Agenda for 12/17

1. "A Long History of Racial Preference - for Whites"

2. Race - The Power of an Illusion

Open eBackpack Assignment #17

3.  Essential Viewing (videos and links from class):

• "Race the Power of an Illusion pt. 1 
• "Race the Power of an Illusion pt. 2 
• "The Social Construction of Race" 
• "The Unequal Opportunity Race" 

HW - Finish Assignment #17 (eBackpack)

Agenda for 12/16

1. Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore

2. The response to this "controversial" statement 

3. In Holland, Santa Doesn’t Have Elves. He Has Slaves.

4. Learning racial preferences at a young age - The Doll Test

So we learn to group people by race from a young age. But are we actually any good at it?

5. The "Sorting People" Activity

Agenda for 12/15

1. Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore

2. The response to this "controversial" statement 

3. In Holland, Santa Doesn’t Have Elves. He Has Slaves.

4. Learning racial preferences at a young age - The Doll Test

So we learn to group people by race from a young age. But are we actually any good at it?

5. The "Sorting People" Activity

Agenda for 12/12

1. Bill O'Reilly - "President Obama and the Race Problem"

2. FBI 2010 National Crime Statistics - who really commits more crime?

3. #CrimingWhileWhite 

4. The "Affluenza" Defense - white (rich) privilege?

5. Which policing policies and strategies target blacks and minorities? Stop and frisk.

6. Stop and Frisk Data - visualized

7. A "Stop and Frisk" victim?

8. The Stop and Frisk Debate - NY Times

HW - Assignment #16 - Stop and Frisk (eBackpack)

• Visit the websites and videos about "Stop and Frisk" above and then answer the following questions.

1. Define "Stop and Frisk" as used by the NYPD

2. What are the primary arguments in support of "Stop and Frisk?" Provide at least three pieces of specific data that supports the policy.

3. What are the primary arguments against "Stop and Frisk." Provide at least three specific pieces of evidence to support arguments against the policy.

4. What is your opinion of the policy?

• Which arguments are most convincing to you?
• If you agree that it should be used, what would you say to a law-abiding New Yorker who is stopped 5-7 times a year for no other reason that the color of his skin and the neighborhood in which he lives?

• If you disagree with the process, what would you say to those people who live in dangerous areas of NYC and are desperate for the police to be as active as possible in preventing violent crime?

5. Do you think the policy would have the support it does if 87% of the people stopped were white instead of Black and Latino?

Agenda for 12/11

1. CIA Torture Report

2. The "Affluenza" Defense - white (rich) privilege?

3. Which policing policies and strategies target blacks and minorities? Stop and frisk.

4. Stop and Frisk Data - visualized

5. A "Stop and Frisk" victim?

6. The Stop and Frisk Debate - NY Times

HW - Assignment #16 - Stop and Frisk (eBackpack)

• Visit the websites and videos about "Stop and Frisk" above and then answer the following questions.

1. Define "Stop and Frisk" as used by the NYPD

2. What are the primary arguments in support of "Stop and Frisk?" Provide at least three pieces of specific data that supports the policy.

3. What are the primary arguments against "Stop and Frisk." Provide at least three specific pieces of evidence to support arguments against the policy.

4. What is your opinion of the policy?

• Which arguments are most convincing to you?
• If you agree that it should be used, what would you say to a law-abiding New Yorker who is stopped 5-7 times a year for no other reason that the color of his skin and the neighborhood in which he lives?

• If you disagree with the process, what would you say to those people who live in dangerous areas of NYC and are desperate for the police to be as active as possible in preventing violent crime?

5. Do you think the policy would have the support it does if 87% of the people stopped were white instead of Black and Latino?

Agenda for 12/10

Image: Center for Digital Archaeology 2011

CIA Torture Report

1. Click here to see which states pay more for prisons when there are fewer people in them.

The Week asks, "Are for-profit prisons more dangerous than traditional prisons?" Click here for their answer.

