When the hurly-burly’s done

But here are some videos from last Saturday’s Matisyahu show that I found on YouTube. I know a lot of you were there, so I thought you might dig this. Enjoy your break, get some rest, and we’ll get crackin’ on midterms stuff when we return…

For your second satire post, please watch this clip from The Colbert Report and write about what you thought as you watched it.  What is the position that the character of Stephen Colbert promotes?  What do you think is the real message behind the segment?  What makes this satirical?  Was it funny?

Chris Lehmann writes about what blogging is, or at least should be:

It’s about putting ideas out there, exploring them, sharing them, and taking part in a larger community. Sometimes, yes, it’s just about an announcement or two, but at its best, my blogging helps me think, brings others into my thought process and improves it because of their input and forces me to make sense of my thoughts — which is why it’s so damned hard sometimes.

I feel this.  There’s some tension around these parts (”these parts” being where my practical and utopian sides meet and wrestle) when it comes to what the purpose of all this blogging really is.  There are some teachers here who are just getting into blogging, and that’s great, but since I (and by extension, my ENG213 classes) are being held up as a model, I feel some real pressure to demonstrate a real honest-to-goodness need for blogging on something like Edublogs, versus something like Nicenet or, for goodness sakes, our official school website thing.

I can spend five minutes a day and use this blog, this space, as a place to post assignments.  This is not a bad idea.  I have plenty of students who miss class from time to time, due to illness or vacations, and it’s great for them to be able to keep up with what’s going on.  And since my assignments are, for the most part, either in a book that the students have been issued, or else in a text that’s available online, that solves a lot of problems.  But I’m afraid that if I just model that, then the students’ blogs will just contain perfunctory responses that don’t really benefit from being in a public space, for public consumption, and inviting public response.

So I’m trying, I really am, to make this a more reflective space and to encourage my students to reflect more.  I think the racism posts are a step in the right direction, but every time I get excited I immediately have to ask for more.  If anyone has any ideas, please, by all means, post them–I’m looking for anything I can get.  I just don’t know how to take them over that ridge and into the vast meadow of reflective readership.

It’s probably past time to get into this, but I think we need to step back from our attempts to identify racism and ponder, for a minute or two, what the term actually means.

Wikipedia, though it’s got its issues, is a pretty good place to start.  Its entry on “racism” begins thus:

Racism is commonly defined as a belief or doctrine where inherent biological differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, with a corollary that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.^[1]

I think that the corollary is really important to keep in mind.  The belief in the biological differences that go beyond physical appearance and relative susceptibility to various diseases (I’m thinking of things like sickle-cell in the African-American population, for example) has been pretty much disproven.  But the key is in the idea that the racial differences, such as they may, make one group superior to the others and thus destined to rule.

The Wikipedia entry goes on to note that 

[t]he term racism is sometimes used to refer to preference for one’s own ethnic group (ethnocentrism),^[2] fear of foreigners (xenophobia), views or preferences against interbreeding of the races (miscegenation),^[3] and nationalism,^[4], and/or a generalization of a specific group of people (stereotype); regardless of any explicit belief in superiority or inferiority embedded within such views or preferences.

That to me is more of “prejudice” than “racism.”  Check out this excerpt from the book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D, which I checked out of the high school media center last spring (and which was an amazingly interesting read):

Many people use the terms prejudice and racism interchangeably.  I do not, and I think it is important to make a distinction.  In his book Portraits of White Racism, David Wellman argues convincingly that limiting our understanding of racism to prejudice does not offer a sufficient explanation for the persistence of racism.  He defines racism as a “system of advantage based on race.”…In the context of the United States, this system clearly operates to the advantage of Whites and to the disadvantage of people of color.  Another related definition of racism…is “prejudice plus power.”

So it’s more than just thinking your race is the best.  It’s using that feeling of superiority to oppress others. 

Let’s see if we can incorporate some thoughts on this into the second round of racism blog entries.

I’ll let the writers speak for themselves.  This is just a small sampling:

Branden:

I don’t think of myself as racist or bias, but when I think if I am one of the 80 percent who don’t realize it, I began to wonder.  Has America come to a point where such cruel ideals have become beliefs so natural to human beings that we don’t even realize it?  It really scares me. 

Anna:

I think it’s very interesting that today, even though we don’t believe that racism exists much anymore, a lot of us probably think of African Americans and other races differently without even realizing it.  The reason given by the author is a veyr possible one, that black people are generally found more often in poorer communities, and so we think of them as more of a threat than others.  Clearly, there are a lot of possible reasons that we and the police officers might possibly have been racist.

Cindy:

Another example that really bothers me but, I can not do much about is the segregation in the Student Center! This segregation is not written to exist but, it exists mentally. What I mean by this is that people sit with people who they feel comfortable with, relate to, and do not feel opressed by. The insecuirty between diverse people is the streotypes and the feeling of not wanting to deal with them. I do not blame people for sitting with people who they are most comfotable with because, it’s their free choice. However, I find it extrodinary how it always comes down to most people sitting with other people of their race.

Anna (not the same one):

It’s interesting to me that the students are more aware of racism, than the teachers who had taught them how horrible it was. This raises interesting questions in my mind. Are our teachers only teaching us that racism is wrong because they have to? Or do they truly think racism is wrong? And are some of them even racist themselves?

Eliza:

I feel that American’s feel very ‘nervous’ about race. It is something that is talked about or touched upon breifly, but never really expanded on.

Jon:

However, having said all of this, there is a very good chance that Barack Obama will be our next president.  Unfortunately, part of his campaign will have to be making himself appealing to the white population.

Lucy:

 Maybe if more people in upper class, privleged societies saw the terrible tolls that prejudice can take on a racist society, there would be more initiative to stop it altogether.

Mason:

If being positive can also be considered racist, then what direction do we have to go in order stop being racist?

Rachelle:

When you read this book, you can not believe that this is the same United States that we live in today.  The language that is in this book is very disturbing and really gives the reader a lasting impression on just how hard the south was on African Americans during this time.