Race and Ethnicity

‘Calling in,’ not calling out, the racism of those who love you

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 20:52:04 +0000

‘Calling in,’ not calling out, the racism of those who love you Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/22/2023 - 14:52

Daniel Long

In her recently published book, Samira Mehta offers insight into a lesser-known, but nevertheless hurtful, type of racism

It’s 2016, Pennsylvania, and Samira Mehta, who would later become an associate professor of women and gender studies and director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, is having dinner with an old friend.

He asks about her experiences during the election, as he, like many people, has become worried about the xenophobia stirred up by the Trump campaign. How’s that been for her?

Short answer: not great.

The daughter of a white mother from Illinois and a father from India, Mehta has twice been spat on at her local grocery store and told to “go home.” (Home, by the way, is Connecticut, where Mehta was born and reared.)

Samira K. Mehta, an associate professor and director, explores the intersectionality of religion, culture and gender, including US family politics.

Yet although such flagrant acts of racism are scary, Mehta tells her friend, they aren’t the kind of racism that really hurts her. The kind that really hurts her, she says, is “the racism of people who love me.”

Now Mehta has published a book exploring this topic, The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging, which takes a first-hand look at the challenges of mixedness and encourages discussion of a kind of racism that is sometimes overlooked, under-addressed or misunderstood.

Usually, when we think about racism, Mehta says, we think about big historical moments. We think about the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; about Los Angeles police officers brutally attacking Rodney King; about Rosa Parks being told to give up her seat on the Montgomery, Alabama, bus; about John Lewis being beaten on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

“What’s much harder to talk about and think about are moments of racism that you encounter in relationships where you love the other person and they love you,” says Mehta.

The racism of people who love you is a subtler, more elusive form of racism, Mehta explains, and one that can be especially challenging for mixed-race individuals. Mehta herself has endured it on many occasions.

One example concerns the very friend she was having dinner with in 2016.

Years earlier, she was flying out to visit him, she recalls, “and I got searched really aggressively by TSA, and it was invasive. I got pulled out of the line and had to take off clothes, and I was worried. And my friend was like, ‘If, by searching people who look like you, they keep everyone safe, this is just an inconvenience.’”

Another example involves Mehta’s maternal aunt. At a family get-together, Mehta was wearing Indian clothing, and so her aunt decided to ask her, “So, are you super ethnic now?”

Neither Mehta’s friend nor her aunt was deliberately being racist. In fact, they’re the kind of people who’d vehemently disavow racism. “These are people for whom being liberal, or maybe even being progressive, is really central to their identity,” Mehta says.

Yet it’s precisely this tension between who the person is and what the person says that can make the racism of people who love you so difficult to address.

“It’s really hard to talk to people about these things, because to them they’re one-offs; to them they’re little things,” says Mehta. “They don’t necessarily recognize what they’re saying or doing as indicative of a larger power structure.”

Plus, Mehta says, “nobody wants to see themselves as a racist,” especially when that person is someone close—an old friend, for instance, or a family member—and especially nowadays, when charges of racism feel extremely high stakes.

“We’ve got a sort of one-drop rule of racism in the United States, where, if you do one racist thing, the distance between you and someone who would burn a cross on someone’s front lawn collapses. It’s the worst thing you could say to somebody,” says Mehta.

This then creates a Catch-22 for those suffering from the racism of people who love them: “If you don’t say anything, you lose the friendship because you let them go off and be racist. And if you do say something, you run the risk of losing the friendship because you just called your friend a racist.”

Put bluntly, either lose the friendship or lose the friendship.

But Mehta has a way around this dilemma, one she drew from the work of Loretta Ross, a feminist, activist and educator known for her work in women’s rights, reproductive justice and anti-racism, and a cofounder of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective.

Ross distinguishes between two modes of confronting racism: calling out and calling in.

"The Racism of People Who Love You" by Samira Mehta investigates the complicated challenges within mixed-race families and relationships.

With calling out, Ross says, “You think somebody has done something wrong, you think they should be held accountable for it, and you think they should be punished for it.”

Calling out is an opportunity to shame, says Ross. It’s done out of anger. And for that reason, she believes it is ineffective. “With this approach, you’ve guaranteed one thing. With this blaming and shaming, you just invited [the person accused of racism] to a fight, not a conversation.”

Calling in, however, is basically the same as calling out, but “done with love,” says Ross. It is not an opportunity to shame but an invitation to change. It promotes conversation, not fighting.

It’s the difference between volubly condemning someone at the Thanksgiving table and asking them to a private chat on a walk after dinner.

When it comes to the racism of people who love you, says Mehta, it’s calling in, not calling out, that’s the thing to do.