2. Match the Crime with the Time. Average sentences for federal drug offences?

3. Incarceration in America - info graphic

4. The problem with the "white culture of violence"

5. Bill O'Reilly - "President Obama and the Race Problem"

6. FBI 2010 National Crime Statistics - who really commits the most crime?

7. #CrimingWhileWhite 

8. The "Affluenza" defense

Agenda for 12/9

Image: Center for Digital Archaeology 2011

1. Click here to see which states pay more for prisons when there are fewer people in them.

The Week asks, "Are for-profit prisons more dangerous than traditional prisons?" Click here for their answer.

2. Match the Crime with the Time. Average sentences for federal drug offences?

3. Incarceration in America - info graphic

4. The problem with the "white culture of violence"

5. Bill O'Reilly - "President Obama and the Race Problem"

6. FBI 2010 National Crime Statistics - who really commits the most crime?

7. #CrimingWhileWhite

Agenda for 12/8

Tim Wise:

"To white America, in the main, police are the folks who help get our cats out of the tree, or who take us on ride-arounds to show us how gosh-darned exciting it is to be a cop. We experience police most often as helpful, as protectors of our lives and property. But that is not the black experience by and large; and black people know this, however much we don’t. The history of law enforcement in America, with regard to black folks, has been one of unremitting oppression. That is neither hyperbole nor opinion, but incontrovertible fact. From slave patrols to overseers to the Black Codes to lynching, it is a fact. From dozens of white-on-black riots that marked the first half of the 20th century (in which cops participated actively) to Watts to Rodney King to Abner Louima to Amadou Diallo to the railroading of the Central Park 5, it is a fact. From the New Orleans Police Department’s killings of Adolph Archie to Henry Glover to the Danziger Bridge shootings there in the wake of Katrina to stop-and-frisk in places like New York, it’s a fact. And the fact that white people don’t know this history, have never been required to learn it, and can be considered even remotely informed citizens without knowing it, explains a lot about what’s wrong with America. Black people have to learn everything about white people just to stay alive. They especially and quite obviously have to know what scares us, what triggers the reptilian part of our brains and convinces us that they intend to do us harm. Meanwhile, we need know nothing whatsoever about them. We don’t have to know their history, their experiences, their hopes and dreams, or their fears. And we can go right on being oblivious to all that without consequence. It won’t be on the test, so to speak.

In his contribution to Jill Nelson’s 2000 anthology on police brutality, scholar Robin D.G Kelley reminds us of the bill of particulars.* As Kelley notes, in colonial Virginia, slave owners were allowed to beat, burn, and even mutilate slaves without fear of punishment; and throughout the colonial period, police not only looked the other way at the commission of brutality against black folks, but were actively engaged in the forcible suppression of slave uprisings and insurrections. Later, after abolition, law enforcement regularly and repeatedly released black prisoners into the hands of lynch mobs and stood by as their bodies were hanged from trees, burned with blowtorches, body parts amputated and given out as souvenirs. In city after city, north and south, police either stood by or actively participated in pogroms against African American communities: in Wilmington, North Carolina, Atlanta, New Orleans, New York City, Akron and Birmingham, just to name a few. In one particularly egregious anti-black rampage in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, police shot blacks dead in the street as part of an orgy of violence aimed at African Americans who had moved from the Deep South in search of jobs. One hundred and fifty were killed, including thirty-nine children whose skulls were crushed and whose bodies were thrown into bonfires set by white mobs. In the 1920s, it is estimated that half of all black people who were killed by whites, were killed by white police officers.

But Kelley continues: In 1943 white police in Detroit joined with others of their racial compatriots, attacking blacks who had dared to move into previously all-white public housing, killing seventeen. In the 1960s and early ’70s police killed over two dozen members of the Black Panther Party, including those like Mark Clark and Fred Hampton in Chicago, asleep in their beds at the time their apartment was raided. In 1985, Philadelphia law enforcement perpetrated an all-out assault on members of the MOVE organization, bombing their row houses from state police helicopters, killing eleven, including five children, destroying sixty-one homes and leaving hundreds homeless.

