Odds 'N Ends

1) This study is from June 2011, but it's interesting:

"Things such as calling women 'girls' but not calling men 'boys' or referring to a collective group as 'guys' are forms of subtle sexism that creep into daily interactions. The study helps not only identify which forms of sexism are most overlooked by which sex, but also how noticing these acts can change people's attitudes.

'Women endorse sexist beliefs, at least in part, because they do not attend to subtle, aggregate forms of sexism in their personal lives,' wrote authors Julia C. Becker and Janet K. Swim."

I'll just file this one away for when the next time some dude comes here and tells me to stop writing about the silly little stuff I write about and instead write about More Important Things like the Muslim Women. The really big sexist things are often built upon a foundation of little sexist things, things that many people, willfully or not, fail to see.


2) This article's from August 2011 (yes, I know, only the most current news here in Fannie's Room!), but it's a good one:

"So I throw it out there: Raise your hand if you're a racist.

As my students do that thing where they sort of just look at you, perplexed, I raise my own hand. I am deeply embarrassed, but I feel I have to be honest if I am asking them to be....

'In Seattle, there's really a small amount that you have to do to be labeled a hero of diversity,' says Eddie Moore Jr., the Bush School's outgoing director of diversity, who describes Seattle as 'a segregated pattern of existence.'

He adds, 'It's just that there's really no real challenge to how the structure in Seattle continues to assist whiteness and white male dominance in particular. When you say 'white supremacy' or 'white privilege' in Seattle, people still think you're talking about the Klan. There's really no skills being developed to shift the conversation. How can we be acknowledged to be so progressive, yet be identified to be so white? I wish that's the question more Seattleites were asking themselves.'"

In a way similar to how some men think supporting "equality" and women's right to vote is, like, good enough to be considered a heroic feminist ally, it seems as though many white people think that, like, not being in the KKK and not saying the n-word totally makes a person not at all racist. The above article discusses a Coalition of Anti-Racist Whites (CARW) that discusses such issues and, importantly, states a philosophy of following the lead of people of color on matters of race. As one CARW member notes:

"[There are] awesome organizations and leaders of people of color who have been doing this work for decades... The truth is that communities of color are thinking about racial justice all the time. They're living it and breathing it, and there's a group of white folks supporting that work, but it's only a small fraction of the white community at this point."

3) This made me smile.