Group items tagged

Blacks and whites experience myriad pressures that keep them separate, a fact that becomes clear when you attempt to straddle the race line, talk to people who have, or simply read the newspaper.

The aversion to whites is so strong that, even in schools where few are present, black students who excel academically are ridiculed for "acting white." This is a serious problem.

black cliques erect insuperable cultural barrier of tastes and behavior that are unintelligible to whites

blacks excommunicated for "acting white," whites who adopt black culture are likely to face resistance at home and in their former cultural community. They're labeled "wannabes" and "wiggers."

makes developing deep friendships hard

This is the

Colorism can occur within one’s own community, or across racial and ethnic groups

any other “racial” group.

Our more systematic historical research shows that the importance of skin color on life chances dates back at least to the nineteenth century.

it may emerge as an indirect effect of the person’s ability to take advantage of the higher social status that has accrued over many generations to light-skinned African-Americans

skin tone within a given race or ethnicity is associated with socioeconomic outcomes.

Being dark-skinned has psychological as well as economic, educational, and temporal costs.

“colorism” may be a direct response to the behavior of or, more likely, the appearance of a person standing before the potential employer, judge, or teacher.

people who suffer from discrimination may not protest it because they are unaware of their unfair treatment, because they perceive no alternatives, or because they see no means of effective protest. 

Light-skinned blacks tend to come from families with relatively high status on these dimensions, so skin tone affects educational attainment indirectly.

light- and medium-skinned blacks received shorter sentences for all crimes than the darkest category of blacks.  In every case except property crimes [i.e. for drug, personal, and miscellaneous crimes], the darkest group of blacks received higher sentences, on average, than whites

sentences are 2 percent shorter for light-skinned blacks compared with whites, 4 percent longer for medium-skinned blacks, and 2 percent longer for dark-skinned blacks. Those differences seem small, but 4 percent of a 2,560 day sentence (the average length for whites) is over three months of prison time.

light-skinned African Americans are relatively advantaged in the social and economic arenas,

they have a similar advantage as voters and political actors, and that dark-skinned blacks perceive more discrimination.

Light-skinned blacks may be slightly more likely to perceive discrimination against other members of their race, and they are a little more likely to participate politically.

So why isn’t colorism an issue around which blacks organize politically?

Public opinion in this instance was ill informed, insensitive to some of the most important implications of the tax cuts, and largely disconnected from

a variety of relevant values and material interests

light-skinned blacks as roughly analogous to middle-class Americans – certainly not at the top of the distribution, but enjoying enough benefits from the unfair structure that they would be hesitant to disrupt it too much.

he implication is that dark-skinned blacks ought to perceive that they are doubly maltreated, that skin color hierarchy is just as unfair as the racial hierarchy within which it nests, and that protest is warranted. 

the task is to understand their values on their own terms.

Applying this logic to the case of skin color discrimination yields several hypotheses.  Perhaps dark-skinned blacks are aware of their doubly unfair treatment, but choose to ignore it because they too care more about some other political value, such as racial solidarity or individual autonomy.

Similarly, light-skinned African Americans may recognize,

that “for generations of black people, color and class have been inexorably tied together,” but they too care more about racial solidarity than about either taking advantage of or fighting this internal division. 

in short, one form of unfairness may be worth accepting or ignoring publicly for the sake of fighting another, or simply pursuing some unrelated goal.

The deeply religious, in short, vote their values, not their interests.

At the turn of the twentieth century, both black and white media frequently used “mulatto” (and sometimes “quadroon” and “octoroon”) – sometimes favorably, sometimes unfavorably, but to a surprising degree simply as a common and unremarkable descriptor.

those descriptors were never used or were terms of opprobrium or shock.

one can explain the lack of collective attention to the unfairness of skin tone discrimination by pointing to the dissemination of and allegiance to other, apparently stronger values.

Racial nationalists have traditionally been hostile to black feminists or black Marxists who seek to draw attention to unfair practices within the black community

they are similarly hostile to any discussion of skin color differentiation because it appears to be a strategy of “divide and conquer.

Assume that there were salamanders living in some grasslands. Suppose, Lamarck argued, that these salamanders had a hard time walking because their short legs couldn't trample the tall grasses or reach the ground. Suppose that these salamanders began to slither on their bellies to move from place to place. Because they didn't use their legs, the leg muscles wasted away from disuse and the legs thus became small.

passed this acquired trait

legless salamanders evolved

no legs.

by inheriting the acquired characteristic of

Darwin's Background

o have extraordinary talents.

genius, did not at first appear

Darwin disliked school

d observing birds and collecting insects to study.

sent to medical school in Scotland

"intolerably dull

interested in attending natural history lectures.

university at Cambridge, England, in 1827.

Darwin be chosen for the position of naturalist on the ship the HMS Beagle.

to collect specimens, make observations, and keep careful records of anything he observed that he thought significant.

Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell,

In the Andes he observed fossil shells of marine organisms in rock beds at about 4,300 m.

One reason that Darwin was so eager to study life on land was that he suffered from terrible seasickness and couldn't wait to get off the Beagle.

thousands

trekked hundreds of miles through unmapped region.

catalog his specimens and write his notes.

praised by the scientific community.

experts for study.

bird specialist

Darwin's bird collections from the Galapagos Islands, located about 1,000 km west of South America.

13 similar

Other experts

believe that species change over time.

evidence f

In 1837 Darwin began his first notebook on evolution. For several years Darwin filled his notebooks with facts that could be used to support the theory of evolution.

fossils of similar relative ages are more closely related than those of widely different relative ages.

He ran his own breeding experiments and also did experiments on seed dispersal.

By the Color of Our Skin is not a policy book. It aims to describe America's black-white condition, not to point the way to racial harmony

Desegregation, they say, "means the elimination of discriminatory laws and barriers." Integration, by contrast, is "governed by behavior and choice."

They give integration an almost impossibly strict definition. It's not enough for whites to interact with blacks with whom they share space, whether residential, professional, or personal interest. Whites must actively seek out and embrace blacks.

American culture doesn't exist apart from black American culture. Some of this integration may be virtual - corporate ads and university brochures, for example.

Yet due to centuries of separation, black Americans have developed a culture that is distinct from, even as it exerts a disproportionate influence on, America's white or mainstream culture.