The Identity Politics of Whiteness – The New York Times

2016/11/24 Leave a comment

Good thought-provoking piece by Laila Lalani:

A common refrain in the days after the election was “Not all his voters are racist.” But this will not do, because those voters chose a candidate who promised them relief from their problems at the expense of other races. They may claim innocence now, but it seems to me that when a leading chapter of the Ku Klux Klan announces plans to hold a victory parade for the president-elect, the time for innocence is long past.

Racism is a necessary explanation for what happened on Nov. 8, but it is not a sufficient one. Last February, when the subject of racial identity came up at the Democratic primary debate in Milwaukee, the moderator Gwen Ifill surprised many viewers by asking about white voters: “By the middle of this century, the nation is going to be majority nonwhite,” she said. “Our public schools are already there. If working-class white Americans are about to be outnumbered, are already underemployed in many cases, and one study found they are dying sooner, don’t they have a reason to be resentful?”

Hillary Clinton said she was concerned about every community, including white communities “where we are seeing an increase in alcoholism, addiction, earlier deaths.” She said she planned to revitalize what she called “coal country” and explore spending more in communities with persistent generational poverty. Senator Bernie Sanders took a different view: “We can talk about it as a racial issue,” he said. “But it is a general economic issue.” Workers of all races, he said, have been hurt by trade deals like Nafta. “We need to start paying attention to the needs of working families in this country.”

This resonated with me: I, too, come from the working class, and from the significant portion of it that is not white. Neither of my parents went to college. Still, they managed to put their children through school and buy a home — a life that, for many in the working class, is impossible now. Nine months after that debate, we have found out exactly how much attention we should have been paying such families. The same white working-class voters who re-elected Obama four years ago did not cast their ballots for Clinton this year. These voters suffer from economic disadvantages even as they enjoy racial advantages. But it is impossible for them to notice these racial advantages if they live in rural areas where everyone around them is white. What they perceive instead is the cruel sense of being forgotten by the political class and condescended to by the cultural one.

While poor white voters are being scrutinized now, less attention has been paid to voters who are white and rich. White voters flocked to Trump by a wide margin, and he won a majority of voters who earn more than $50,000 a year, despite their relative economic safety. A majority of white women chose him, too, even though more than a dozen women have accused him of sexual assault. No, the top issue that drove Trump’s voters to the polls was not the economy — more voters concerned about that went to Clinton. It was immigration, an issue on which we’ve abandoned serious debate and become engulfed in sensational stories about rapists crossing the southern border or the pending imposition of Shariah law in the Midwest.

If whiteness is no longer the default and is to be treated as an identity — even, soon, a “minority” — then perhaps it is time white people considered the disadvantages of being a race. The next time a white man bombs an abortion clinic or goes on a shooting rampage on a college campus, white people might have to be lectured on religious tolerance and called upon to denounce the violent extremists in their midst. The opioid epidemic in today’s white communities could be treated the way we once treated the crack epidemic in black ones — not as a failure of the government to take care of its people but as a failure of the race. The fact that this has not happened, nor is it likely to, only serves as evidence that white Americans can still escape race.

Much has been made about privilege in this election. I will readily admit to many privileges. I have employer-provided health care. I live in a nice suburb. I am not dependent on government benefits. But I am also an immigrant and a person of color and a Muslim. On the night of the election, I was away from my family. Speaking to them on the phone, I could hear the terror in my daughter’s voice as the returns came in. The next morning, her friends at school, most of them Asian or Jewish or Hispanic, were in tears. My daughter called on the phone. “He can’t make us leave, right?” she asked. “We’re citizens.”

My husband and I did our best to quiet her fears. No, we said. He cannot make us leave. But every time I have thought about this conversation — and I have thought about it dozens of times, in my sleepless nights since the election — I have felt less certain. For all the privileges I can pass on to my daughter, there is one I cannot: whiteness.

