Archive for March, 2008
Monday links
- “The Speech — Dual Consciousness on the Presidential Stage” — Kai Chang
- “Honoring Cesar Chavez at 81” — Joseph Orosco
- “Confronting Sexual Violence” — Brownfemipower
- “Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth” — Tim Wise
- “Double the Offense: Chinese Laundry and the Boston Herald Blog” — Latoya Peterson
Tech people
I was recently at a higher education conference for academic advisors where every time the campus tech support office personnel were referenced, they were called “tech guys.”
For example: “Our tech guys are going to be configuring our database.”
I was asked to be on a technology panel on academic advising and Web 2.0 technologies. During what was probably a long-winded answer to an audience question, I decided to point out that our campuses have “tech people” or “tech folks” on staff in our IT offices. I said something about the fact that tech guys is such a sexist phrase as it makes women invisible and centralizes men as being technology experts.
On a related note, Jason Kottke has been keeping track of the gender diversity at some of the most well known and attended web conferences… WebVisions, a web conference in Portland, Oregon seems to contain a bit more gender variation than some of the conferences that Kottke references, but not by a lot. Of 38 total speakers, only 8 are women.
I won an award!
I was sifting through my web site statistics when I found yet another inbound link from a hate-spewing, neo-nazi, white supremacist website. It’s the type of thing that happens when word gets out that yet another Swiss-German, anti-racist, feminist, ally, man is blogging about social justice issues. The white supremacists link to your site and visit in droves. Jim S., who graciously nominated me for the award, has commented on my site a couple times and has left hundreds of bigoted comments on the aforementioned (not directly linked as I refuse to send link juice in their direction) site.
The full text of the award is as follows:
“We ought to have a thread for “wussified liberal race traitor of the week.”
I nominate Eric Stoller!
Translation: This guy is blogging about racism and he’s white! What the hell are we going to do about him? Let’s call him a wuss (notice the way they weave sexism into the award, I think that counts for double!), a liberal (they must have found out that since I do not identify as a liberal that this would burn like a paper cut) and a race traitor (I prefer the term: “social justice patriot”).
Bleach and starch
Pat Buchanan must have been huffing bleach and/or starch when he wrote this post on his blog. I usually reserve my inner monologues for posts in response to a comment. However, PJB’s post deserves a bit of commentary. (I’ve clipped only a portion of his white supremacist musings.)
Looking forward
A theme that I have come across lately is the idea of looking forward in order to move past an issue. I feel that looking forward or forward thinking is a good thing as long as the issue at hand has been addressed. Unfortunately, a lot of times, the concept of looking forward becomes PR speak for not actually addressing the issue but going back to the status quo.
The fall term at Oregon State University provides an example of this idea of doing nothing but saying that we are looking forward type of thinking. In the fall term, OSU’s community was focused on two separate racist incidents. A student wearing blackface was featured on the front of the campus newspaper (ensuing conversations, editorials, and Facebook groups underscored a campus climate that is not bereft of racism) and a noose was hung in the yard of an OSU fraternity. Both incidents received a lot of press and generated several meetings amongst campus community members. An official statement from President Ray was issued in November.
The first half of the statement focuses on the amount of media coverage that occurred in the fall term:
In recent weeks, The Oregonian and other media have carried coverage focusing on the campus climate at OSU regarding race, recent incidents regarding racial symbols and steps the university is taking to address these matters. We have long recognized the need to address such matters here at OSU.
The last paragraph of the statement really sums up my feelings on how the fall was addressed:
I do not want us to engage in a cyclical pattern of negative events, meaningful dialogues, and then business as usual. We have committed to look at the issues students raised and to make progress. The notion that nothing changes is simply not acceptable.
And then the fall term ended. People went on winter break and poof, the racist occurrences from the fall term seemed to have been swept under the rug at the front door of the capital campaign.
Near the end of winter term, an article titled, “A University Examines Underlying Problems After Racist Incidents” was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education on March 11th (my apologies for the lack of speediness with my post). [Full text].
