You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Race’ category.
In reading about the book The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses, which I mentioned here last week, I stumbled upon the website of an interesting museum exhibit that’s currently up here in New York.
Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow: Jewish Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges traces the history of several dozen German Jewish professors who, after fleeing Nazi Germany, took teaching positions at segregated colleges in the American South. According to the website, the exhibit emphasizes the relationships that grew up between these professors and their students, and the effect that this unusual meeting of cultures had on both groups.
The exhibit runs at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan through January. I’ll report back after my visit.
The remaining five Jena Six defendants pleaded to reduced charges yesterday, ending a court case that dragged on for two and a half years and sparked national controversy.
In the fall of 2006, three white students hung nooses from a tree on the grounds of Louisiana’s Jena High School, a mostly-white school in a rural part of the state, and school administrators called the incident a harmless prank.
A few months later a white student was beaten at school by six blacks, later identified as the Jena Six. Though no weapons were used in the assault, and the victim suffered no long-term physical harm, the six were initially charged with attempted murder, and one was convicted by an all-white jury of charges that carried a maximum jail term of twenty-two years. (His conviction was later thrown out, after which he pled guilty to a reduced charge.)
The other five defendants remained in legal limbo until yesterday, when each pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges of simple battery. Each will pay $500 to $1,000 in court costs and fines, and will be placed on unsupervised probation for seven days. A civil lawsuit filed by the beating victim was settled immediately before the sentencing for undisclosed terms.
The five remaining Jena Six defendants are expected to plead guilty to reduced charges today. No information on the specifics of the plea deal has been released.
The Jena Six were students at Jena High School in Jena, Louisiana, in 2006 when they were accused of beating a white youth. The incident followed months of racial conflict at the school.
The Six were charged with attempted murder in the wake of the beating, a far more serious charge than any white student involved in similar recent assaults. Wikipedia has a detailed discussion of the ensuing controversy here.
One member of the Jena Six pled guilty to battery in late 2007.
A new book, The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses, examines American academics’ response to the rise of Nazism, specifically noting that many “maintained amicable relations with the Third Reich” until after (sometimes well after) Kristallnacht, in 1938.
Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein makes a provocative point about that subject:
While Germany from 1933 through 1938 treated Jews very badly, it wasn’t until Kristallnacht that one could say that Germany was more vicious in its treatment of minorities than, say, Mississippi. American universities certainly weren’t boycotting Mississippi, so it strikes me as an obvious issue of hindsight bias to argue that American universities that were exceedingly tolerant of domestic racism should be specifically excoriated for paying little attention to foreign anti-Semitism, just because in historical retrospect we know that German anti-Semitism led to the Holocaust.
Without getting into an argument about whether one or the other was “more vicious,” I’d say that Bernstein doesn’t go far enough here. Many Americans put the German racism of the mid-1930s in a different category than the American racism of the same era not because of hindsight bias, but also because they don’t fully grasp, or haven’t fully come to terms with, just how brutal and horrific our country’s 20th century racial legacy actually is.
(I should note, by the way, that I’m not vouching for the rest of Bernstein’s post. I strongly disagree with parts of his arguments about Spanish fascism and American Stalinism, but that’s another topic for another time.)
On CNN yesterday, former GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo said that the National Council of La Raza, the Latino civil rights organization of which Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a member, is “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses.” His evidence?
The logo of La Raza is ‘All for the race. Nothing for the rest.’
One big problem with that. The motto of the National Council of La Raza is “Strengthening America by promoting the advancement of Latino families.” (Their logo, if anyone’s wondering, can be seen in this photo of John McCain’s speech to their 2008 national convention.)
Oops.
The phrase Tancredo had in mind, “Por La Raza todo, fuera de La Raza nada,” appears in a 1969 poem/manifesto associated with the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), a Chicano student activist group.
MEChA is a loose federation of campus-based student organizations, some more radical than others. California politician Cruz Bustamente was a MEChA member as an undergraduate at Fresno State University in the 1970s, and he got in hot water with conservatives during his 2003 campaign for governor for refusing to repudiate the group.
MEChA and NCLR could hardly be more different.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments