A Jeanne Site
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: October 2, 2001
Faculty on the Site.
New stuff, Fall 2001
- Vernellia Randall's Home Page Race, Law, Health, University of Dayton Law School.
- Racial Patterns and Basic Needs "Race, Racism and the Law considers race, racism and racial distinctions in the law; It examines the role of domestic and international law in promoting and/or alleviating racism. The site includes statutes, cases, excerpts of law review articles, annotated bibliographies and other documents related to race and racism."
- Transition
"People may not think of American blacks as culturally mixed, but cultural mixture is what forced African immigrants and their descendants to think of themselves as 'black' rather than Yoruba or Mandinka or half-German or one-quarter Cherokee."Kelefa Sanneh, "After the Beginning Again"
New stuff, Summer 2001
- race and ethnicity on the e-server "The EServer, formerly at Carnegie Mellon, is now based at the University of Washington. We are increasing efforts to publish new works (31462 so far).
- It's Devastating by "Mac" Rebecca McLaren. Poem, in the form of research, on racial awareness in young children.
- Race in the 'Post Third World' by Makani Themba-Nixon. "The UN becomes the flash point as groups vie for racism’s new meanings.">
New stuff, Summer 2000
- How Race Is Lived in America
You need to register, but it's free.- Anti-RacismNet
- Signed: anonymous a Teaching Tolerance article.
- Home was a horse stall Be sure to pick up the Bully Trap on the Teaching Tolerance articles. Link it to bullying for kids' page.
- The New Negro, and other essays, same site
See particularly the Demoiselles d'Avignon. Essay up soon. August 15, 2001. Link valid.New Stuff, December 1999
New Stuff, October 1999
Excerpt from "Bathroom Doors and Drinking Fountains: Jim Crow's Racial Symbolic"
by Elizabeth Abel in Spring 1999 Issue of Critical Inquiry
Multiculturalism, Transdisciplinarity, and Teaching in an Intercultural Perspective: A German-American Collaborative Research Project
Link added July 19, 1999. Checked August 15, 2001.Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I A Woman?"
Link added July 18, 1999. Updated August 15, 2001.- Sisters of the Yam Essay bell hooks. Link added August 15, 2001.
Toward a Socialist Theory of Racism
by Cornel West. Link added July 18, 1999.Critical Race Theory
- Critical Race Theory
Links. Added July 13, 1999.
Critical Race Theory Reading Groups
University of Michigan Law School. Link added July 13, 1999.
Institutional Racism
Relations between Native Americans and the United States
Yale's Avalon Electron Text Project. Link added July 7, 1999"Raising Personal Awareness of Everyday Racism,"
by Wendy Jebens. A personal account of how one tries
to deal with long-standing validity claims that have never been granted
good faith hearings. Link found on Julie Miller's social work page and added
July 4, 1999. I suggest a comparison to Peggy McIntosh's "White Privilege,
Color, and Crime: A Personal Account," in
Images of Color, Images of Crime, by Coramae Richey Mann and Marjoire S. Zatz.National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Sociological Research Online: Institutional Racism
Chapter Six of the Macpherson report on hte Stephen Lawrence
murder: an unprovoked fatal stabbing of a young black man
by five young white men. Inquiry questions whether institutional racism
affected investigation and results. Different context from the one in which
we usually discuss the issue of rules and policies that hurt some people
without the intervention of a perpetrator who has intent to discriminate.
Link added June 22, 1999.The Wearing of the Veil
A Short Historical Non-Ethnocentric View of Female Fundamental Muslim Attire
Vernellia Randall's Sites
Legal Construction of the White Race: The Racial Prerequisite Cases
Ian Haney Lopex. Link courtesy of Vernellia Randall, added June 1, 1999.Signs of Racism
Rajiv Kapur. Link courtesy of Vernellia Randall, added June 1, 1999.Trustung the Health Care System Ain't Always Easy
An African-Americaan Perspective on Vernellia Randall's Site
See particularly Section III, in connection with Women and Crime.
Link added April 2000.See Also: Indigenous Peoples
Institutional Racism
Definition set in the context of race and racism in the law.
Institutional Bad Faith
Definition as given by Gordon in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism.
A New State for the Inuit
News item on the granting of self-government to the Inuit of Canada.
Time-specific link. If not working, try search at , then search for:
"A New State for the Inuit," by Anthony dePlama on January 29, 1999.
Added January 29, 1999.
Dinesh D'Souza's Concluding Remarks on Racial Preferences
D'Souza is opposed to affirmative action, that's from the Right. Not critical left approach.
Link added January 27, 1999.
Living with the Myth of the Model Minority
Horizon Magazine's online article the twin assumptions about Asian Americans:
either under scrutiny or invisible. Link added on January 27, 1999.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
The Center's Board
A site devoted to budget and policy analysis,
with particular emphasis on low income families and individuals.
Of major import to both race and gender.
For example, you will find an article on what a typical family pays in taxes.
Considering the current debate on this issue in our Legislature,
this is an important source of information.
As with all data sources, you will need to assess the trust
you wish to place in the measurement and methodology described.DOCUMENTING THE GLOBAL BLACK EXPERIENCE FOR THE 21st CENTURY
The site is visually attractive and colorful,
but it is not arranged very effectively for Web viewing.