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‘Hate wave’ could hit Canada, too: Van Jones

2016/11/24 Leave a comment

Valid note of caution and test of Canadian resilience (Kellie Leitch currently testing the waters):

A high-profile political commentator and former White House policy adviser warned Tuesday that the same class tensions and divisive forces that swept Donald Trump to power could easily take root in Canada, adding it would be “irresponsible” to pretend otherwise.

Van Jones, a CNN political contributor, said the “hate wave” that has stirred vigilante behaviour and prompted gatherings of apparent Nazi-affiliated groups is playing out in all Western democracies, and anyone who thinks Canada will be spared is wrong.

“The working classes, especially the white working classes, feeling rightfully thrown under the bus and left behind, are reacting in ways that are shocking, in ways that I think are unfair, in ways that are unfortunate and sometimes that are xenophobic and racist,” he said.

“It is happening all across the Western democracies and it can happen in Canada, too.”

Jones, who emerged as a strong voice during the U.S. election campaign that ended earlier this month with Trump’s stunning victory, was in Toronto to discuss what a Trump presidency will mean for the U.S. and its northern neighbour.

He was to deliver a keynote address in the city at an event organized by the Broadbent Institute.

Speaking before the event, Jones said everyone, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum, must remain vigilant to keep class and racial tensions from turning into violence.

“Every single part of civil society in Canada, the United States and around the world needs to get very vocal right now, needs to stand up right now,” he said.

“If anybody thinks they can just stand back and hope for the best … if you think that standing back and giving this guy a chance means giving him a pass on stuff you wouldn’t let your kids do, stuff you wouldn’t let your next door neighbour’s kids do, then you’re not paying attention,” he said.

“We are so far now past left versus right, this is no longer a left-right issue. … It is wrong for any political party to get ahead by picking on defenceless groups and small groups and minority groups, and then to turn your head when the violence comes,” he said.

“That is irresponsible.”

Source: ‘Hate wave’ could hit Canada, too: Van Jones – Macleans.ca

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When Hamilton actor appealed to Mike Pence, theatre showed its strength

2016/11/21 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Kelly Nestruck on the message the cast of Hamilton gave to VP-designate Pence, although he exaggerates the extent that theatre brings people together – there is a selection bias in terms of those who go to see the play, both from an ideology/values perspective as well as economic (check the price of those tickets!):

Theatre is a live art form – and, as such, it’s subject to alteration and improvisation and intervention at any given moment. Actors don’t have to stick to the script – and neither do audiences. This is something that has scared certain people, particularly those in power, over the centuries.

Add Donald Trump to the millennium-long list of puritans and politicians afraid of the democratic nature of the free speech zone that is theatre.

Last night, American vice-president-elect Mike Pence got an earful as he attended Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton on Broadway.

First, the audience had its turn. According to reports, there were boos directed at Pence as he took his seat – and the cheers were exceptionally loud when the musical’s signature line arrived: “Immigrants, we get the job done.” George Washington’s line “Winning is easy, young man, governing’s harder” was greeted by more applause than usual by the audience, re-authoring a lyric Miranda penned written years ago into a dig at those about to move into the White House.

Actor Brandon Victor Dixon, currently playing Aaron Burr in the musical about the American revolution and its aftermath, then spoke to Pence directly during the curtain call. “We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights,” he said. “We truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us. All of us.”

We haven’t heard from Pence about how he received this epilogue yet – according to AP, he politely listened to it in full from the hallway outside the auditorium.

The President-elect, Donald Trump, however, took to Twitter to condemn the Hamilton cast for having “harassed” Pence. On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted: “The theatre must always be a safe and special place. The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!”

What happened at Hamilton is a sign not of rudeness, however, but of the theatre in rude health. Anyone who’s a student of classical plays will know that prologues or epilogues directed at the “court” are a long theatrical tradition – and a little audience booing is pretty tame behaviour compared to the riots that have erupted at performances through the ages from Byzantium to New York in the 19th Century.

Trump is half-right about theatre, however: It is a special place, but not a safe one.

There is nothing “safe” about gathering citizens together in the same physical space and having them listen to characters in conflict, that is, with different points of views. It’s only seemed like it in the West for the past century or so as we’ve lived in societies that have embraced free, respectful speech and democratic debate in common areas like the mainstream media, now derided and dying.

Now, however, just how “special” theatre is has started to become clear again.

The Internet promised us a place where we would interact with people unlike us – but it’s actually delivered the opposite. Facebook algorithms shove us into silos of like-mindedness, delivering us news articles and opinion pieces that match our worldview and turn us against our neighbours. Twitter’s an echo chamber – and, on those rare occasions when those who disagree do come together on it, it’s usually to hurl insults at one another rather than to try to understand one another.

Theatre is one of the few remaining places where citizens come face-to-face, sit side-by-side to hear ideas for an extended period of time. This is, of course, what made theatre revolutionary when it was born as an art form in Ancient Greece alongside democracy. The great innovation of theatre was to bring the concept of dialogue to storytelling – and the classics scholar Peter Burian has argued audiences learning to listen to characters present different points of view in the theatre paved the way to them listening to each other in democratic discourse.

We need that civics lesson again now. Hamilton’s a great example of theatre’s power to create empathy for those unlike us, or those we might disagree with. On one level, it is certainly a product of the Obama years in the United States – through its diverse casting and hip-hop score, comparing the young Americans of colour and immigrants of today to the Founding Fathers.

But Hamilton also asks black actors and other actors of colour to play historical figures, none of them simple heroes, like the slave-owner George Washington. This is radically out of step with the political left’s current call-out culture – asking us to step into another’s shoes rather than judge them.

That is indeed unsafe to Trump and those like him who profit off the politics of division.

Source: When Hamilton actor appealed to Mike Pence, theatre showed its strength – The Globe and Mail

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A ‘Commission on Radical Islam’ Could Lead to a New McCarthy Era – NYTimes.com

2016/11/21 Leave a comment

Valid concern and parallel by Faiza Patel:

Presidents Obama and George W. Bush were careful to avoid tarring all Muslims with the terrorism brush. Six days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bushvisited a mosque to warn against the harassment of American Muslims and underline the need to respect Islam. Mr. Obama has sent the same message, refusing to even use the term “radical Islam.” This does not mean that the United States government has simply ignored the belief systems of terrorists. To the contrary, there are reams of research and several congressional reports on the topic. It seems unlikely that a Commission on Radical Islam would add anything.

Mr. Trump’s commission would be charged with identifying “warning signs of radicalization,” allowing it to veer easily into examining political and religious views. Both the New York Police Department and the F.B.I. have said that indicators of terrorism included political activism and signs of Muslim religiosity, such as growing a beard, wearing a head scarf or giving up smoking and drinking. Although these ideas have been thoroughly debunked by research, they continue to be influential and could serve as a basis for categorizing tens of thousands of American Muslims as potential terrorists requiring monitoring by law enforcement (or worse).

Research has also found little evidence of support for terrorism among American Muslims. James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., said, “The threat here focuses primarily on troubled souls in America who are being inspired or enabled online to do something violent.” This makes the proposed commission’s mandate of ferreting out networks that support radicalization sound like a witch hunt that could ensnare politically active American Muslims and the civil society groups that work to protect the community’s rights.

That seems to be what Newt Gingrich, one of the president-elect’s top advisers, has in mind. Earlier this year, Mr. Gingrich called for a new House Un-American Activities Committee to deal with “Islamic supremacists.” That notorious committee’s hearings and the investigations by Senator Joseph McCarthy into suspected Communists represented some of the most severe political repression in American history and destroyed lives. Today, as falsehoods are spread quickly on the internet and accepted as true, this risk may be even more acute.

These fears are not theoretical. Conspiracy theorists and pseudo-experts poised to peddle lies about prominent Muslim officials and groups have garnered support in both Congress and Mr. Trump’s inner circle.