The concept of looking ahead to the future rather than focusing on racist incidents is brought forth in the article:
Administrators at Oregon State, unlike their peers at many colleges, have taken the view that it would be a mistake for them to focus their energy on responding to various racist incidents. To make lasting progress in diminishing racism, they say, campus leaders must focus on promoting diversity in a forward-looking manner, between the controversies that erupt.
In what I feel is another part of the cyclical pattern of how incidents are handled at OSU, another statement was issued from the president’s office the same day as the Chronicle article was published. Statement issuing seems to occur in conjunction only when significant media coverage is present. The statement speaks of action “through ongoing dialogue, surveys, and other means to assess where we stand and what we must do to make real progress.”
I do not feel that we can look forward without addressing incidents like the ones that happened in the fall term. “Looking forward” becomes code for waiting until people are quiet again and the media has moved on to another story.
Muxtape
Muxtape is “a simple way to create and share mixtapes.” It’s so web 2.0 that it hurts! Get your mp3′s together and create something fabulous!
Barack Obama ’08
It has been a little over a week since Barack Obama’s speech on race in America. I watched the speech while I was at an Academic Advising conference in Vancouver, BC. It feels like a moment that I will remember for a very long time. It’s similar to the Challenger accident or the events that transpired on September 11, 2001. This was a monumental day in American history.
- I was in Cotter, Iowa at Cotter Elementary when the Challenger exploded.
- I sat in front of a tv at my apartment in Oak Park, Illinois on 9/11.
- I watched Barack Obama’s historic and moving speech in a hotel in downtown Vancouver.
These are three events that will always remain in my memory. I’ve watched this speech several times and it’s not perfect, but it’s the most honest speech on race in the United States that I have ever watched.
Community forum series
I was in Waldo Hall about a month ago when I came upon a larger version of this poster. I’m a fan of inverted black and white posters as they remind me of my graphic design days in Chicago.
The poster was advertising a community forum to discuss “isms in media.” I moved a little closer and read the list of “-isms.” Sexism, racism, ableism and classism. Okay, those are all forms of oppression. What? Why was alcoholism on this list? It just did not make sense to me as it did not fit with the rest of the items on the poster. And where oh where was heterosexism? A list of institutionalized oppressions and a disease. I do not understand why alcoholism was included…?
The Daily Barometer, Oregon State University’s student newspaper, has had yet another year where the paper prints something racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. and then attempts to do a better job (usually folks of color start appearing in the photographs on the front page during Winter term). It’s a cycle and the pattern has occurred since I moved to Corvallis in 2004 and became a member of the OSU community. Year after year a student editorial board and their lackluster faculty advisor bring about copious amounts of harm to the community, apologize and then attempt to rectify what happened in the fall. I can understand that student editorial board members come and go, but the faculty advisor remains…
Cornfield in Iowa
Many of you have heard me reference the fact that I grew up on an acreage in Iowa. Here are a few relevant stats:
- Animals (while I was growing up): hogs, chickens, cats, horses, and dogs
- Road surface: gravel (one mile to a paved road)
- Nearest neighbor: one mile
- Sides of the property surrounded by corn fields: 4
- Nearest town: Columbus Junction, 9 miles away
More pictures after the jump…
University of Northern Iowa
My alma mater, the University of Northern Iowa, had a scare today on campus. Thankfully, nothing happened and the UNI Alert system seems to have worked fairly well.
University of Northern Iowa officials have locked down Dancer Hall on campus because a male made several threatening text messages to a female Dancer resident, indicating he was coming to the campus with a weapon, officials said.
This is the first time the alert system has been used. It was just instituted two weeks ago.
via the Waterloo – Cedar Falls Courier
I actually lived in Bender Hall in 1997. Bender is the twin residence hall of Dancer where things were locked down.
I took screen shots of the UNI website as their Marketing and PR folks made updates. The site was stripped of most images in order to conserve bandwidth.
The screenshots are after the cut.