These are but a few of the stories one could tell, and which Kelley does in his extraordinary recitation of the history—and for most whites, we are without real knowledge of any of them. But they and others like them are incidents burned into the cell memory of black America. They haven’t the luxury of forgetting, even as we apparently cannot be bothered to remember, or to learn of these things in the first place. Bull Connor, Sheriff Jim Clark, Deputy Cecil Price: these are not far-away characters for most black folks. How could they be? After all, more than a few still carry the scars inflicted by men such as they. And while few of us would think to ridicule Jews for still harboring less than warm feelings for Germans some seventy years later—we would understand the lack of trust, the wariness, even the anger—we apparently find it hard to understand the same historically-embedded logic of black trepidation and contempt for law enforcement in this country. And this is so, even as black folks’ negative experiences with police have extended well beyond the time frame of Hitler’s twelve year Reich, and even as those experiences did not stop seventy years ago, or even seventy days ago, or seventy minutes.

Can we just put aside all we think we know about black communities (most of which could fit in a thimble, truth be told) and imagine what it must feel like to walk through life as the embodiment of other people’s fear, as a monster that haunts their dreams the way Freddie Kreuger does in the movies? To be the physical representation of what marks a neighborhood as bad, a school as bad, not because of anything you have actually done, but simply because of the color of your skin? Surely that is not an inconsequential weight to bear. To go through life, every day, having to think about how to behave so as not to scare white people, or so as not to trigger our contempt—thinking about how to dress, and how to walk and how to talk and how to respond to a cop (not because you’re wanting to be polite, but because you’d like to see your mother again)—is work; and it’s harder than any job that any white person has ever had in this country. To be seen as a font of cultural contagion is tantamount to being a modern day leper.

And then perhaps we might spend a few minutes considering what this does to the young black child, and how it differs from the way that white children grow up. Think about how you would respond to the world if that world told you every day how awful you were, how horrible your community was, and how pathological your family. That’s what we’re telling black people daily. Every time police call the people they are sworn to protect animals, as at least one Ferguson officer was willing to do on camera, we tell them this. Every time we shrug at the way police routinely stop and frisk young black men, we tell them this. Every time we turn away from the clear disparities in our nation’s schools, which relegate the black and brown to classrooms led by the least experienced teachers, we tell them this. Every time Bill O’Reilly pontificates about “black culture” and every time Barack Obama tells black men to be better fathers, we tell them this: that they are uniquely flawed, uniquely pathological, a cancerous mass of moral decrepitude to be feared, scorned, surveilled, incarcerated and discarded. The constant drumbeat of negativity is so normalized by now that it forms the backdrop of every conversation about black people held in white spaces when black folks themselves are not around. It is like the way your knee jumps when the doctor taps it with that little hammer thing during a check-up: a reflex by now instinctual, automatic, unthinking.

And still we pretend that one can think these things—that vast numbers of us can—and yet be capable of treating black folks fairly in the workforce, housing market, schools or in the streets; that we can, on the one hand, view the larger black community as a chaotic maelstrom of iniquity, while still managing, on the other, to treat black loan applicants, job applicants, students or random strangers as mere individuals. That we can somehow thread the needle between our grand aspirations to equanimity as Americans and our deeply internalized biases regarding broad swaths of our nation’s people.

But we can’t; and it is in these moments—moments like those provided by events in Ferguson—that the limits of our commitment to that aspirational America are laid bare. It is in moments like these when the chasm between our respective understandings of the world—itself opened up by the equally cavernous differences in the way we’ve experienced it—seems almost impossible to bridge. But bridge them we must, before the strain of our repetitive motion disorder does permanent and untreatable damage to our collective national body."