And that is one thing she hopes her book helps readers do. She hopes it helps those who’ve experienced racism from the people who love them, as well as those who’ve committed such acts of racism, find a healthy way to discuss that racism.

But Mehta is also quick to admit that these conversations don’t always create the desired outcome, which leads one to wonder, as her audience members often do at her book talks, when to forgive a person for his or her racism and when to cut that person off?

“How you make that judgment call is really individual,” Mehta says. “It depends on what's going on in your life. It depends on how much you need that person. I do not think it’s a good idea to cancel the people you love for things that they do that hurt you, but I also don’t think you should be a doormat who is willing to be hurt forever.”

There is a balance to strike, in other words. Care should be taken.

But, ultimately, Mehta believes in people’s ability to be and do better, as long as they’re given the chance.

“If you cancel people, they never grow and change. But they can grow and change when you call them in and offer them love.”

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In her recently published book, Samira Mehta offers insight into a lesser-known, but nevertheless hurtful, type of racism.

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Historian hones website focused on African slaves who were ‘liberated’ but not freed

Anonymous — Thu, 25 May 2023 22:04:02 +0000

Historian hones website focused on African slaves who were ‘liberated’ but not freed Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/25/2023 - 16:04

Bradley Worrell

CU Boulder’s Henry Lovejoy updates LiberatedAfricans.org, which highlights a largely forgotten period of time in the history of African diaspora

For Henry Lovejoy, an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder whose focus is on the history of Africa and the African diaspora, the two words provoking the cruelest irony are “Liberated Africans.”

The term “Liberated Africans” coincides with a now-little-remembered part of history following the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 by the United Kingdom’s Parliament, which prohibited the slave trade within the British Empire (although it did not abolish the practice of slavery until 1834).

Meanwhile, around the same time, the United States Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, among others, passed their own anti-trafficking laws. In the years that followed, the British Royal Navy—which then controlled the world’s seas—and other participating navies operated a squadron of ships in the Atlantic and Indian oceans to interdict the slave trade.

Top of the page: "Liberated African" children sitting on the deck of the Daphne shortly after their capture. The National Archives, UK, FO 84/1310, 1869, f. 193-195. Above: Henry Lovejoy is an associate professor of history, a specialist in the digital humanities, and the director of the Digital Slavery Research Lab at CU Boulder. He recently relaunched an enhanced version of the website www.liberatedafricans.org.

Before 1900, those navies seized nearly 3,000 slave ships. Various British and international courts convened to determine the fates of the “Liberated Africans.”

However, in a cruel twist of fate, most of those “liberated” people weren’t actually freed—but were instead condemned as property, declared free under anti-slave trade legislation, and then subjected to indentures, lasting several years.

“So, scholars argue this is another type of slavery, because it resulted in bonded labor,” Lovejoy says, noting, “They were made to work on sugar plantations just like enslaved Africans. They get ignored from the history of indentured labor from Asia because they are sort of regrouped with chattel slavery.

“So, there’s a whole new social status that forms under the term ‘Liberated Africans,’ which is a misnomer. This is called a humanitarian effort, but the contradiction is, it’s a crime against humanity.”

Documenting the history of Liberated Africans online

Serving as specialist in the digital humanities and as the director of the Digital Slavery Research Lab, Lovejoy is a strong believer in using technology to make history accessible to researchers, scholars and students.

It’s the reason he is relaunching a greatly enhanced version of the website www.liberatedafricans.org, a memorial of information regarding the more than 700,000 men, women and children “liberated” in the British-led campaign to abolish African slave trafficking.

First established in 2015, Lovejoy says the website is getting a major upgrade, thanks to grant funding and a partnership with Walk With Web Inc., under the CEO direction of Kartikay Chadha, who is a doctoral candidate at McGill University. This Canadian company provides technical support to institutions associated with social sciences and humanities research, development and preservation.

The updated website will be notable for its complex datasets while being easy to navigate and highly interactive, according to Lovejoy.

“What I really like about this design is that it’s really simple. It’s 10 menu items makes accessible a very complex history,” he says.

The website features archives containing more than 500 pieces of anti-slavery legislation from the 1790s through the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Lovejoy says this section of the website was largely built by CU students in the Department of History.

Notably, the website also ties in with the website www.AfricanRegions.org, with regional maps explaining pre-colonial Africa in historical context.

Specific features of the relaunched l website, www.liberatedafricans.org, includes a map visualizing the maritime blockade of the slave trade off the coast of west Africa, complete with nearly 3,000 documented locations where navies seized slave ships in international waters, which Lovejoy says is the first time these efforts have been captured on a temporal map.

