Both myself and Dumi from Black at Michigan are cited in this article in US News and World Report. The article discusses racist incidents on college campuses around the US, focusing on how new technologies have created greater awareness of campus racism. Here’s a brief quote from the article:
“Having a decent knowledge of history, I sort of lost it,” says Knott, one of only a small number of students of color at Whitman. She was not the last to be outraged. Over the course of the semester, racially charged photos, videos, and Facebook pages offended students at more than a dozen campuses across the country–from the University of California–Los Angeles, where a video of police shocking an Iranian-American student with a TASER gun sparked a rally against police brutality, to Tufts University outside Boston, where the editor of a student journal just apologized for a satirical poem called “O Come All Ye Black Folk.” One widely forwarded Texas A&M video shows a white student painted with shoe polish getting whipped and sexually assaulted. The NAACP found the trend so disturbing that it announced a Campaign to End Campus Racism. Over the past 15 years, colleges have become more racially diverse, but students and observers say campuses remain segregated–and, for minority students, racially tense. Survey data tend to miss that tension. “People know how to say all the right things [in a survey],” explains Rachel Sullivan, a sociologist at Long Island University.
All seeing. What’s made it more visible is new technology, from Internet sites to cellphone cameras. “I can go on the Internet,” says L’Heureux Lewis, who studies campus race relations at the University of Michigan, “and within a few clicks I can find out who you know, where you hang out, and what you do on a Saturday night. I have 24-hour access to your offenses now. So if I didn’t hear about what you did last night, or I wasn’t there two months ago when this happened, there is a chance that I may see it now.”
You can follow the link to site to read the full article and come back and give your two cents in the comment section.
Yay! You’re famous!
(Okay, sorry, probably you were hoping for a deeper reaction than that.)
Of course, the technology can also be used to make the counter-racist-society argument; if racism is so incredibly pervasive and there are so many people with these awful beliefs, shouldn’t there be THOUSANDS of blackface videos on YouTube, and shouldn’t every day bring a half-dozen camera-phone-recorded racial incidents to light?
But “yay! you’re famous! as well.” Don’t tell them you can’t tell the difference between a tenet and a tenant. ;)
“I can go on the Internet,” says L’Heureux Lewis, who studies campus race relations at the University of Michigan, “and within a few clicks I can find out who you know, where you hang out, and what you do on a Saturday night.
An excellent reason for not posting who you know, where you hang out, and what you did on Saturday night.
Or Primer and Primar!! LOL!
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