4. Finish "The House I Live In"

HW - Complete viewing questions for "The House I Live In" (Assignment #15)

Agenda for 12/5

Darren Wilson Interview

Scenes From Ferguson—and Beyond

1. Eric Garner video

2. The Eric Garner "aftermath"

3. Why cops are almost never indicted for shooting someone in the line of duty.

Tim Wise
 
"To white America, in the main, police are the folks who help get our cats out of the tree, or who take us on ride-arounds to show us how gosh-darned exciting it is to be a cop. We experience police most often as helpful, as protectors of our lives and property. But that is not the black experience by and large; and black people know this, however much we don’t. The history of law enforcement in America, with regard to black folks, has been one of unremitting oppression. That is neither hyperbole nor opinion, but incontrovertible fact. From slave patrols to overseers to the Black Codes to lynching, it is a fact. From dozens of white-on-black riots that marked the first half of the 20th century (in which cops participated actively) to Watts to Rodney King to Abner Louima to Amadou Diallo to the railroading of the Central Park 5, it is a fact. From the New Orleans Police Department’s killings of Adolph Archie to Henry Glover to the Danziger Bridge shootings there in the wake of Katrina to stop-and-frisk in places like New York, it’s a fact. And the fact that white people don’t know this history, have never been required to learn it, and can be considered even remotely informed citizens without knowing it, explains a lot about what’s wrong with America. Black people have to learn everything about white people just to stay alive. They especially and quite obviously have to know what scares us, what triggers the reptilian part of our brains and convinces us that they intend to do us harm. Meanwhile, we need know nothing whatsoever about them. We don’t have to know their history, their experiences, their hopes and dreams, or their fears. And we can go right on being oblivious to all that without consequence. It won’t be on the test, so to speak.

In his contribution to Jill Nelson’s 2000 anthology on police brutality, scholar Robin D.G Kelley reminds us of the bill of particulars.* As Kelley notes, in colonial Virginia, slave owners were allowed to beat, burn, and even mutilate slaves without fear of punishment; and throughout the colonial period, police not only looked the other way at the commission of brutality against black folks, but were actively engaged in the forcible suppression of slave uprisings and insurrections. Later, after abolition, law enforcement regularly and repeatedly released black prisoners into the hands of lynch mobs and stood by as their bodies were hanged from trees, burned with blowtorches, body parts amputated and given out as souvenirs. In city after city, north and south, police either stood by or actively participated in pogroms against African American communities: in Wilmington, North Carolina, Atlanta, New Orleans, New York City, Akron and Birmingham, just to name a few. In one particularly egregious anti-black rampage in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, police shot blacks dead in the street as part of an orgy of violence aimed at African Americans who had moved from the Deep South in search of jobs. One hundred and fifty were killed, including thirty-nine children whose skulls were crushed and whose bodies were thrown into bonfires set by white mobs. In the 1920s, it is estimated that half of all black people who were killed by whites, were killed by white police officers.

But Kelley continues: In 1943 white police in Detroit joined with others of their racial compatriots, attacking blacks who had dared to move into previously all-white public housing, killing seventeen. In the 1960s and early ’70s police killed over two dozen members of the Black Panther Party, including those like Mark Clark and Fred Hampton in Chicago, asleep in their beds at the time their apartment was raided. In 1985, Philadelphia law enforcement perpetrated an all-out assault on members of the MOVE organization, bombing their row houses from state police helicopters, killing eleven, including five children, destroying sixty-one homes and leaving hundreds homeless.
These are but a few of the stories one could tell, and which Kelley does in his extraordinary recitation of the history—and for most whites, we are without real knowledge of any of them. But they and others like them are incidents burned into the cell memory of black America. They haven’t the luxury of forgetting, even as we apparently cannot be bothered to remember, or to learn of these things in the first place. Bull Connor, Sheriff Jim Clark, Deputy Cecil Price: these are not far-away characters for most black folks. How could they be? After all, more than a few still carry the scars inflicted by men such as they. And while few of us would think to ridicule Jews for still harboring less than warm feelings for Germans some seventy years later—we would understand the lack of trust, the wariness, even the anger—we apparently find it hard to understand the same historically-embedded logic of black trepidation and contempt for law enforcement in this country. And this is so, even as black folks’ negative experiences with police have extended well beyond the time frame of Hitler’s twelve year Reich, and even as those experiences did not stop seventy years ago, or even seventy days ago, or seventy minutes.

Can we just put aside all we think we know about black communities (most of which could fit in a thimble, truth be told) and imagine what it must feel like to walk through life as the embodiment of other people’s fear, as a monster that haunts their dreams the way Freddie Kreuger does in the movies? To be the physical representation of what marks a neighborhood as bad, a school as bad, not because of anything you have actually done, but simply because of the color of your skin? Surely that is not an inconsequential weight to bear. To go through life, every day, having to think about how to behave so as not to scare white people, or so as not to trigger our contempt—thinking about how to dress, and how to walk and how to talk and how to respond to a cop (not because you’re wanting to be polite, but because you’d like to see your mother again)—is work; and it’s harder than any job that any white person has ever had in this country. To be seen as a font of cultural contagion is tantamount to being a modern day leper.

And then perhaps we might spend a few minutes considering what this does to the young black child, and how it differs from the way that white children grow up. Think about how you would respond to the world if that world told you every day how awful you were, how horrible your community was, and how pathological your family. That’s what we’re telling black people daily. Every time police call the people they are sworn to protect animals, as at least one Ferguson officer was willing to do on camera, we tell them this. Every time we shrug at the way police routinely stop and frisk young black men, we tell them this. Every time we turn away from the clear disparities in our nation’s schools, which relegate the black and brown to classrooms led by the least experienced teachers, we tell them this. Every time Bill O’Reilly pontificates about “black culture” and every time Barack Obama tells black men to be better fathers, we tell them this: that they are uniquely flawed, uniquely pathological, a cancerous mass of moral decrepitude to be feared, scorned, surveilled, incarcerated and discarded. The constant drumbeat of negativity is so normalized by now that it forms the backdrop of every conversation about black people held in white spaces when black folks themselves are not around. It is like the way your knee jumps when the doctor taps it with that little hammer thing during a check-up: a reflex by now instinctual, automatic, unthinking.

And still we pretend that one can think these things—that vast numbers of us can—and yet be capable of treating black folks fairly in the workforce, housing market, schools or in the streets; that we can, on the one hand, view the larger black community as a chaotic maelstrom of iniquity, while still managing, on the other, to treat black loan applicants, job applicants, students or random strangers as mere individuals. That we can somehow thread the needle between our grand aspirations to equanimity as Americans and our deeply internalized biases regarding broad swaths of our nation’s people.

But we can’t; and it is in these moments—moments like those provided by events in Ferguson—that the limits of our commitment to that aspirational America are laid bare. It is in moments like these when the chasm between our respective understandings of the world—itself opened up by the equally cavernous differences in the way we’ve experienced it—seems almost impossible to bridge. But bridge them we must, before the strain of our repetitive motion disorder does permanent and untreatable damage to our collective national body."


4. Finish "The House I Live In"

HW - Complete viewing questions (Assignment #15)

Agenda for 12/4 - Maroon

1. Darren Wilson Interview

2. Scenes From Ferguson—and Beyond

3. Eric Garner video

4. The Eric Garner "aftermath"

5. Why cops are almost never indicted for shooting someone in the line of duty.

3. Finish "The House I Live In"

HW - Complete viewing questions (Assignment #15)

Agenda for 12/2

1. What happened in Ferguson?

2. The response to the grand jury's decision
 
3. Deadly Force in Black and White

4. Continue "The House I Live In."

HW - work on Assignment 15 viewing questions (due Monday 12/8)

Agenda for 12/1

1. What happened in Ferguson?

2. . Deadly Force in Black and White

3. Continue "The House I Live In"