“No one has mapped all of this out before, and no one has seen all of this before,” Lovejoy says.

The website showcases more than 5,000 cases involving the “liberation” process resulting in involuntary indentures. Additionally, a growing collection of case files related to government schemes to “liberate” and involuntarily indenture enslaved Africans according to anti-slavery law are featured on the website.

Maps, in particular, play a huge role in telling the story of Liberated Africans.

“I’ve centered this project primarily on maps,” Lovejoy says, “because when you are talking about a global forced migration of people related to the suppression of the slave trade, putting it on maps helps locate people in terms of where these cases occurred and the broad geographic scope of 700,000 indentured Africans.”

Lovejoy is aiming to have the latest version of the Liberated Africans website go live on June 1, coinciding with the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences conference at York University in Toronto, Canada, where he will give a presentation highlighting its enhanced features and upgrades.

While this latest version of the Liberated Africans website represents a major step forward, Lovejoy says adding new content to the website is an ongoing effort.

The long-term goal for LiberatedAfricans.org is to organize all the available digitized archival sources related to the cases, including registers naming nearly 200,000 people involved." 

“The long-term goal for LiberatedAfricans.org is to organize all the available digitized archival sources related to the cases, including registers naming nearly 200,000 people involved. Currently, these records are scattered in world archives,” he says. In May, Lovejoy spent more than two weeks in Portugal, reviewing government documents related to that country’s abolition and suppression of the slave trade.

Meanwhile, Lovejoy says he sees the improved website as appealing to a large audience, from historians to students.

“The people who will make use of this website primarily will be historians interested in Africa and Africa diaspora, but it should be of interest for any type of history, whether it’s economic history, migratory history, legal history etc.,” he says. “And, I’ve also designed it for classroom education, because I’ve essentially mapped out the entire suppression of the slave trade from Africa.”

CU Boulder’s Henry Lovejoy updates LiberatedAfricans.org, which highlights a largely forgotten period of time in the history of African diaspora.

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Reexamining lessons learned from COVID-19

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 17:10:59 +0000

Reexamining lessons learned from COVID-19 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/16/2023 - 11:10

Bradley Worrell

CU Boulder professor is concerned that the focus on individual responsibility for health and wellness—especially during health crises like the COVID pandemic—overlooks underlying causes as to why minorities generally had worse outcomes than the overall population in the U.S. Ideas to be discussed in next Let’s CU Well seminar

In the days since COVID-19 first became a pandemic in the United States in 2020, researchers and health care professionals developed a series of guidelines associated with getting vaccinated, masking, handwashing and social distancing, as well as making lifestyle changes, to reduce the risk of dying or becoming seriously ill from the disease.

Those guidelines were well-meaning, but at the same time they generally are focused on “biomedical individualism” (how the virus is transmitted and what the individual could do to reduce their risk) to the exclusion of understanding why certain segments of the population, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, were at much greater risk of being harmed by COVID-19, according to Maisam Alomar, University of Colorado Boulder professor in women and gender studies. Part of her research focuses on race and gender policies of medicine and rehabilitation.

“It’s not that masks or vaccines aren’t important,” says Alomar, acknowledging that the politics around COVID-19 can be polarizing. However, at the same time, “part of what I’m suggesting is that we need to be moving away from our almost exclusive focus on biomedical individualism in our understanding of wellness … to try to understand that group wellness is not just the sum of individual behaviors or the biological mechanisms by which the virus can infect someone.”

Maisam Alomar is an assistant professor in women and gender studies. Her research lies mainly in the areas of disability studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and also incorporates black studies and critical race scholarship to analyze ways racial categories shape what is considered a disability, who is considered disabled, and the legal and social consequences of such categorization.

For example, the scientific and health care communities came to embrace the idea that making healthful lifestyle choices could reduce the risk of becoming sick from COVID—without recognizing that these lifestyle choices are not equally available to everyone, that some people live in “food deserts” that make it difficult to obtain nutritious meals or that those populations don’t have easy access to recreational spaces, according to Alomar.

“These are some of the things we don’t tend to consider as much,” she says, adding, “I’m also suggesting that we should be tailoring our interventions to account for the most vulnerable people … and this idea that when you structure your health care systems in a way that’s geared toward the most vulnerable people that you yield better health results for everyone.”

What’s more, when considering why certain groups of people, such as racial or ethnic minorities, have worse outcomes when it comes to COVID, there is a tendency even among the scientific community to ascribe those outcomes to preexisting conditions within those communities or even biological factors—rather than issues having to do with socioeconomic inequities more generally and the disparity in health care among different segments of the U.S. population, according to Alomar.

