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markfrankel18

Norway to restage 1914 'human zoo' that exhibited Africans as inmates | World news | th... - 2 views

  • As part of mammoth celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Norway’s constitution, the government is funding two artists to re-enact a "human zoo", which will open to the public on 15 May. Oslo’s original human zoo or Kongolandsbyen was central to Norway’s world fair in 1914. The artists claim that the new project, which they named European Attraction Limited, is meant to provoke a discussion on colonialism and racism in a post-modern world, engaging with Norway’s racist past in the process. Some anti-racism organisations and commentators have labelled the project offensive and racist. Is there any artistic value in the re-enactment of such a dehumanising spectacle, especially in a world not yet fully healed of racism? Is this an abuse of art? Or will the re-enactment reverse the modest gains of the equality struggles, especially when the world engages with the subject of race so superficially?
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Living with the J-word - 1 views

  • Thankfully, most of this Jew-targeted hatred takes the form of verbal aggression rather than physical violence. But because many critics of Israel make no distinction between citizens of the Jewish state and the worldwide Jewish community, the J-word has been the focus. You won't see "Kill Israelis" scrawled on London synagogue walls. What you see on walls is "Kill the Jews", and on banners "Hitler was Right". And this brings me back to the point about the complexity of anti-Semitism today. It is always around and in the end it is focused primarily on the J-word, in the same way that another form of racism is focused on the N-word. Those on the receiving end find their lives shaped by it. Certainly my life, my sense of myself, has been shaped by the casual anti-Semitism that I have encountered for more than half a century. The first time I was called a "Jew" with malicious intent was September 1958 in the playground of Belmont Hills Elementary School, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It came as a surprise. I was eight years old and up until that time had been living in New York City where everyone I encountered was Jewish. Until that moment, the word "Jew" had simply been one of the words and phrases - like "Mike", "son" and "114 East 90th Street" - whose meanings were slowly building up into a sense of who I was.
  • Throughout the 19th Century, "Israelite" or "Hebrew" or "follower of Moses" supplanted "Jew" as the politically correct way to refer to the community. It was a process analogous to the way "black" and then "African-American" or "person of colour" replaced "Negro" in polite discourse after the Civil Rights era.
  • Thirty years later, a new word for this hatred was coined - "anti-Semitism". This was a time when race science was all the rage. Anti-Semitism avoided the connotation of pure hatred against individuals which is, after all, irrational. It focused scientifically on the supposed racial and social characteristics of a group, the Jews, without mentioning them by name. From there it was easy to start a political movement - based on scientific "facts" - to rein in a people who clearly were alien.
Beata Rodlingova

Points of view (The Guardian advert, 1986) - 0 views

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    The Guardian's award-winning 'Skinhead' commercial was screened in 1986 and features a skinhead who appeared to be wrestling a man's briefcase from his hands. But the camera then cuts and viewers see that he is in fact trying to rescue the man from falling bricks
Lawrence Hrubes

Should We See Everything a Cop Sees? - The New York Times - 2 views

  • Much of the moral case for bodycams, that they reduce police violence, rests on a single experiment: the 2012 Rialto study
  • The data from nearly 1,000 shifts and 50,000 hours of police-public interactions showed that when officers wore bodycams, they were less likely to use batons, Tasers, firearms and pepper spray or to have confrontations that resulted in police-dog bites, and they were far less likely to receive civilian complaints about their conduct.
  • In an essay published shortly after the White House announced its $75 million in bodycam funding in 2014, two authors of the study, Barak Ariel and Alex Sutherland, hypothesized that it was not cameras alone that drove the positive results; it was the fact that before every interaction with a citizen, officers in the trial were required to announce that they were recording. There may have been a “self-awareness effect”: Both parties were reminded at the moment of contact that they were under surveillance and that they should behave accordingly. One question was whether the effect would hold up if officers did not announce the cameras’ presence. Another was whether it would hold up when the cameras lost their novelty.
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  • Their resulting analysis of 2.2 million officer hours, published this May, seems to validate their concerns that Rialto offered an incomplete picture. It found that police use of force actually went up by an astonishing 71 percent when officers could turn their cameras on and off at will and went down (by 37 percent) only when they recorded nearly every interaction with the public from start to finish.
markfrankel18

When Whites Just Don't Get It, Part 6 - The New York Times - 1 views

  • Why do we discriminate? The big factor isn’t overt racism. Rather, it seems to be unconscious bias among whites who believe in equality but act in ways that perpetuate inequality.
  • That’s why it’s so important for whites to engage in these uncomfortable discussions of race, because we are (unintentionally) so much a part of the problem. It’s not that we’re evil, but that we’re human. The challenge is to recognize that unconscious bias afflicts us all — but that we just may be able to overcome it if we face it.
Lawrence Hrubes

Should Patients Be Allowed to Choose - or Refuse - Doctors by Race or Gender? - The New... - 0 views

  • Everyone knows that doctors must not discriminate on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, religion or national origin when they select or treat patients: It’s an obligation they accepted when they entered the health care profession. (That doesn’t mean they have to take all comers; they can turn away patients for various other reasons.) But should patients be able to choose clinicians on the basis of such attributes? The answer is: It depends.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture | The New Yorker - 1 views

  • if you were looking at an ancient Greek or Roman sculpture up close, some of the pigment “was easy to see, even with the naked eye.” Westerners had been engaged in an act of collective blindness. “It turns out that vision is heavily subjective,” he told me. “You need to transform your eye into an objective tool in order to overcome this powerful imprint”—a tendency to equate whiteness with beauty, taste, and classical ideals, and to see color as alien, sensual, and garish.
Lawrence Hrubes

Colin Kaepernick and a Landmark Supreme Court Case | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Kaepernick refused to stand as a form of political expression—to protest, he said, the oppression of African-Americans by the police and others. The Supreme Court case arose out of a related First Amendment right—to exercise the freedom of religion. In 1943, at the height of the Second World War, the court heard a challenge by a Jehovah’s Witness family to the expulsion of their daughters, Marie and Gathie Barnette, from a school in West Virginia. The sisters had been punished for refusing to salute the flag and repeat the Pledge of Allegiance, something state law required of students.
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