Ways of Thinking...: July 2020

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Lesson 12: Race in the U.S.

The Census provides a map and chart of racial diversity in the US:

https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/04/09/race-in-america-2019/

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Racism toward Americans who are Hindu

PEW Data about Americans who identify as Hindu.

Hindu American website, and the Hindu Hate Watch https://www.hinduamerican.org/projects/hindu-hate-watch

Trends and Analysis

Looking at the overall number of suspected hate crimes reported in the media, there are two important trends to note.

First, two important spikes in the incidents must be noted: the first occurring right after the 9/11 attacks; the second occurring in 2014-15.

The first spike is more easily explainable, coming as a part of a backlash from the attacks targeting Arab and Muslim Americans, and those who could be mistaken for such, including Sikh, Hindu, and other South Asian Americans. However, the 2014 spike is not tied to any such major terrorist attack.

The second trend is a shift in the types of incidents occurring.

Out of 18 reported incidents in the last three months of 2001, two were attacks on houses of worship, four were attacks on private or commercial property, while the remaining twelve were physical attacks or harassment of individuals. In contrast, out of the 33 incidents in 2014 and 2015, there were only two attacks on individuals, with the rest of the incidents comprising of vandalism, attacks on houses of worship, and home invasions. Subsequent to 2015, there were 18 incidents, 14 of which were directed towards individuals and four against houses of worship.

Anti-Hindu Prejudice in the Media and the Public Sphere

Even as the Hindu American community grows its numbers, Hinduism remains poorly understood in the American public sphere. According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2014, only 22% of Americans knew a practitioner of the Hindu faith, compared to 38% for Muslims and 61% for Jews. Americans in general also held a neutral or negative view of Hindus compared to other religions in the United States.

Given a lack of familiarity with Hindu practitioners, many Americans are influenced by the portrayal of Hinduism offered in the mainstream media, by public officials, and by their own community and religious leaders.

Unfortunately, much of the coverage of Hindus, Hindu Americans, and Hinduism in these outlets is flawed, relying on stereotypes and inaccurate information.

Anti-Hindu Prejudice In the Public Square

Given the level of misconceptions and ignorance about the Hindu community and it’s beliefs, Hindu Americans frequently face harassment and religious prejudice when they attempt to participate in public life, whether they choose to lobby their representatives or run for public office.

On September 14, 2000, the first Hindu invocation in the history of the United States Congress was offered by Venkatachalapathi Samudrala before the U.S. House of Representatives.

This prayer attracted criticism from the Family Research Council, who argued that it was a sign that the country was “drifting from its Judeo-Christian roots.”

On July 12, 2007, the first Hindu invocation was offered before the US Senate by Nevada Hindu leader Rajan Zed. As Zed stood up to speak, three protesters started screaming at him, “This is an abomination!” Zed’s invocation was the first invocation in the history of the United States Senate to have been protested.

Shortly after the incident, former Navy Chaplain, Gordon Klingenschmitt wrote in the protester’s defense, arguing that Hinduism constituted idolatry and should not be respected in America.

Similarly, Rev. Flip Denham condemned the prayer, decrying the equal treatment accorded to Christianity and Hinduism, and accusing Hinduism of worship a “false god.”

A number of public figures joined the chorus of support for the protesters including US Representative Bill Sali (R-ID), Tim Waldmon of the American Family Association, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and currently a commissioner at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Bonnie Alba of Renew America, evangelical activist David Barton, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court, and Rev. Wiley Drake of the Southern Baptist Convention.

In March 2015, Zed was invited to give the invocation before the Idaho State Senate. Unlike the 2000 and 2007 invocations, which were largely protested by outside groups, the 2015 invocation was protested by members of the Idaho State Senate. Senator Steve Vick, who led the protests, argued that Hinduism should not be welcome in Idaho because Hindus “worship cows” and “have a caste system.” Sen. Sheryl Nuxoll added that “Hindu [sic] is a false faith with false gods.”

Similarly, Hindu attempts to represent their heritage alongside Christian monuments have repeatedly been rejected. Applications to include Hindu monuments alongside the Ten Commandments have been rejected in Arkansas and Oklahoma.
Hindu candidates running for office have frequently been the target of religious prejudice and attacks.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), the first Hindu American elected to Congress, was criticized by her opponent for her Hindu faith.

Similarly, former Minnesota State Senator Satveer Chaudhary was asked to convert to Christianity by his Republican opponent in her concession speech. She said, “The race of your life is more important than this one…It is my sincere wish that you’ll get to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Jesus is the way.”

Even non-Hindu candidates open themselves up to the risk of attacks if they appear tolerant or respectful of Hinduism.

In Kentucky, Gov. Steve Beshear was attacked by State Senate President David Williams for attending the groundbreaking ceremony for a Hindu temple. In his remarks, Williams announced that he would never participate in a religious ceremony that was non-Christian and demanded that all Hindus in Kentucky convert to Christianity.

President Barack Obama was attacked for speaking positively about the Hindu God Hanuman.

Ordinary Hindu Americans have also not been spared. In early 2019, after the Tulsi Gabbard became the first ever Hindu American to run for president, several media outlets began targeting political contributions made by individuals with “Hindu origin names.” These articles accused Hindu Americans of having dual loyalties to India. They also alleged, without any evidence, that these same donors financially support Indian political parties and politicians, which incidentally, would be in contravention of Indian law.

These articles have yet to be redacted and editors have failed to respond to questions about the racist and bigoted nature of these “investigations,” including whether they would approve of similar investigations of Jewish donors to Jewish candidates, Muslim donors to Muslim candidates, or Hindu Americans contributions to other candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and numerous others.

Such attacks show the progress that needs to be made before religious prejudice is erased.

And from Doximity the most common last name for doctors has changed to Patel!

Thursday, July 9, 2020

A Sociological Response to J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy

The most complete rebuttal to J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy is Appalachian Reckoning; A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. It is an anthology written by a number of social scientists including sociologists as well as other humanities scholars. Here is a summary from the publisher's website,

With hundreds of thousands of copies sold, a Ron Howard movie in the works, and the rise of its author as a media personality, J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis has defined Appalachia for much of the nation. What about Hillbilly Elegy accounts for this explosion of interest during this period of political turmoil? Why have its ideas raised so much controversy? And how can debates about the book catalyze new, more inclusive political agendas for the region’s future?

Appalachian Reckoning is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow Hillbilly Elegy has cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Hillbilly Elegy to allow Appalachians from varied backgrounds to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography. The essays and creative work collected in Appalachian Reckoning provide a deeply personal portrait of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. Complicating simplistic visions that associate the region almost exclusively with death and decay, Appalachian Reckoning makes clear Appalachia’s intellectual vitality, spiritual richness, and progressive possibilities.

Here is an NY Times review of Appalachian Reckoning.

Here is a partial table of contents:

Hillbilly Elitism by T. R. C. Hutton;

Social Capital by Jeff Mannp

Once Upon a Time in “Trumpalachia”: Hillbilly Elegy, Personal Choice, and the Blame Game by Dwight B. Billings

Stereotypes on the Syllabus: Exploring Hillbilly Elegy’s Use as an Instructional Text at Colleges and Universities by Elizabeth Catte

Benham, Kentucky, Coalminer / Wise County, Virginia, Landscape by Theresa Burriss

Panning for Gold: A Reflection of Life from Appalachia by Ricardo Nazario y Colón

Will the Real Hillbilly Please Stand Up? Urban Appalachian Migration and Culture Seen through the Lens of Hillbilly Elegy by Roger Guy

What Hillbilly Elegy Reveals about Race in Twenty-First-Century America by Lisa R. Pruitt

Prisons Are Not Innovation by Lou Murrey

Down and Out in Middletown and Jackson: Drugs, Dependency, and Decline in J. D. Vance’s Capitalist Realism by Travis Linnemann and Corina Medley

Additional critique of Hillbilly Elegy

From the New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/138717/jd-vance-false-prophet-blue-america

Elegy is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class. Vance’s central argument is that hillbillies themselves are to blame for their troubles. “Our religion has changed,” he laments, to a version “heavy on emotional rhetoric” and “light on the kind of social support” that he needed as a child. He also faults “a peculiar crisis of masculinity.” This brave new world, in sore need of that old time religion and manly men, is apparently to blame for everything from his mother’s drug addiction to the region’s economic crisis.