Alomar will share other additional views on COVID-19 and U.S. health care policy during her upcoming seminar, “Moving Away from Biomedical Individualism in Health and Wellness.” This event is scheduled as a Zoom presentation starting at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, March 21. The event is free, but registration is required.

The event is part of the Let’s CU Well speaker series for CU staff, students and interested community members. The series is an offshoot of Be Well, a wellness initiative launched by the College of Arts and Sciences.

Alomar draws a line between COVID-19’s effects on varying populations relate and the “interdisciplines” at universities.

According to Alomar, interdisciplines—which includes Black and feminist studies—have performed valuable research related to COVID-19. That’s particularly true, she says, when it comes to debunking some unsupported claims involving COVID-19 outcomes based on race and ethnicity.

Interdisciplines offer a very useful critique ... When budgets are tight, people start asking, do we really need this (field of study) if there’s a crisis? I think that when there’s a crisis we need these fields even more because of the explanatory power they offer.”

For example, she notes that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has highlighted obesity as a co-morbidity factor disproportionally harming minorities in COVID outcomes, but that research from a noted sociologist found that “the association between ‘obesity’ and mortality is baseless.”

Alomar says interdisciplines at universities can be very useful for the insights and critiques they provide for various fields of study, such as science and health care. At the same time, she says interdisciplines also tend to be one of the programs universities first look to cut when their finances are dented by unforeseen circumstances, such as the Great Recession of 2008 or the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What I’m saying is interdisciplines offer a very useful critique, and it’s very important to have that in a university,” Alomar says. “When budgets are tight, people start asking, do we really need this (field of study) if there’s a crisis? I think that when there’s a crisis we need these fields even more because of the explanatory power they offer.”

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Study: High crime raises diabetes risk

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 15:07:41 +0000

Study: High crime raises diabetes risk Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/06/2023 - 08:07

Daniel Long

Genes matter, says CU Boulder’s Jason Boardman, but so does the environment

Young adults living in high-crime areas have an increased genetic risk for Type 2 diabetes, according to a recently published study co-authored by Jason Boardman, University of Colorado Boulder professor of sociology and director of the Institute of Behavioral Science’s Health and Society Program.

Boardman and his co-authors published their paper, “Does Crime Trigger Genetic Risk for Type 2 Diabetes in Young Adults? A G x E Interaction Study Using National Data,” in Social Science & Medicine in November.

A key takeaway is that genes are not an irrefutable crystal ball predicting people’s health future. The environment plays a significant role as well.

Jason Boardman teaches undergraduate and graduate-level courses in statistics, social demography, and the sociology of race and ethnicity.

“Genes matter,” says Boardman, “but how they are linked to your health depends on where you live.”

Key to understanding why, says Boardman, who studies the social determinants of health, is the notion of environmental triggering, a phenomenon by which the environment elicits certain genetic responses.

It’s a bit like planting a flower, Boardman says, with the seed being people’s genes and the soil, water and sunlight being the environment. The seed may be planted, but without the right environmental conditions, it won’t sprout.

Something similar happens with Type 2 diabetes.

“Genetic risk for Type 2 diabetes does not manifest as a risk absent environmental triggers—in this case, local area crime rate,” Boardman explains. “Indeed, we find that the polygenic risk for Type 2 diabetes is non-existent among residents of communities with little to no crime.”

In other words, genetic variants linked to Type 2 diabetes are not enough to give someone the disease. What counts is how those genes interact with the environment.

Boardman and his colleagues’ findings recast what many consider the primary driver of Type 2 diabetes: obesity, which Boardman says plays not so much a causal role as a mediating one.

To understand how this works, Boardman explains, imagine the same person in two scenarios.

In the first scenario, this person lives in an area with a low crime rate. He or she therefore experiences little stress and has access to healthy coping mechanisms, such as walking or riding a bike outside. This person is consequently unlikely to become obese and develop diabetes.

In the second scenario, however, this same person lives in a high-crime area and has elevated stress levels and limited access to healthy coping mechanisms. This person is therefore more likely to internalize stress, adopt an unhealthy dietary pattern, gain weight and become diabetic.

Same person, same genes, opposite outcomes. The only difference between the two scenarios is the environment.

“Thus,” says Boardman, “what appears to be a biological process is in large part a social process.”

Boardman began studying the social influences of health several decades ago.

“I was fortunate to be part of the Social Environment Working Group of the National Children’s Study in the early 2000s,” he says.

While working with this group, Boardman witnessed the scientific community placing “a great deal of emphasis on collecting and summarizing rich biological measures of population health” while overlooking “comparably rich measures of the social and physical communities in which people live, go to school and play.”