Material is too small to be read. Photographs are layered over one another so
that you can't see them.
We have much yet to learn about using these new media.Nevertheless,
this site may afford you important sources to other materials.
Race and Racism in American Law
Site maintained by Professor at Universitty of Dayton Law School.
Site name taken from Derrrick Bell's book of same name.
Good resources, frequently updated. Link added to this file on January 29, 1999.Images of African Americans from the 19th Century.
Long download time. But rare pictures provide a good sense of history.
NY Public Library Marriage, Women, and the Law
Research Librairies Group project on collecting materials to support
research on this issue in the 19th Century. A sample
search screen, and information on the project is available.
NY Public Library .
Institutional Racism
Essay by jeanne (January 1999)Institutional racism is racism without a perpetrator. How can that be? There must be a perpetrator, someone who is racist, to engage in behaviors that reflect that racism. Not so. Joe Feagin, amongst many others, has done extensive research on this issue.
Imagine a town in which there has been antiblack racism for a long time. Often the schools were once segregated; at least most blacks would be clustered in the poorer schools, since a large percentage of the black population is impoverished. Now imagine that Elizabeth Cohen, of Stanford, decides to discover ways in which the schools can combat racism. So she brings black and white teenagers together to collaborate on activities that are academic task-related. She finds that the whites talk more to the whites, that the blacks talk more to the whites, and that all have higher expectations for achievement of the whites. How can this be? Like Katz, in his experiments with college males before Cohen's experiment with junior high school males, Cohen tries to alter this perception of competence, and finds that the whites are very uncomfortable in situations in which Cohen manipulates the experiment so that the blacks necessarily contribute more to the solving of the problem.
Cohen, Katz, and later Curran, with third grade males, showed that these expectations were already in place by third grade. A system that consistently provides experiences from which some groups (people of color, women, the poor) are excluded creates a climate in which expectations are formed for the privileged group. All learn that the privileged group will outperform the excluded groups. They see this in daily interactions. The expectations become normative. When they are violated for whatever reason, negative affect is triggered, as with most norm violations. Women learn to deal with this by not consistently winning at chess, at tennis, any competitive endeavors against the males with whom they must live and work. People of color learn not to excel against the Other who is not of color. Then we look at the results of all this, and conclude that those over whom the excluded ones have carefully not excelled are considered innately superior to the excluded ones. Think about it. The very infrastructure in which all this takes place has been manipulated over time to promote the effect it now announces as objectively shown. This is deep and subtle. Much harder to see than straight out racism with a perpetrator. Much harder to fight against in terms of your own self esteem and to make others aware of the harm they are causing through privileging.
For further information on the subtlety and difficulty of fighting institutional discrimination, read Covaleskie on power as it is exerted in the educational institution. Covaleskie would classify institutional discrimination under the use of disciplinary power, which is far more subtle and hard to assess and prove than sovereign (up front straight-out, based on status positon) power.
Let's look at a much simpler and easier to grasp example. In the last two decades many universities have turned to night courses to accomodate students who must work at day jobs. Yet the night student has failed over the decades to make his/her voice heard. Financial aid offices, registration offices, petition offices, athletic opportunities, speakers, dozens of service offices, necessary to effective college involvement continue to operate either exclusively on the 9 to 5 schedule, or with minimal staff on late day and evenings, and generally staff with no authority to make real decisions. One example, after years of complaint on a campus where a very large percentage of students are night students, student clubs can receive no support from the Student Union unless a representative attends a Friday noon meeting. Now try that if you're working! Are the day students prejudiced against the night students? Probably not. They are day students. They can't imagine the perspective of night students. They make up the rules to fit their lives. The rules are just the rules, like objective, you know what I mean? Right! And who was empowered to make them? And where were there provisions for alternative validity claims?
When night students rail against the injustice, the answer is that nobody did this to them (no perpetrator). It 's just the rules. Auto-poietic non-learning sub-system. Duh! This is institutional discrimination. The refusal to hear in good faith validity claims that are brought as the result of changing situations and of exclusion. But that brings us to bad faith. Can institutions have bad faith? Yes!
Institutional Bad Faith
Essay by jeanne (January 1999)Institutions, like people, are in bad faith when they close themselves off from hearing evidence that could show their procedures really do exclude Others. Gordon, in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, describes institutional bad faith as weak: "We call it a weak form of bad faith simply because it expresses itself in the system of beliefs manifested by people in their everyday activities, their folkways and mores, and because such a system's maintenance and perpetuation depend on a collectivity of choices that may or may not be efforts to hide from responsibility." (Gordon, at p. 47)
Gordon speaks of "conspiracy" on p. 48: "There is no white-man conspiracy in the United States," a white man may declare. But ...a black man can respond,"True. But that doesn't mean that antiblack racism is an accidental feature of the United States."
Gordon describes strong bad faith as that in which individuals cannot escape the fact that they ARE making choices that exclude and harm, for they choose to support the "rules" that harm others. "Strong" bad faith is strong precisely because the decision to hide behind the array of bad social beliefs is the responsibility of not only the collective of individuals, but also each individual." (Gordon, at p.48)