Will Daily Show viewers pay as much attention when a black host talks about race?

I spoke with VOX's @jdesmondharris about Trevor Noah about this this:

Jenée Desmond-Harris: There's a broad consensus that having a black man host The Daily Show show is positive for television diversity. But I'm interested in getting your thoughts on how the incisive commentary on race and racism-related headlines that The Daily Show has become known for will be received from a biracial/black host.

Whitney Dow: White people hear other white people much more clearly when they speak about race than they do people of color.  Even the most culturally aware. They go into this default position of listening to people complain versus recognizing that race is something about them. The big Rubicon you have to cross with a white person is that they're having as racialized an experience as anyone of any other ethnicity — they think when people of color talk about race it's about an experience outside of themselves.  Read Full Article

I understand it is hard for white people to talk about race in public or a work setting.  You open yourself up to being misunderstood, humiliated or looking dumb.  What I don't understand is not stepping up when you hear something that you know is wrong.

If you you can't close the gap between your public and private selves you might need to decide which one is most import to you.

This interactive map is amazing.  It is comprehensive, color-coded map of racial distribution across the United States.  Blue dots: White; green dots: Black; red dots: Asian; orange dots: Latino; brown dots: all other races.  Click on it and you can zoom in to any location in the country - down to individual neighborhoods - and see who lives where. It was created by Dustin Cable at University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.

A quick look should give comfort to white people who are worried we are losing our dominant position in the United States. We pretty much have have the country covered.  And a closer look at specific cities should give pause to those who say that we are living in any sort of post racial society.  Our cities look a lot more like the Balkans then even a vaguely multicultural landscape. Some key cities:

Race Together conversation starter:  "Would your family accept someone of a different race as your spouse?"

    

He takes relentless lickings and keeps on ticking.
Great conversation between George Yancy and Noam Chompsky.  Yancy's work speaks for itself, but Chomsky's durability is astounding.  He has had the shit kicked out of him for so many years and yet and seems to just calmly carry on. Key graph:

"There is also a common variant of what has sometimes been called “intentional ignorance” of what it is inconvenient to know: “Yes, bad things happened in the past, but let us put all of that behind us and march on to a glorious future, all sharing equally in the rights and opportunities of citizenry.” The appalling statistics of today’s circumstances of African-American life can be confronted by other bitter residues of a shameful past, laments about black cultural inferiority, or worse, forgetting how our wealth and privilege was created in no small part by the centuries of torture and degradation of which we are the beneficiaries and they remain the victims. As for the very partial and hopelessly inadequate compensation that decency would require — that lies somewhere between the memory hole and anathema".

Link to full article

I love the Starbucks "Race Together" Campaign.  It is messy, poorly conceived, and naive, but it seems to come from a sincere, if privileged and sheltered, place. This interview With Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, is soft, but fascinating, not just because of how direct he is about his motivations and how naive he sounds, but how loosely this massive companywide initiative is apparently structured. Edit: CNN has cut this interview from 12 minutes down to 3:30 and reposted it to the same link.  This is too bad as longer interview shows that Schultz is really at sea with this thing.

I am not sure why so much wrath being directed at Schultz and Race Together. For me it is simply stunning to see a company like Starbucks, which gained its 70B valuation by managing its image and brand extremely carefully, engage this at all - especially through their retail counter help. I get tired of the "You're not doing right" argument. (Many of the criticisms have the ring of the hard-core fan of an indi band who gets upset when the rest of world discovers it.) Would I be happier if baristas had been asked to write: “white supremacy has always been the organizing principle of this country, discuss.” on the cups? Sure, but you have to start somewhere and the majority of people have never engaged this topic at all.  Bringing mainstream white people into this this discussion is not going to be easy or pretty.  For some people, good people with good intentions, just recognizing that the subject needs to be engaged is a big first step. They might not even be able to have a conversation, but having a company like Starbucks write "Race Together" on their coffee cup could feel really radical to them. I know from doing the interviews for WP that some people have NEVER EVER thought about this stuff.  Maybe the old “Don’t let the great be the enemy of the good” should be modified in this case to “Don’t let the great be the enemy of the weirdly conceived, admittedly problematic but strangely compelling.”

Buffalo was the 3rd city I filmed for the Whiteness Project, previously I had conducted interviews in New York City and Milwaukee, WI.   Although I did not feel that the footage from either city could work as stand-alone project installments, there was still a lot of strong material. Going forward I will be posting clips that I think are interesting.

In Milwaukee I did a terrible job of casting and ended with a relatively narrow socioeconomic sample of interviewees.  The upside was that I was able to talk to a group of people who, for the most part, were raised in homogenous communities and did not have a lot of contact with people of other races growing up. 

I think this is a revealing exchange.

Why wouldn't you conflate being white with being American if that is all you ever see?  

And what happens when you are confronted by people who are different from you for the first time?

And what happens when you leave home?

Are you starting at a disadvantage when you are white Midwesterner Lutheran and your idea of otherness is a white Midwestern Catholic? 

So what’s the deal with this blog?

Naturally, not everything I shoot for the Whiteness Project ends up on the project website.  Of the 50 hours of interviews I have shot to date, only about 30 minutes are featured on the site.  I thought it would be interesting to create a place where I could post additional content and add some context to the project in less a structured way.  Please email me with questions, comments, etc.

Whitney Dow
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