But rather than criticize the field of statistical genetics, Boardman decided to gain training in it. He received a career development award from the Eunice Kenney Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Development and, as a tenure-track professor, enrolled in the graduate-training program at CU’s Institute for Behavioral Genetics.

Boardman says that research exploring gene-environment interactions provides a more nuanced understanding of what causes Type 2 diabetes than does the nature-nurture argument.

“The nature-nurture dichotomy gets us nowhere in terms of understanding complex phenomena like the increase in obesity in recent years,” says Boardman, adding that it’s not either nature or nurture that people should be focusing on, but both.

“Nurture fundamentally affects nature, and nature fundamentally affects nurture.”

Boardman also hopes his research will provide a counterpoint to what he considers a worrying trend.

“I am most concerned about the routine practice among researchers utilizing genome-wide data and related summary scores to limit their analyses to individuals who identify with a similar socially defined racial group,” he says.

“My hope is to contribute to methods that provide summary genetic scores that belie the unnecessary need to run models separately by racial and ethnic group.”

Genes matter, says CU Boulder’s Jason Boardman, but so does the environment.

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Scholar probes inequity in world of sports

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 05:25:39 +0000

Scholar probes inequity in world of sports Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/31/2023 - 22:25

Orla McGrath

CU on the Weekend lecture this Saturday to discuss how scholars address a past and present of inequities and understand intersectional identities in sports

The world of sports is rife with inequity, and Nicholas Villanueva has made this a focus of his scholarly study.

Villanueva, an assistant professor of ethnic studies and director of critical sports studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, will discuss his research at 1 p.m. on Saturday. The free event is being held in the CASE Building fourth-floor auditorium, or is available remotely by Zoom. Registration for Zoom attendance is required and can be completed at this link.

Saturday’s seminar is part of the CU on the Weekend series. The event is organized by the CU Boulder Office of Outreach and Engagement.

In his talk, Villanueva will discuss inequity in sports and intersectionality within the area of critical sports studies. Intersectionality is a framework for understanding a person or group of people as being affected by a number of types of discrimination or disadvantages. It takes into account people’s overlapping identities, such as someone being a woman and also being Black, in order to understand the complexities of prejudices and privileges they face.

Nicholas Villanueva is an assistant professor of ethnic studies and director of critical sports studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

An author of three novels and the recipient of two national book awards for his work in Latinx studies, Villanueva co-created the Critical Sports Studies Program at CU Boulder to address current social issues in sports and is researching LGBTQ+ inclusion in sports.

Villanueva said his interest in the field dates back to his childhood, when he first became aware of prejudice in sports.

“Certain sports eventually became associated with different genders, and I remember looking around and wondering why we’re always associating masculinity and femininity with these activities,” he said.

The Critical Sports Studies Program offers a certificate based in the Ethnic Studies Department, where students can take classes on historical and current social and political issues in sports.

Villanueva teaches several of those classes. He said he chose to make the program a certificate instead of a minor to allow more flexibility for students to pursue their interests in the study in a variety of departments. He added that he recognizes that not every sport or social issue falls into his area of expertise and so he is open to proposals from students on courses they may find applicable to the Critical Sports Studies certificate.

“We don’t just examine social or cultural identities on their own; we focus on the intersectionality of all of those identities when we look at sports studies,” Villanueva said, noting that the concept of intersectionality plays an important role in his upcoming lecture and in his studies generally.

Villanueva is particularly interested in analyzing traditional ideas about masculinity in sports and is working on a new manuscript on the International Gay Rodeo Association and how it started to upend the stereotype about masculinity in sports.

I want people to understand that as more BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities participate in sports—especially in powerful roles—the more the dominant societal group that holds power begins to feel threatened.”

“I’m obsessed with this idea of having people think about masculinity in sport in new ways.” Villanueva said, adding: “I want people to understand that as more BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities participate in sports—especially in powerful roles—the more the dominant societal group that holds power begins to feel threatened. This happens not just in sports, but also in every institution. Discrimination in this sense is about the dominant group feeling threatened that they are going to lose their power and control.”

The concept of critical sports studies might prompt some people to think of Colin Kaepernick or Simone Biles—athletes with large followings who made headlines for taking controversial stands. But, as always, it’s crucial to look beyond notable names and examine why Kaepernick’s story stirred the nation in the first place, Villanueva said.

He added that he is dedicated to examining frameworks and institutional issues that exist not only in sports, but everywhere in society.

CU on the Weekend lecture this Saturday to discuss how scholars address a past and present of inequities and understand intersectional identities in sports.

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