“We spend our way to the poorhouse,” he writes. “We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.”

And he isn’t interested in government solutions. All hillbillies need to do is work hard, maybe do a stint in the military, and they can end up at Yale Law School like he did. “Public policy can help,” he writes, “but there is no government that can fix these problems for us … it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

Set aside the anti-government bromides that could have been ripped from a random page of National Review, where Vance is a regular contributor. There is a more sinister thesis at work here, one that dovetails with many liberal views of Appalachia and its problems. Vance assures readers that an emphasis on Appalachia’s economic insecurity is “incomplete” without a critical examination of its culture. His great takeaway from life in America’s underclass is: Pull up those bootstraps. Don’t question elites. Don’t ask if they erred by granting people mortgages and lines of credit they couldn’t afford to repay. Don’t call it what it is—corporate deception—or admit that it plunged this country into one of the worst economic crises it’s ever experienced.

From Contexts (2019),

In Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, W. Carson Byrd conducts a theoretical case study of the book, which has achieved wide-reaching notoriety since its 2016 release. In particular, Byrd interrogates how Vance’s use of color-blind framing and White ignorance (the purposeful position of ignorance toward issues of racial inequality) makes his account palatable to Whites, despite targeting a segment of Whites.
Byrd argues that Vance’s book gained acceptance by presenting racial inequality as the natural result of blending genetic determinism and racial essentialism. Vance even adopts culture of poverty explanations for the position of Appalachian Whites that mimic those used to stereotype inner-city Blacks (since at least the Moynihan Report). Byrd also highlights that Vance explicitly asks readers to avoid using a racial lens as they interpret his story. Combined with its focus on micro-level explanations for pathological behaviors and inequality, Hillbilly Elegy effectively erases the racial makeup of Appalachia (making it seem White and homogenous), thus removing race from the equation to allow space for Vance (and readers) to retain their White ignorance.
Pointedly, Byrd warns that Vance’s color-blind accounts of the plight of Appalachian Whites paint both intraracial and interracial inequality as inevitable by sensationalizing and giving legitimacy to racist and biodeterminist explanations of inequality. Byrd is critical, too, of how rewarding this book and other accounts that are similarly dismissive about structural solutions could negatively impact efforts toward systematic analyses of and potential policy remedies for inequality.

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Social Class and the Connection Between Location and Education

The Wall Street Journal published a study of data showing where graduates from different colleges move after graduating. The article and interactive is here.

Tuesday, July 7, 2020

So you want to learn more about race or racism? Here's recommended reading...

Monday, July 6, 2020

Brief history of the recent sociology of race

Brief history of the recent sociology of race

Historically, the approach to race has had some major evolutions especially within sociology.

As the U.S. emerged from the civil rights movement, by the 1980s, the emphasis for reacting to race in the U.S. was on colorblindness or acknowledging that race is a made-up social construct so we should no longer think in terms of race; we should try not to see anyone's race, and move forward in the world ignoring race.

However, colorblindness did not reduce racism, instead, it ignored it. This allowed racism to continue and allowed SOME people to claim they were not racist because they ignored race (but also ignored the racism)

This led to a new movement (late 90s) championed by sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. He said we should strive to be race-conscious. This means that we should acknowledge that though race is not a discrete biological category, it is in fact a social construct. As such, it affects both how think about our own identity as well as how we think and act toward other people. Some of these thoughts and actions might be explicit/conscious and some are implicit/unconscious. Race consciousness emphasized trying to be conscious of all of these attitudes.