In 2012, five members of Congress asked the State Department’s inspector general to investigate the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on the department, citing family ties of Huma Abedin, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s closest aide. (The alleged connections were so convoluted that that they inspired a “Daily Show” sketch.) This summer, Senator Ted Cruz held a hearing in which a witness smeared the Islamic Society of North America, an umbrella organization for Muslim groups, claiming it had links to terrorist groups. The same witness also insinuated that the two Muslim members of the House of Representatives, Keith Ellison and Andre Carson, supported terrorism because they attended the group’s events, as had the Homeland Security secretary, Jeh Johnson.

The F.B.I. has a policy of marginalizing the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights organization. The F.B.I.’s stance, which it claims is based on vague concerns over potential connections to terrorism, is difficult to understand given the bureau’s broad powers to seize the assets of any organization supporting terrorism. So unfounded is the F.B.I.’s stance that it has been resisted by its own field offices and the Justice Department, and the council is a frequent partner of local police departmentsand other agencies.

Baseless insinuations about Muslim groups and individuals are a regular feature on Breitbart, the website run by Stephen Bannon, chief strategist to the incoming president.

Like many campaign promises, Mr. Trump’s commission may never become reality. But it would be far harder to challenge in court than a Muslim ban or registry. It must be vigorously resisted as a threat not only to American Muslims, but all Americans who dread a return to McCarthyism.

Source: A ‘Commission on Radical Islam’ Could Lead to a New McCarthy Era – NYTimes.com

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Japanese American internment is ‘precedent’ for national Muslim registry, prominent Trump backer says – The Washington Post

2016/11/18 Leave a comment

Sigh … not learning or mislearning the lessons of history:

A spokesman for a major super PAC backing Donald Trump said Wednesday that the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was a “precedent” for the president-elect’s plans to create a registry for immigrants from Muslim countries.

During an appearance on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show, Carl Higbie said a registry proposal being discussed by Trump’s immigration advisers would be legal and would “hold constitutional muster.”

“We’ve done it with Iran back awhile ago. We did it during World War II with the Japanese,” said Higbie, a former Navy SEAL and a spokesman for the pro-Trump Great America PAC.

Kelly seemed taken aback by the idea.

“Come on, you’re not proposing we go back to the days of internment camps, I hope,” she said.

“I’m not proposing that at all,” Higbie told her. “But I’m just saying there is precedent for it.”

Higbie’s remarks came a day after a key member of Trump’s transition team, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, said Trump’s policy advisers were weighing whether to send him a formal proposal for a national registry of immigrants and visitors from Muslim countries. Kobach, a possible candidate for attorney general, told Reuters that the team was considering a reinstatement of a similar program he helped design after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks while serving in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush.

Known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS,) the program required people from “higher risk” countries to submit to fingerprinting, interrogations and, in some cases, parole-like check-ins with authorities. The program was suspended in 2011 after criticism from civil rights groups who said it targeted Muslims.

When an NBC News reporter asked Trump last year whether he would require Muslims to register in a database, he said he “would certainly implement that — absolutely.”

In his appearance on Kelly’s show, Higbie, a frequent political commentator, said noncitizens were not protected by the same constitutional rights as citizens. He said he believed most Muslims were “perfectly good people” but argued that a small percentage of them adhered to an “extreme ideology.”

Source: Japanese American internment is ‘precedent’ for national Muslim registry, prominent Trump backer says – The Washington Post

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Groups fighting hate, anti-Semitism see surge of support

2016/11/18 Leave a comment

Not necessarily surprising but certainly encouraging:

In the wake of the election, the Anti-Defamation League — the national organization devoted to fighting anti-Semitism and bigotry in all forms — is wasting no time in accelerating its efforts against hate in America.

The climate at the organization’s offices post-election is characterized by “exhaustion and energy,” Deborah Lauter, ADL’s senior vice president for policy and programs, told CBS News.

