump together as one culture, but that Africa has several times more cultures than Europe does? The only reason we don't learn about them is because white people don't care and all the tribes got split up because stupid white people came in and cut up the whole continent.
That's one reason I'm going to take African Civ next semester for my non-western Civ credit--I want to learn this stuff. Speaking of which, I want to briefly talk about the issues of race in my city and, especially, at my school.
One of our requirements to graduate here is to take one Western Civ class (this includes Modern Western Civ) and then one "non-western civ" class. That's right, everybody HAS to take a class that focuses on white people and their achievements, but you have to choose from four other classes focusing on people who aren't white. Instead of offering all six classes equally and requiring that students take two of them, we MUST take one about white people and all the others get lumped in as "non-western" and are so unimportant that you only have to take one of them to graduate.
For our annual Multi-Cultural Feast that we have before Thanksgiving Break, people would rather do fictional cultures and have two of the same European culture than African cultures. Sometimes people do North African cultures, but no one does anything south of Egypt and Morocco. And, of course, they only do countries, not actual tribes.
Our school is not a district school. People choose to apply here, and, hopefully, get accepted. This city is incredibly diverse. And yet, in 450 students, we have a handful of Asian kids, ONE Muslim student, maybe one Indian student, and around fifteen black students. And while we have a thriving BSU that organizes all kinds of awareness projects and fundraisers every year (theirs is one of three school dances, along with prom and the Halloween dance), we are still a predominantly white school in a city filled with people from all over the world. Especially in the area I live in, there are a lot of people from India, Sri Lanka, Japan, South Korea, China, Thailand, Taiwan, Turkey...the list goes on. And yet, our school is severely lacking in diversity. It's a mystery the people of the school have been trying to figure out for years.
Then there's our staff. The only POC on our staff are the diversity counselor, the speech therapist, one of the guys who helps out the disabled students, one of the math teachers, and the guy who makes sure the students aren't doing drugs in the hallway. They don't have high-end jobs on the faculty, and you hardly ever see them. We had the opportunity to add some diversity with the hiring of a new art teacher, but ultimately, a white woman was picked.
I hope I made sense, and if I said anything that wasn't correct or right, please say so. :)
If you want something on a more in-depth, experienced and all-out better level, read kittikattie's posts from the past couple of years for IBARW and about race in general. GO GO GO.
This week is International Blog Against Racism Week, and I kept putting off blogging until today (because I'm lazy as hell, I didn't blog for choice or against sexism earlier this year because I couldn't figure out what to say). And since we're leaving tomorrow for a four day trip to Michigan's Upper Peninsula (woo hoo northern backwoods!), today'll be the only day I can blog about something. *hits self*
So my post will mostly be about my observations as a white person who has just started paying attention to race issues. (Since before, being white, I didn't really care because it didn't affect me.)
For the past month or so, I've been going through all my magazines--old Girls' Life from middle school, Newsweek, Anime Insider--for ads and pictures and such to use in collages I made to put on my school supplies. I'm a dork like that. Anyway, I noticed that, in all of the magazines, only a handful of their ads featured people who weren't white or Asian. As in, I can count on one hand how many ads had people darker than a glass of milk. Thus, unfortunately, my collages are lacking in diversity. I have one picture of a black girl from Africa (the ad wasn't specific about what region she was from, just "Africa", which I'll get to in a bit), and the ad was for a humanitarian campaign to help poor people in that area. Apparently, the only reason to put black people in ads is if they *have* to, simply because nobody else lives where the ad is supposed to take place.
I've also noticed vast underrepresentation on TV. Commercials are getting better, but they're still overwhelmingly full of white people. The only ads with more POC than white people are the ones that are anti-gang and anti-violence and anti-gun, in which the POC are the ones who are in gangs, are violent and have guns. Yeah, that's real positive.
Then there are ads with token minorities. You know, one of each of the "other" and then a bunch of white people. Like, three white kids and then one black kid, one Latin@ kid, one Asian kid. Sometimes there's no Latin@ kid or no Asian kid, just two "other" kids. And I use "kids" because, generally, this method is used for products or services directed at children.