However, being race-conscious allowed SOME people to believe that they were doing their part to be not racist. It was possible to feel that you understand the racial dynamics in America and that you were going to try hard to be aware of racist attitudes and actions and avoid them in your own life. This could allow SOME people to go about their business feeling righteous about their own views on race, all the while allowing the status quo to continue. And the status quo meant that racism could continue. Sometimes there was a legacy of racism - such as the wealth gap which was generational, and other times there was racism embedded in social institutions. The empirical data for this type of racial inequality is overwhelming. (If you need data/examples here, I am happy to provide it)

So it became clear that individuals claiming to be racially conscious and self-aware was not changing the system. This led to Ibram Kendi's work called How to Be an Anti-racist. Kendi's main thesis is that being race-conscious and working to not be racist as an individual is not enough to reverse the racism already embedded within society. Doing so, allows racism to continue in really significant ways. And so Kendi is trying to emphasize that simply denouncing racism without doing anything does not make one anti-racist. In order to truly be anti-racist, one must actively work against the forces of racism that are already embedded in society.

Some people want to criticize Kendi for being too extreme. And I think that it is possible to be critical of specific aspects of being an anti-racist. For example, there are some Americans perceived as whites who claim to be working against racism but not all Americans who identify as black will see their actions as such. A great example of this are a number of instances during the George Floyd protests where well-meaning whites thought that by looting or rioting they were speaking out against the racism of the George Floyd incident. These "woke" whites thought that they were taking to the streets to voice their displeasure with race relations. They thought that they were working to be an anti-racist. Plenty of Americans who identify as black spoke out against these looters/rioters. There were stories of protesters who protected cops from being harmed by crowds and protesters who protected stores from being looted. Clearly, there is disagreement or misunderstanding about what it means to be an anti-racist. And this is not surprising because society is complex and so are individuals. And not only are they complex and multi-faceted, but they are dynamic: individuals and society are constantly changing.

But the general thesis of Kendi's idea is really simple to me; if you truly opposed something, you will work to stop it. For example, if you see a young child wander out into a busy street, you can stand by and say "I am really against letting children get by cars." Or, you can actually help the kid even though you are a stranger. You take an active role for something that you care about. Take something like poverty. You can claim to be against poverty or anti-poverty, but if you don't take steps in your daily life to end poverty, are you really anti-poverty? In other words, it is one thing to believe something, but it is something much more to actively work against it. That is the simple takeaway from Kendi.

Meanwhile, Robin Diangelo has been working as a racial equity trainer throughout the different eras that I described above. And what she has noticed is that SOME people who are in the various mindsets above, knee-jerk when they are challenged to be anti-racists as in the way that Kendi describes. SOME people think that colorblindness is enough to be antiracist. In fact, some people strive for colorblindness to the degree that any mention of race makes them uncomfortable. I have experienced this with students myself. Others think that race consciousness is enough and as long as they are aware of race, they do not feel obligated to work against laws or institutions that reinforce racial inequality. When you say that being a bystander allows inequality and oppression to continue, they react defensively because they don't want to be implicated as a cause of continued racism. The defensive feelings of people who identify as the majority are what Diangelo calls white fragility. Discussing racism is hard and emotional so it makes people uncomfortable in ways that they have never had to feel. And since whites are in the majority, they are not used to having to feel the emotion and discomfort of racial issues. That, is what Diangelo describes as "white fragility".

Despite the history of sociological scholarship I mention above, it is true that both people and society are unique, complex and dynamic. I think sociologists would be careful to not say, "The left thinks..." or "Conservatives think..." or "white people think..." I thought about that as I was reading your text about "not all black people agree with the most progressive version of anti racism". I agree with you and I think that overgeneralizations are a problem. However I also think that failing to see the forest for the trees is a problem as well. If you dismiss the overall thesis of Diangelo and Kendi because you get too bogged down in the minutiae, I think it misses the point.

Regarding ERD - we would have to talk about the specifics of which ERD and what was being pushed. I think it is naive to think that after hundreds of years of racism that anyone has the solution or even that there is one solution.

But instead, I think the goal is to acknowledge that:

- Race is a social construct that shapes the obstacles and opportunities for people in the U.S.

- Being aware of the ways in which race shapes the obstacles and opportunities can help us as both citizens and educators speak and act to mitigate the racial inequalities.

Those are the two basic ways that I approach race. But I acknowledge that everyone is at a different understanding of those two things. SOME (emphasis intended) people refuse to believe that race plays a roll in society and even moreso, SOME people will balk at the idea that they have contributed to racism.