“There’s more of a sense of urgency, more of a sense that we’re more relevant than ever before,” Lauter said. “The day after, when people were shocked by the result personally, they said, ‘Thank God I work here because at least I can get hugs from my colleagues.’”

The organization — which conducts large-scale research on hate groups, including the alt-right; partners with law enforcement to better deal with hate crimes; and cultivates public awareness of hate and bigotry, among other campaigns — has seen an explosion in financial contributions and volunteer interest since Donald Trump’s election. The president-elect won the White House after conducting a campaign critics accused of trafficking in racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes. At various points, Trump called Mexicans “murderers” and “rapists;” suggested an American-born federal judge could not do his job impartially because of his Mexican heritage; advocated “a total and complete shutdown” of Muslims coming to the U.S.; and used imagery lifted from white supremacists and Neo-Nazi online message boards.

It was an election that “saw hate move from the fringes and into the mainstream with unprecedented volume and velocity,” the ADL said in a statement after Donald Trump’s win.

The ADL joins other prominent nonprofit organizations — like the American Civil Liberties Union, the investigative journalism site ProPublica, and Planned Parenthood — who’ve seen dramatic spikes in donations since the election.

Contributions to the ADL jumped 50-fold the day after the election, and that level of giving has persisted throughout last week and this week, the group said. About 70 percent of those donations came from first-time donors. Several major donors are also upping their contributions in light of the election, some to six figures.

In addition, the group’s 27 regional offices have seen significantly higher call volume — 10 to 20 times what they’d normally receive — from people asking how they could support the organization’s work combating bigotry, the ADL said.

“We have seen so many instances where we fear and are concerned about the fact that the extremists’ rhetoric has become mainstream,” Lauter said. “The feeling is one of being disheartened at how easily this can happen. But [we’re] also somewhat energized at how important this work is to rebuild what we thought was the status quo of tolerance in this country.”

Source: Groups fighting hate, anti-Semitism see surge of support – CBS News

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Trump win reveals new white extremism in middle America: Saunders

2016/11/15 Leave a comment

Good long and sobering read by Doug Saunders on white extremism/radicalisation (exit poll data indicates that Trump did slightly better with minorities than Romney but still the white/minority divide is striking):

“You’d better watch yourself – I wouldn’t go anywhere near there,” she said. It was the source of fear, the inner-city “hell” of Donald Trump’s speeches. That Ybor City has become an upwardly mobile place has escaped notice. (It was also, not coincidentally, the site of peaceful anti-Trump protests this week.)

Her anxieties fall into one of the biggest mysteries of far-right support among white people: the phenomenon that has traditionally been called the “halo effect.”

By contrast, white people who live in areas where they’re immersed in longstanding populations of immigrants and minorities – that is, in big cities – don’t generally tend to vote for the politics of racial intolerance. That’s called the “contact effect” – you don’t get anxious about immigration if you live around immigrants. But people who live in mainly white areas that adjoin cities with greater diversity often show very high levels of support for people like Mr. Trump.

“The general consensus in the literature is that you get the strong anti-immigration sentiment when you have a relatively low local share of minorities and immigrants coupled with a high rate of change,” says Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of London and author of The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: The Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States. “That is, if you live in a very white area but you’re close to an increasingly diverse area.”

Prof. Goodwin’s research suggests that it is instead white people in areas with sudden changes in immigration numbers who tend to become intolerant. But Prof. Kaufmann says this is an initial effect, after which they typically become more tolerant after a few years, when the contact effect has been able to kick in.

In other words, proximity is a bigger driver of extremism than is actual experience: It is not economic decline or immigration that cause people to become right-wing radicals, but proximity to those things, from a vantage of white security that feels threatened by the unknown.

…The propensity of white people to turn to radicalization does seem to be much more rooted in deep psychological anxieties than in anything material or economic.

“It all largely comes under the rubric of cultural and social identity motivations, and not personal economic circumstances – the notion of the ‘left behind’ voter is quite flawed in my mind,” says Prof. Kaufmann.