After that, there's reality TV (which I've been watching a lot of lately). This actually came up on last night's episode of Top Chef. Tre (the only black contestant on the show) said, of the guest judge Govind Armstrong, "he's also African-American, which you don't see a lot of nowadays in the cooking industry" (quoted verbatim, couldn't find the video of it). And for each season of Top Chef so far, there's only been one black contestant per season. So, in a sense, Top Chef does kind of show the reality--that there aren't a lot of black people that far up in the cooking industry. But in other shows--What Not to Wear, Trading Spaces, other shows on TLC--you'll be hard-put to find more than three episodes with POC. And What Not to Wear and Trading Spaces have at least four seasons under their belts! I'm an avid watcher of both (Trading Spaces because I loooove interior design, What Not to Wear so I can write a nasty essay about it someday), and I've see less than five episodes of each show that had POC in them. Nobody on the WNTW staff is an ethnic minority. And only two of the designers on Trading Spaces are POC. All the carpenters are white. Come on, TLC! The world is not made up of white straight cisgendered people only!
Returning to the "Africa = one big country with only one culture" thing I mentioned earlier, there was an episode of either Decorating Cents or Design on a Dime (I can't really tell them apart, they both have silly puns in their names) in which a woman had decked out her house in an "African" theme. Because, as we all know, Africa is like Australia and is both a continent and a country. The people who were helping her redecorate it so that it was a more functional room with the same theme kept referring to it as "African", while the woman who decorated it originally seemed to at least have a specific region in mind. One of the people on the design team stuck to calling it "ethnic", which I thought was a lot better suited than "African", especially considering that the guy who went around to do the shopping paid no attention to tribe, culture or region and just grabbed what he thought was "African-themed-looking". The Sims did something similar--they have an "African" set that has "African" sculptures and such. Not Afrikan. African. When will people learn that Africa is not only just as diverse in culture as Europe, which we never lump together as one culture, but that Africa has several times more cultures than Europe does? The only reason we don't learn about them is because white people don't care and all the tribes got split up because stupid white people came in and cut up the whole continent.
That's one reason I'm going to take African Civ next semester for my non-western Civ credit--I want to learn this stuff. Speaking of which, I want to briefly talk about the issues of race in my city and, especially, at my school.
One of our requirements to graduate here is to take one Western Civ class (this includes Modern Western Civ) and then one "non-western civ" class. That's right, everybody HAS to take a class that focuses on white people and their achievements, but you have to choose from four other classes focusing on people who aren't white. Instead of offering all six classes equally and requiring that students take two of them, we MUST take one about white people and all the others get lumped in as "non-western" and are so unimportant that you only have to take one of them to graduate.
For our annual Multi-Cultural Feast that we have before Thanksgiving Break, people would rather do fictional cultures and have two of the same European culture than African cultures. Sometimes people do North African cultures, but no one does anything south of Egypt and Morocco. And, of course, they only do countries, not actual tribes.
Our school is not a district school. People choose to apply here, and, hopefully, get accepted. This city is incredibly diverse. And yet, in 450 students, we have a handful of Asian kids, ONE Muslim student, maybe one Indian student, and around fifteen black students. And while we have a thriving BSU that organizes all kinds of awareness projects and fundraisers every year (theirs is one of three school dances, along with prom and the Halloween dance), we are still a predominantly white school in a city filled with people from all over the world. Especially in the area I live in, there are a lot of people from India, Sri Lanka, Japan, South Korea, China, Thailand, Taiwan, Turkey...the list goes on. And yet, our school is severely lacking in diversity. It's a mystery the people of the school have been trying to figure out for years.
Then there's our staff. The only POC on our staff are the diversity counselor, the speech therapist, one of the guys who helps out the disabled students, one of the math teachers, and the guy who makes sure the students aren't doing drugs in the hallway. They don't have high-end jobs on the faculty, and you hardly ever see them. We had the opportunity to add some diversity with the hiring of a new art teacher, but ultimately, a white woman was picked.
I hope I made sense, and if I said anything that wasn't correct or right, please say so. :)
If you want something on a more in-depth, experienced and all-out better level, read kittikattie's posts from the past couple of years for IBARW and about race in general. GO GO GO.