Eric Stoller's Blog

A Race is a Nice Thing to Have: A Guide to Being a White Person or Understanding the White Persons in Your Life by Janet E. Helms.

The classic book on race and racism is once again available. This book is designed to help White people assume responsibility for ending racism, understand how racism impacts Whites as well as others, analyze racism, and discover positive alternatives for living in a multicultural society. Many self-analysis exercises and instruments enrich the text.

From the preface:
“For racism to disappear in the United States, White people must take the responsibility for ending it. For them to assume that responsibility, they must become aware of how racism hurts White people and consequently, how ending it serves White people’s best interests. Moreover, this awareness not only must be accompanied by enhanced abilities to recognize the many faces of racism, but also by the discovery of options to replace it.”

The 15th Erase Racism Carnival is up at RaceWire.

Check out all of the Erase Racism Carnivals at Ally Work.

For the record, I believe that writing about white privilege and patriarchy is a positive thing to do. I feel very positive when I write about these particular barriers to social justice.

I feel that working towards the elimination of racism and sexism is a positive thing. It’s not an easy thing to do. It often hurts. There are comments that make my heart pound as I attempt to digest scattered remnants of thoughts that have been buried beneath piles of words. Sometimes it keeps me awake at night as I try to negotiate how to respond. It hurts to see comments from friends who say that I only talk about negatives. It is challenging.

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I ran into a reader of my site yesterday. She whispered my name to her friend and said that I look different in person than I do on my blog

This post is inspired by her comments…

This post is an open invitation for all my readers to post a comment. Say hello, post a link to your site, tell us all your real name, talk about your summer, let me know if I need more posts about trombones, etc.

It’s a comments free-for-all. Don’t be shy

Declining Enrollment:
Eastern Oregon University is in trouble. With enrollment and finance on the decline, officials have created a “strategic plan that includes enrollment management, recruitment and transfer improvements.”

Student applications are down 41 percent this fall compared with two years ago. Tuition revenue for the university dropped $1.48 million below its expectations for this year; it projects an additional $847,000 decline in tuition revenue for 2007-08. With fewer students, the school is also failing to fill its residence halls, which means it must pay a bigger share of dorm debt.

Perhaps it is time for Eastern Oregon University to contact some strategic enrollment management consultants?

The 30 Wealthiest Americans list was calculated by each person’s total wealth as a percentage of the economy of the time.

Do you see any commonalities among the people in this list?

via the Official Google Blog:

• Web Search: Result pages include headers to delineate logical sections.
  
• Accessible Search: Promotes results that are accessible.
  
• Book Search: Full-text access to public-domain works.
  
• Gmail: A simple yet functional HTML mode that works well with screenreaders.
  
• Gmail Mobile: A lightweight user interface that is also speech-friendly.
  
• Google Maps: Easy-to-use textual directions.
  
• Calendar: A functional, yet speech-friendly user interface.
  
• Audio Captchas: All services that use Google Accounts provide an audio alternative for the visual challenge-response tests that are used to distinguish humans from machines.
  
• Mobile Transcoder: A mobile lens for viewing the web that produces accessible views.
  
• Google Video: Allows uploaded videos to contain captions/subtitles in multiple languages for viewers who are hearing-impaired or unfamiliar with the original language.
  
• Google Talk: IM clients inside a web browser can pose accessibility challenges, but the use of the open Jabber API means that Google users can choose from a variety of Jabber clients, many of which work well with adaptive technologies.
  
• Web APIs: Many Google services offer high-level web APIs that aid in authoring mashups; this provides a means for creating highly customized accessible views.
• 1-800-GOOG-411: Here’s an exception to the rule that we deliver most things through a web browser. Our experimental Voice Local Search service lets anyone who can speak into a phone search for a local business by name or category; get connected to the business free of charge; get the details by SMS if you’re using a mobile phone. (Just say “text message”.)

The Columbia River Gorge, the Historic Highway, and Multnomah Falls are some of my favorite places to visit in Oregon.

We were driving home from Portland the other day when I took these photographs. The sunset was a mix of purples, yellows, oranges, and light blue. I pulled off of highway 34, rolled down the window and snapped a couple quick shots of the sunset just outside of Corvallis.

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If you need to buy soap, I would suggest purchasing your bars from the Oregon Soap Company. My personal favorite is the Soapman’s Spice. Its blend of clove oil and cinnamon powder in a vegetable-based soap is just terrific! Oregon Soap Company soaps are available for sale on their website and at the Skidmore Saturday Market in Portland Oregon.