What is particularly surprising is that the personal circumstances of most Trump voters have improved during recent years: His movement is not a knee-jerk reaction to an actual economic setback (which would have been more the case in 2008 or 1980, when different sorts of U.S. politics prevailed). Rather, it is based on a deeper psychic sense of loss, one not so solidly moored in lived reality.

Carol Anderson, a historian at Atlanta’s Emory University who recently published the book-length study, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide, sees the turn toward Trumpian extremism as a psychological response among many white people not to any actual loss – the Trump voters are typically more well-off people, who have gained in recent years – but to a sense of relative loss of influence caused by the increasingly equal status of black and brown Americans.

“When you’re talking about the angst and anxiety and feeling of being stifled and that kind of despair, what I see is that, as African-Americans advance in this society in terms of gaining their citizenship rights, that there is a wave of what I’ve been calling ‘white rage,’ which are the movements within legislative bodies and within the judicial sector in terms of policies and laws and rulings that undercut that advancement,” Prof. Anderson said during a panel last month organized by the online publication, Politico.

“You know, if you’ve always been privileged, equality begins to look like oppression,” she said, in what may be the most definitive phrase to describe the crisis of white extremism. “That’s part of what you’re seeing in terms of the [white] pessimism, particularly when the system gets defined as a zero-sum game – that you can only gain at somebody else’s loss.”

Of course, the American experience has not been zero-sum: The inclusion of minorities and immigrant groups into the middle-class economy over the last five decades has not diminished living standards or earnings; they’re better than they were in the 1950s. Trade with Mexico and China did hurt employment in the 1990s, but it is not doing so today; the economic precariousness of the Rust Belt is caused by technological change, not by trade or immigrants.

But a psychology of wounded ethnic pride – and often of wounded virility – has overtaken a large part of the white community, and not generally the part that is actually feeling economic pain. If those of us worried about the extremists in our midst want to root them out and turn them around, we need to speak to this underlying sense of loss. It may not be rational or realistic, but it has become profound enough that it has provoked the most extreme and dangerous political event of the century.

Source: Trump win reveals new white extremism in middle America – The Globe and Mail

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USA: Why did DHS mistakenly grant 858 immigrants citizenship? – Lawstreet

2016/10/14 Leave a comment

Analysis of DHS’ mistaken granting of citizenship, identifying the main failure as lack of coordinated, consistent and digitized fingerprinting for identification purposes:

Immigration is consistently ranked as one of the top concerns for American voters every election year. After the failed Gang of Eight immigration reform bill, the attempt at reaching consensus on immigration has fizzled. Both sides of the debate have become more partisan in nature, making it very difficult to strike a deal and get a bill passed through Congress. Donald Trump started off his presidential race with a pitch accusing Mexican immigrants of bringing drugs into the country, whereas Democrats are pointing out that illegal immigration amounts to millions of individuals just overstaying their visas.

No matter the root cause of a broken immigration system, one thing that can always streamline the process of admitting new immigrants is by having a uniform background check system that is archived online for easy access. Currently, ICE checks fingerprints through two systems: the FBI’s Integrated Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) and the DHS Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT). Although an agency may have different reasons for checking a fingerprint file, the archive has to be universal so as to make a search as efficient as possible.

Immigrants make up 13 percent of the total U.S. population as of 2014, according to the Migration Policy Institute, and that percentage only continues to grow. Critics point out that if the issue with immigration is that there are too many people who are here illegally, and that is due to overstayed visas, it may be an administrative issue on the federal government’s end that needs to be resolved. One example is a gap in digitized information that the government needs to archive so that it is easier to catch immigrants that may be of higher concern for the country.

Additionally, calls for border security may be issued in spite of not knowing that our federal government has an administrative issue to resolve. For example, one common misconception is the idea that Mexican immigrants are overflowing our southern border. The Pew Research Center found that since 2014, Mexican immigrants are returning back to Mexico more than actually immigrating to the U.S.

Proponents of immigration point out that immigrants are a huge economic boon for the U. S. as well, and fixing our information gap can be a good way to streamline capturing immigrants with criminal records as opposed to rounding up hard-working families looking to achieve their American Dream. Of the more than 11 million unauthorized immigrants currently in the U.S., ICE has deported almost 178,000. ICE has also issued one million ‘detainer requests’ that ask local officials to detain and then transfer suspects to DHS custody. It is evident that our immigration officials are hard at work identifying individuals who are unauthorized to be in the U.S. and that our border is not as porous as some might believe.

CONCLUSION

The DHS was audited by its Inspector General, a routine check and balance on a federal agency tasked with enforcing the laws passed by Congress. John Roth, the Inspector General, has done a very good job identifying where DHS is lacking in terms of its ability to enforce our country’s immigration laws. If our executive agencies finish archiving fingerprint and other identification files, and streamline ways to access this information, we might have a shot at fixing our immigration system.

Source: Why did DHS mistakenly grant 858 immigrants citizenship?

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Race, School Ratings And Real Estate: A ‘Legal Gray Area’ : NPR

2016/10/12 Leave a comment

Not surprising that neighbourhoods become a proxy for race:

With her infant son in a sling, Monique Black strolls through a weekend open house in the gentrified Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. There are lots of factors to consider when looking for a home — in this one, Monique notices, the tiny window in the second bedroom doesn’t let in enough light. But for parents like Black and her husband, Jonny, there’s a more important question: How good are the nearby schools?

It’s well-known in the real estate industry that highly rated schools translate into higher housing values. Several studies confirm this, and even put a dollar figure on it: an average premium of $50 a square foot, in a 2013 national study.

In Chappaqua, N.Y., an affluent bedroom community for New York City, the town supervisor recently went so far as to declare that, “The schools are our biggest industry — whether you have kids in the school or not, that’s what maintains our property values.”

But some advocates for fair housing see a potential problem with the close ties between school ratings and real estate. They say the common denominator, too often, is race. And they argue that the problem has intensified in the last decade with new web platforms bringing all kinds of information directly to homebuyers.

“A school rating map mirrors a racial dot map,” showing patterns of segregation and diversity, observes Sally Santangelo, the executive director of Central New York Fair Housing, a group that provides education and legal assistance to oppose housing discrimination.

Which, in turn, raises some complicated questions about how factors like test scores and school ratings are used to influence home-buying decisions.

Characteristics like safety and parent involvement — the qualities Monique and Jonny say they value in a school— can be hard to quantify. Most states base their school ratings primarily on more easily measured factors, like standardized test scores and graduation rates. And these indicators, in turn, are heavily influenced by inequities of race and class.

There’s a large, persistent, and well-documented gap in test scores between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian peers. There are many reasons for these disparities: income and wealth gaps, disciplinary policies that “push out” black students from school systems, less experienced teachers, the early-learning gap between high- and low-income children. But they all end up reflected in one number: a school rating.

“A lot of time, with schools that serve majorities of students of color, you get a negative rating because the test scores are low,” says Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, an assistant professor who studies race and housing at Virginia Commonwealth University. But, she says, “most of the variation in test scores is explained by the kids’ own poverty or the poverty of their school.”

Housing patterns and school ratings, of course, also reinforce each other. In most places around the country, school budgets are partly linked to local property taxes. Highly rated schools beget higher housing values, which in turn beget more richly resourced schools.

It’s a virtuous cycle for a town like Chappaqua, but a vicious cycle elsewhere.

What does all this mean for potential homeowners like Monique Black? Or for realtors who see school quality as a selling point?

For a realtor, directly discussing the racial composition of a neighborhood with homebuyers is against the law. In 1968, the Fair Housing Act outlawed the practice of racial “steering” by realtors. This can mean showing different properties to a white family and a black family who have the same requirements, or telling them different things about the desirability of a given property or neighborhood, in a way that tends to maintain segregation or perpetuate discrimination.

