Posted on 09/06/2006 7:09:04 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Survey focuses on what white people think about being white
MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (9/6/2006) -- What whites think about their own race is the focus of a first-of-its-kind national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota's department of sociology. From a telephone survey of more than 2,000 households nationwide, results show that there is more recognition among white people of their own racial identity and the social privileges that come with it than was previously thought.
The assumption behind prior scholarship and diversity training initiatives was that whites overlooked their own race.
"It's sort of like having an accent," said the study's co-author, University of Minnesota associate professor Doug Hartmann. "For some white Americans, racial identity is so fixed, so taken for granted, that 'race' becomes something other people have."
In fact, the researchers found that a majority of whites (74 percent) felt that their own racial identity was important to them, and that a similar majority were able to see prejudice and discrimination as important in explaining white advantage. At the same time, minorities are more likely to see their racial identities as important and to see structural reasons for racial disparities.
The research also suggests that awareness of white identity and awareness of white privilege are not the same. "The fact of the matter is that people claim white identity for defensive as well as progressive reasons," said survey co-author Paul Croll, University of Minnesota graduate student.
Age and income have little impact on a white person's awareness of their racial identity, the study found. But Southerners and social conservatives place more emphasis on their racial identity than other white Americans, while those with more education place less. Republican and male respondents most strongly resist claims that discrimination in legal and financial systems can explain white advantage. Additionally, respondents--regardless of their racial identity--believed strongly in the importance of individual effort, hard work and family upbringing in achieving success.
### The study, available upon request, was part of the American Mosaic Project, a three-year project funded by the Minneapolis-based David Edelstein Family Foundation that looks at race, religion and cultural diversity in the contemporary United States.
If one looks around in Ca., the SW of the USA and some areas in the NE, I was astonished that any whites were available for the polling and study! And as far as cultural contributions, history books in the public schools have all but erased those of Anglos, white Europeans who after all are just old white dead guys.
Nice to know that Southerners are classified and lumped into the category of racial phobics. These pinheads who did this survey are full of bull fertilizer!
No, Homer Simpson is yellow.
Is there a drop-off box where I can return them?
Hoover Institute
http://www.hoover.org/publications/he/2896296.html
Race, Culture, and Equality
Thomas Sowell
Executive Summary
In his remarks at the Commonwealth Club of California on June 18, 1998, Thomas Sowell discussed the conclusions he reached after spending fifteen years researching the economic and social impacts of cultural differences among peoples and nations around the world. This essay, Race, Culture, and Equality, distills the results found in the trilogy that was published during these years---Race and Culture (1994), Migrations and Cultures (1996), and Conquests and Cultures (1998).
The most obvious and inescapable finding from these years of research is that huge disparities in income and wealth have been the rule, not the exception, in countries around the world and over centuries of human history. Real income consists of outputs and these outputs have been radically different because the inputs have been radically different from peoples with different cultures.
Geography alone creates profound differences among peoples. It is not simply that such natural wealth as oil and gold are very unequally distributed around the world. More fundamentally, people themselves are different because of different levels of access to other peoples and cultures. Isolated peoples have always lagged behind those with greater access to a wider world, whether isolation has been the result of mountains, jungles, widely scattered islands or other geographic barriers.
Cities have been in the vanguard of cultural, technological and economic progress in virtually every civilization. But the geographic settings in which cities flourish are by no means equally distributed around the globe. Urbanization has been correspondingly unequally developed in different geographic regions--most prevalent among the networks of navigable waterways in Western Europe and least prevalent where such waterways are most lacking in tropical Africa.
If geography is not egalitarian, neither is demography. When the median age of Jews in the United States is 20 years older than the median age of Puerto Ricans, then there is no way that these two groups could be equally represented in jobs requiring long years of experience, in retirement homes or in sports. Even if they were identical in every other way, radically different age distributions would prevent their being equal in incomes or occupations.
Discrimination is also one of the many factors operating against equality. But even if all human beings behaved like saints toward one another, the other factors would still make equality of income and wealth virtually impossible to achieve.
Neither geography nor history can be undone but we can at least avoid artificially creating cultural isolation under glittering names like "multiculturalism."
Click on link for Essay & Notes
The point is that large numbers/proportions of the Asian applicants were getting 1600 on their SAT's.
That's called "driven".
Little story (true one): The son of a former co-worker of mine was a student at Texas A&M 15-20 years ago. He was a hard enough worker, spent plenty of time in the A&M library. One night he was studying there and missed hearing the closing bell, lost in study, and got himself locked in. Suddenly the lights went out, and the emergency/night lights came on. He looked around, and suddenly realized that under every one of the night lights, squarely in the middle of their little pools of floodlight, was an Asian student. They'd been sitting and studying in those spots all evening, and he hadn't thought anything of it. But then he realized that every one of them had chosen those spots hours before, right under the lights. That was when he realized that these people were fanatics, and that they were competing with him at that level. Or more to the point, they weren't competing with him any more. That story was already over.
So I wonder, is it time to say hello to our future, meritocratic policy elite, the successors to the "neocons"? If so, the good news is, there won't be any mortal conflict with China. The Chinese over there and the Chinese over here will come up with a friendly solution to all outstanding issues and problems, and implement it so smoothly that we'll never even hear the click.
If you're white, you're right, you're out of sight.
If you're yellow, how mellow, you're one of the fellows.
If you're brown, stick around; there's room for you in town.
But if you're black, God help you, get back!
The reference was to shadings of skin tone among the "colored" (black) community. Or, as Ellison was pointing out, not-so-community.
Jamaican society in the 19th and early 20th centuries was ruled by skin tone disguised as a "class" system. The boundary between "colored" and "white", however, was somewhat permeable. The son of an person who was only 1/8th African ("octoroon") and another who was white was called "statutory white" and could "pass" in theory.
This system of deflecting racial identity and turning it into a class system was threatened by the arrival of Marcus Garvey. It was the elite of "colored" society who drove Garvey out of Jamaica, whereupon he came to America to preach racial separatism and begin his "back to Africa" movement.
The Jamaican shadings of color, however, paled next to the excimiating recordation of every possible combination of ethnicities in Spanish-speaking New World societies, which had over 40 different words for different admixtures of black, white, and Amerindian parentage -- which were recorded on baptismal certificates, and affixed to their owners for life, determining their place in society. Such words as cholo, cimarron, chino, jibaro, salta atras, tente in el aire, albino, mestizo, negro fino, ochavado, pardo, prieto, cuatrero, and many, many more were used to fix a person's place in the demographic spectrum of the Spanish Empire and its successor societies.
And chicanos call whites "racist".
Yup, time for another round of scab-picking over skin color.
What race am I?
Human.
I first heard it on the job in early seventies in Harlem.
I read Ellison but couldn't get past the noble suffering. Chester Himes was to my mind a better window into that part of our society at that time.
Chester Himes....a Black Raymond Chandler with a sense of humor. He wrote 'Blind Man with a Pistol' and 'Cotton Comes to Harlem' among others. Worth checking out for a look at that world in that time.
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