This quiz testing your knowledge of key things about whiteness gives you the answers. So, don't cheat. I'm posting this because my recent blog about privilege and whiteness showed there's a lot of interest in the topic. Since Aussie Luke Pearson and Sophie Verass put the following post together, you'll encounter some Down-Under spelling and examples. What's interesting is that Australia, as well as many other countries, wrestles with the same issues and problems as the US … [Read more...]
White supremacy increasing. Need civil rights activist heroes.
Calling the civil rights activist — wherever you may be. We need you now. Why" To combat the rise in hate crimes experienced worldwide. Data from multiple sources suggest this is so, not just info from news accounts about egregious crimes. The latest being the terror attacks on two New Zealand mosques, killing 50 and injuring 50. We need the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and many of the men and women in his orbit. We know a lot about the civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, for … [Read more...]
Discrimination, Blackface and the Bullying Connection.
Worries about discrimination and racism are at the heart of efforts to get Virginia Governor Ralph Northam to resign from office. But did you know there's a connection to bullying in all this? More on this later, but first the controversy. Northam's 1984 med school yearbook page shows a picture of a person in blackface and another wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood . . . next to different pictures of the then doctor-governor-to be. Discrimination and racism. Northam's many critics feel that 1) … [Read more...]
Understanding White Privilege – its sociological origins.
In an effort at understanding white privilege from an historical perspective, I wrote a post back in January. In this post, I'm into understanding white privilege from a sociological perspective. For a variety of reasons, one engaging perspective of this sort by sociologist Alan G. Johnson starts off with the notion that the British were instrumental in the development of the idea of racial superiority. According to Johnson's perspective, the British were not the first to believe that … [Read more...]
Scary NFLer—victim of bullying, discrimination, or mental illness?
I'm disturbed and saddened that discrimination and/or mental illness has taken a serious toll on a bullying victim I've featured in prior posts. Ex-NFLer Jonathan Martin graduated from Harvard-Westlake prep school in L.A. and then Stanford. He joined the Miami Dolphins in 2012. But during his 2nd year with Miami, he became the center of a scandal involving harassment and bullying on the part of his teammates Richie Incognito and Mike Pouncey. Hero, villain, or fool? Things … [Read more...]
Explaining White Privilege – visiting its historic origins.
Whether you agree with the concept of white privilege or not, it's worth explaining white privilege. Or trying to. To do this, I'll start by taking a look at the origins of the concept. By the way, I agree with the concept as a tool to understand unconscious biases in whites. But I disagree with using it to beat up on whites and lay guilt trips on them. Much of the guilt lays with people who set up social systems centuries ago in the US and even earlier in the case of slavery. Explaining white … [Read more...]
White economic privilege impacts crim justice system.
White privilege statistics. I've been writing a memoir of late about how four murders seriously changed my career as a criminologist. So, how do white privilege statistics come into play? Well, among the many reasons the murders changed my worldview was the fact that the crim justice system treated the killers well. They were all white and given remarkably light sentences in comparison to black killers who committed similar crimes. This was back in the late 1960s and 1970s, … [Read more...]