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Archive for August, 2005

August 29, 2005

Hernandez, Daisy. “Playing with Race.” Hot and Bothered: Sex, Race, Gender. ColorLines: Race, Culture, Action 7.4 (Winter 2004-05).

August 29th 2005 Posted to Uncategorized

Hernandez reports on an activity in the BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism) community called “race play.” In race play, participants engage in racist scenarios and employ racist language in order to become aroused. The appearance of race play at BDSM workshops and conferences has prompted a controversy, with opponents both in and outside of the BDSM community arguing that such “play” hits too close to home, because “Racism was institutionalized as social, economic and legal practices, in part, through rape and the white domination of black sexuality.” (Read the article)

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August 28, 2005

Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993.

August 28th 2005 Posted to Uncategorized

Addressing topics as diverse and as reciprocally relevant as theory, pedagogy, feminism, literature, music, and the media, Writing Diaspora argues for a rigorous reappraisal of cultural studies. Chow is wary of the explosion of area studies and cultural studies in the Western Academy, noting that “cross-cultural” study, with its attention to difference, can in fact reinscribe colonial “othering” and risks remaining “trapped within a type of discourse that is geographically deterministic and hence culturally essentialist” (7). (Read the article)

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Defining Race and Pedagogy

August 28th 2005 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, UCSB Courses, Lesson Plans, Syllabi, English 104A, Writing 2, English 197, English 10AC, English 165HR, English 50, English 103A, External Resources for Teachers, Specific U.S. Racial Groups, African American, Asian American, Latino / Latina American, Native American, Type of Resource, Literature, Film, Photographs, Visual Art / Posters, Music Recordings, Maps, Recordings of Speeches, Legal Documents, Panels and Lectures, Biography, Other 2102

Although these terms are often used as though they signified clear and well-bounded meanings, both words have complex histories and implications that are frequently only discernable once one considers the contexts in which they are used. For the purposes of this site, we offer the following definitions: (Read the article)

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August 25, 2005

Donato, Rubén. The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans During the Civil Rights Era. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997.

August 25th 2005 Posted to Uncategorized

In this book Donato explains that while many scholars have focused on the African American struggle for equal education during the Civil Rights movement, few have focused on the Mexican American community during this period. Donato summarizes this “silent” history, using as his primary example Brownfield School District in northern California. Donato writes that in Brownfield, “The concern for respecting and preserving the cultural identity of Mexican Americans found itself at odds with the traditional values of the Brownfield school system and the larger white community…Despite the claim that Mexican children were being processed by a neutral school system, public schools across the Southwest were rife with ethnic, linguistic and class biases. If one of the prime values of the Brownfield schools was uniformity, then there was an inherent conflict between the organization of schools and the desires of the Mexican American community” (10). (Read the article)

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Rumberger, Russell W. and Gloria M. Rodríguez, “Chicano dropouts: an update of research and policy issues,” Chicano School Failure and Success. Ed. Richard R.Valencia. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge/Falmer, 2002, 114-146.

August 25th 2005 Posted to Uncategorized

In Ch.4 of Valencia’s anthology, Rumberger and Rodríguez address the issue of Chicanos’ high dropout rate, citing the fact that “in 1999 the dropout rate for White, non-Latinos was 7.3 percent, compared to 12.6 percent for Black, non-Latinos and 28.6 percent for Latinos (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics, 2001, Table 106)” (Rumberger and Rodríguez 114). Rumberger and Rodríguez examine the individual and institutional factors that contribute to this high dropout rate, identify the economic and social consequences of large numbers of Latino dropouts, and offer several programmatic and policy-based solutions to the dropout problem. (Read the article)

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August 23, 2005

Kolko, Beth E., Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman, eds. Race in Cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2000.

August 23rd 2005 Posted to Uncategorized

Widely acknowledged as a vanguard text on cyberspace race studies, Race in Cyberspace, in collection of twelve essays, directly challenges Internet utopists’ proclamations of an online racial paradise.

The editors begin with an anecdote illustrating how poorly online discourse on race is received, even in critical and mature academic circles. A post on a listserv about a theory positing race as a social, not biological, construct initiated a “flame war,” as the original poster was attacked and labeled a troublemaker for having the audacity to even mention race. The editors were troubled by the fact that the original poster was not attacked for any perceived theoretical flaws, but simply for the act of introducing racial discourse. Online, there seems to be a culture of ignoring race matters. (Read the article)

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August 3, 2005

Weis, Lois and Michelle Fine, eds. Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States Schools. New York: State University of New York Press, 1993.

August 03rd 2005 Posted to Uncategorized

Beyond Silenced Voices is a compilation of articles focusing on institutionalized silencing in public schools. Divided into two parts, Weis and Fine’s collection begins with a series of studies that analyze the ways marginalized voices are systematically silenced according to race, gender, and class affiliations. These pieces are each concerned with the ways certain voices are silenced by both implicit and explicit institutional structures imbedded in the public school system, as well as the way in which these silences are sustained and naturalized by the institution. In the second part of the book, writers attempt to listen to these institutionally silenced voices by incorporating individual testimonials into the articles. It is only by hearing and centering these “once marginalized” voices, Fine and Weis argue in their Introduction, that we can move “‘beyond silenced voices’” and “understand and interrupt the perversions and pleasures of power, privilege, and marginalization in public schooling” (2). (Read the article)

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Portes, Alejandro and Dag McLeod, “Educational Progress of Children of Immigrants: The Roles of Class, Ethnicity and School Context,” Sociology of Education, 69.4 (1996): 255-75.

August 03rd 2005 Posted to Uncategorized

This article addresses two major factors that contribute to the success or failure of students from immigrant families: socioeconomic status and the social influence exerted by ethnic communities on students. As Portes and McLeod write in their abstract,

“Recent immigration to the United States has spawned a rapidly growing second generation, most of whom are of school age. This article reports the findings of a study of 5,255 second-generation high school students in Florida and California, who were children of Cuban and Vietnamese immigrants (representative of relatively advantaged groups) and of Haitian and Mexican immigrants (representative of relatively disadvantaged groups). The study found that parents’ socioeconomic status (SES), length of U.S. residence, and hours spent on homework significantly affected the students’ academic performance, but did not eliminate the effects of ethnic community. Attendance at higher-SES schools increased the average academic performance and the positive effect of parents’ SES, whereas attendance at inner-city schools flattened the negative effect of ethnic disadvantage. However, school context had no appreciable effect on children from advantaged ethnic backgrounds” (255). (Read the article)

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