Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Spreading Racism via Facebook

March 29, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: AMAZE646/SHUTTERSTOCK)

Is Facebook a particularly powerful medium to spread racist messages? That’s the disturbing implication of a newly published study. “Frequent users are particularly disposed to be influenced by negative racial messages,” psychologists Shannon Rauch and Kimberley Schanz write in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. They argue these heavy users log onto the site in search of social inclusion rather than information—and as such, they’re prone to express agreement with the material they see without thinking about it too deeply. This combination of “a need to connect and an ... Read More

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Obama’s Unwanted Legacy: The Renewed Influence of ‘Old-Fashioned Racism’

January 20, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Barack Obama speaks at a campaign rally in North Carolina in 2008 (PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK)

As he looks back on his first term, President Barack Obama can take satisfaction from a series of significant accomplishments. But according to a new analysis by a Brown University political scientist, his rise to power has also produced a less-welcome result: A renewed alignment between political preference and “old-fashioned racism.” Old-school racist beliefs were “unrelated to white Americans’ partisan preferences throughout the post-civil rights era,” writes Michael Tesler. But his analysis of survey data, recently published in the Journal of Politics, suggests that changed ... Read More

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Jeremy Lin and the Post-Racial Playing Field

February 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

If he were still alive, Sigmund Freud might have been a Jeremy Lin fan. At the very least, he would have recognized what was going on when an ESPN.com writer used the headline “Chink in their armor” to describe the Knicks’ first loss since Lin took over as point guard. “A suppression of a previous intention to say something,” Freud wrote, “is the indispensable condition for the occurrence of a slip of the tongue.” ESPN offered an apology and fired the headline writer. But the slip of the tongue, one among a list of many other awkward and revealing moments that have accompanied ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Research of Culture
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Does Black History Need More Than a Month?

January 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Last February, Nike marked the annual celebration of all things African American with the limited release of four separate sets of sneakers. To quote from the company’s marketing copy describing the shoe: “The predominantly black upper of this Black History Month Air Force 1 is a nod to the past, because in the early days of the sport of basketball, shoes on the court were almost always black. The hints of gold all around the shoe are reminders of the golden moment we all are striving to achieve.” And here I thought the gold was a subtle reference to the mercenary nature of the slave ... Read More

More like this: Culture, January-February 2012, Views Reviews and Interviews
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A Masterful Look at Anti-Apartheid

January 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
West Memphis 3

Shortly after my mother died in 1983, I sat down with her financial adviser to go over her estate and to decide what to do with the money she had left me. I discovered mom had investments in South Africa, then a pariah state for its racist policy of apartheid. When I told the adviser that I did not want to invest in that country, her response was, “What’s wrong with South Africa?” My answer was to find another investment adviser and divest immediately — which made me one of the millions of people influenced by the international anti-apartheid movement, an effort that is exhaustively ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Moving Pictures
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A Spotlight on the 9/11 Anti-Muslim Backlash

September 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

In the days following Sept. 11, 2001, reactions to the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and inside United Flight 93 ranged from grief to rage. As it became clear the culprits were a band of 19 fundamentalist Muslims working for a terrorist group that draped itself in a violent version of Islam, some Americans blamed all Muslims. Within days, several individuals were killed in the U.S. solely because of they were Muslim or perceived to be Muslim. One Sikh man died apparently for the suspect activity of wearing a turban; a Coptic Christian storekeeper died because he was Egyptian. ... Read More

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Why Whites Avoid Movies With Black Actors

May 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

In terms of box-office grosses, this is an extraordinary week for Hollywood: The No. 1 movie in America features a mixed-race cast. Granted, that movie is Fast Five, the fifth installment of the Fast and Furious action series. Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris called these films “loud, ludicrous and visually incoherent,” but added that they are “the most progressive force in Hollywood today.” As Morris noted, nonwhite actors played major roles in only two of the 30 top-grossing films of 2010. Studio executives believe white audiences prefer to see white characters, while ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, Findings, NEWS
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The Mental Roots of Racial Prejudice

April 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

A recent poll finding nearly half of Mississippi Republicans disapprove of interracial marriage is a disturbing reminder of the continuing prejudice faced by minority groups in 21st-century America. Why is such bias seemingly immune to eradication, and why does it seem to be more prevalent among social conservatives? A fascinating new study from Italy suggests at least part of the answer can be traced to the way we process information and form political attitudes. Psychologists Luigi Castelli and Luciana Carraro of the University of Padua present evidence that our perception of minority ... Read More

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Walking Backward Out the Schoolhouse Door

December 7, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The NAACP held a conference last week in North Carolina to draw attention to a trend easily unnoticed in what many Americans have come to think of as the "post-racial" age ushered in by the nation's first black president: Fifty years after the Civil Rights era, American public schools are resegregating. More black students today attend "extremely segregated" schools than did in 1988, at the height of desegregation, the NAACP notes. It symbolically hosted the education conference in Raleigh, N.C., where the local school district has been wrestling with the controversial end to a busing ... Read More

More like this: Culture & Society, Education, The Idea Lobby
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Hey TSA, Racial Profiling Doesn’t Work

November 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Arguments over racial profiling at the airport security line typically turn around the assumption that such screening, at least to some extent, works. The idea may be unsavory, but it sounds logical: If we target people with a higher probability of being terrorists — whether they have Saudi passports, beards or headscarves — we'd have a better chance of catching real terrorists in the process. The question becomes one of morals. Is this the right thing to do? Does the societal benefit (catching more terrorists) outweigh the cost (compromising our ethics)? William Press, a professor ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, The Idea Lobby
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