The National Fair Housing Alliance, an advocacy group, conducts “mystery shopper” sales tests, sending out people of various backgrounds to pose as house hunters and determine whether they hear different messages.

In a 2006 report, the NFHA documented some form of steering in 87 percent of these encounters. And, says Morgan Williams, the organization’s general counsel, this steering included discussions of school quality.

“A striking pattern regarding schools emerged from these sales tests,” the report states. “Instead of making blatant comments about the racial composition of neighborhoods, many real estate agents told whites to avoid certain areas because of the schools. It is evident from the investigation that schools have become a proxy for the racial or ethnic composition of neighborhoods.”

For example, white testers reported that they were told to avoid the Tarrytown, N.Y., schools, which are predominately Hispanic. In several cases, the report says, agents there told whites that the schools were “bad,” but Latinos were told that the same schools were “good.”

In Philadelphia, an agent told a white tester that the schools in a particular town were very good, then added, “But don’t tell anyone I told you that.”

Source: Race, School Ratings And Real Estate: A ‘Legal Gray Area’ : NPR Ed : NPR

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Study Finds Students Of All Races Prefer Teachers Of Color

2016/10/11 Leave a comment

Interesting and unexpected:

During the time that Cherng, who is of Chinese descent, taught in an 85 percent African-American middle school in San Francisco, he enjoyed a good rapport with his students, and he wondered what role his own identity played in that.

Now Cherng is a sociologist at New York University and he’s just published a paperwith colleague Peter Halpin that addresses this question. It seems that students of all races — white, black, Latino, and Asian — have more positive perceptions of their black and Latino teachers than they do of their white teachers.

Cherng and Halpin analyzed data from the Measure of Effective Teaching study sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which also supports coverage of education at NPR.

They looked at a group of 1,700 sixth- through ninth-grade teachers from more than 300 schools in cities around the country. The students had completed 30-question surveys, asking about a variety of different dimensions of teaching.

For example:

  • How much does this teacher challenge his students?
  • How supportive is she?
  • How well does he manage the classroom?
  • How captivating does she make the subject?

Although NPR Ed has reported before on the pitfalls of student evaluations used in many undergraduate classrooms, this particular student self-report measure may be more valid because of its thoroughness; it’s been independently linked to student learning gains on standardized tests.

Cherng and Halpin found that all the students, including white students, had significantly more favorable perceptions of Latino versus white teachers across the board, and had significantly more favorable perceptions of black versus white teachers on at least two or three of seven categories in the survey.

The strongest positive relationship was the flipside of what Cherng experienced in his own classroom: Asian-American students had very rosy views of their black teachers.

The relationship persisted after controlling for students’ age, gender, their free and reduced-price lunch status and their academic performance. The researchers also controlled for other factors like the teacher’s level of experience and education, their gender, and even outside expert ratings of the teachers’ effectiveness, based on classroom observations.

No matter what, students had warmer perceptions of their teachers of color.

Cherng calls the findings “surprising.”

“I thought student awareness of the racial hierarchy would influence the results,” in favor of whites, he says.

Other studies have found evidence for “race matching,” or the idea that students and teachers of the same race or ethnicity perceive each other more favorably. And NPR Ed recently covered research on “implicit bias,” the idea that teachers of all races look less favorably on students of color.

“We’re not done,” investigating this finding, Cherng says.

His working theory is that teachers of color score more highly because of their ability to draw on their own experiences to address issues of race and gender, which, he says, can be highly germane even to teaching subjects like math, especially in America’s majority-minority public schools. He’s currently working on a series of studies that look at preservice teachers and teacher training, to provide more evidence about the relationship between teachers’ multicultural beliefs and awareness and their effectiveness in the classroom.

As a math teacher, and now a sociology professor, Cherng was never prepared to really understand or address race or gender dynamics in the classroom. But, he says, there may be good evidence that these are essential tools to being a good teacher, period.

Source: Study Finds Students Of All Races Prefer Teachers Of Color

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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