Communities secratary John Denham leaves Downing Street after the weekly cabinet meeting in London. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
From Alan Travis in The Guardian for 14 January 2010.
Leading equality campaigners and trade unionists said tonight there was still “some way to go” in tackling racial inequality after a speech by John Denham, the communities secretary, in which he insisted it was time to move on from the one-dimensional debate that assumes all minority ethnic people are disadvantaged.
In a landmark speech, Denham said substantial progress had been made on race equality since the Macpherson report 10 years ago and it was time for a more sophisticated approach that recognised that disadvantage was also tied up with class and poverty.
He also strenuously denied that a new duty on the public sector to tackle class inequalities would lead to work on combating racism dropping off the agenda.
Denham said it was important to recognise the importance of class and socio-economic status on people’s lives. The growing black and Asian middle class meant that many more people from minority ethnic backgrounds had a degree, a good job and their own home, while poor white working-class families faced serial disadvantages.
For more…
Finnish Roma activist Miranda Volasrata and Romanian writer Luminita Cioaba, who fought her Roma family to attend school, at the inauguration of the Roma Cultural Route at the Roma Kamenci settlement near Lendava, Slovenia, in November 2009. (Brigid Grauman/GlobalPost)
From Brigid Grauman in the Global Post.
LENDAVA, Slovenia — The word “gypsy” is often used pejoratively. But the Council of Europe is trying to change that with a new tourism route focusing on Roma culture and history.
“People see gypsies by a squalid dump at the side of the road,” said Jake Bowers, a militant British gypsy and journalist, “but they don’t really know us. I’d like a situation where we are recognized as a transnational European nation with representation at the United Nations.”
Bowers was speaking at the inauguration of the Roma Cultural Route last month, sponsored by the Strasbourg-based Council, which is not related to the European Union and works on European integration through culture and human rights. The route will link dispersed gypsy, or Roma, communities across Europe to strengthen existing networks and encourage Roma and non-Roma people to meet. Nine countries are already taking part with museums, shows and documentation centers. The inauguration took place in Slovenia at the Roma Kamenci settlement near the spa town Lendeva.
For more…
CREDIT: JUPITERIMAGES
Raegen T. Miller reviews the book The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls by Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams in Science for 20 November 2009:
Two groups of people should care about the underrepresentation of women in math-intensive fields: academics and everyone else. In The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams provide a valuable resource for both audiences. For academics, their book may help diffuse political tension inimical to the goals of the academy. Currently, the issue of underrepresentation is a political lightning rod, and scholars are virtually guaranteed to attract abundant criticism for posing and testing any hypothesis explaining gender disparities among scientists in different fields. Such criticism is not always confined to the scientific merits of its recipient’s work, and junior scholars, in particular, may jeopardize their careers by pursuing research agendas speaking to the relative scarcity of women in mathematically oriented fields. An intellectualclimate more conducive to self-censorship than the pursuit of knowledge seems unlikely to help explain the issue of underrepresentation, much less address it. In other words, the academy has painted itself into a corner, and it needs help getting out. In this sense, The Mathematics of Sex is a lifeline.
For more (subscription required)…
A new research article by Robert W. Livingston and Nicholas A. Pearce, scheduled for publication in the journal Psychological Science, reports that facial characteristics of Black chief executive officers of major corporations affect their standing and status. The article is entitled “The Teddy-Bear Effect: Does Having a Baby Face Benefit Black Chief Executive Officers?”
Prior research suggests that having a baby face is negatively correlated with success among White males in high positions of leadership. However, we explored the positive role of such “babyfaceness” in the success of high-ranking Black executives. Two studies revealed that Black chief executive officers (CEOs) were significantly more baby-faced than White CEOs. Black CEOs were also judged as being warmer than White CEOs, even though ordinary Blacks were rated categorically as being less warm than ordinary Whites. In addition, baby-faced Black CEOs tended to lead more prestigious corporations and earned higher salaries than mature-faced Black CEOs; these patterns did not emerge for White CEOs. Taken together, these findings suggest that babyfaceness is a disarming mechanism that facilitates the success of Black leaders by attenuating stereotypical perceptions that Blacks are threatening. Theoretical and practical implications for research on race, gender, and leadership are discussed.
A review by Walter Benn Michaels in the London Review of Books for 27 August 2009 of the collection Who Cares about the White Working Class? edited by Kjartan Páll Sveinsson raises some provocative questions about discrimination and exploitation and the similarities and differences between left- and right-neoliberalism.
In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black people. Furthermore, in the form of the celebration of ‘identity’ and ‘ethnic diversity’, it seeks to create a bond between poor black people and rich white ones. So the African-American woman who cleans my office is supposed to feel not so bad about the fact that I make almost ten times as much money as she does because she can be confident that I’m not racist or sexist and that I respect her culture. And she’s also supposed to feel pride because the dean of our college, who makes much more than ten times what she does, is African-American, like her. And since the chancellor of our university, who makes more than 15 times what she does, is not only African-American but a woman too (the fruits of both anti-racism and anti-sexism!), she can feel doubly good about her. But, and I acknowledge that this is the thinnest of anecdotal evidence, I somehow doubt she does.
A U.S. National Science Foundation program dedicated to increasing the number of science and engineering Ph.D.s earned by members of underrepresented minority groups is now bearing fruit, according to a news note in the 24 April 2009 issue of Science magazine.
At 66 of the 79 U.S. universities participating in the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program, the annual number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) doctoral degrees awarded to minority students increased by 33.9% from 2001 to 2008. The gains were even more remarkable among the natural sciences and engineering fields, where Ph.D.’s for minorities increased by 50%.
Tamar Saguy, Nicole Tausch, John F. Dovidio and Felicia Pratto have published their article The Irony of Harmony: Intergroup Contact Can Produce False Expectations for Equality in a recent issue of Psychological Science. Here is their abstract:
Positive intergroup contact has been a guiding framework for research on reducing intergroup tension and for interventions aimed at that goal. We propose that beyond improving attitudes toward the out-group, positive contact affects disadvantaged-group members’ perceptions of intergroup inequality in ways that can undermine their support for social change toward equality. In Study 1, participants were assigned to either high- or low-power experimental groups and then brought together to discuss either commonalities between the groups or intergroup differences. Commonality-focused contact, relative to difference-focused contact, produced heightened expectations for fair (i.e., egalitarian) out-group behavior among members of disadvantaged groups. These expectations, however, proved unrealistic when compared against the actions of members of the advantaged groups. Participants in Study 2 were Israeli Arabs (a disadvantaged minority) who reported the amount of positive contact they experienced with Jews. More positive intergroup contact was associated with increased perceptions of Jews as fair, which in turn predicted decreased support for social change. Implications for social change are considered.
From Tricia Wang’s blog cultural bytes: