White Times: 5 Keys To American Racism (Plus 3 Reasons For Hope) | kineticnow

Not a satirical post but a link to a useful analysis from our parent site kineticnow.com. Summary of main points:

In the month since the Zimmerman case, the mainstream conversation has morphed into a personal verdict on Trayvon’s behavior and a cultural indictment on black people more broadly. Here are five keys that explain how this shift contributes to a broader American history of racial injustice:

  • Key #1: Practice racism without being racist
    American racism is more of a color-blind cultural racism than a personal racism. This kind of racism allows people to believe cultural stereotypes about minority communities in general, without feeling like they are being personally racist against minority individuals.
  • Key #2: Continue a long American tradition of condemning blackness (while confirming whiteness)
    American cultural stereotypes linking blackness to criminality go back a long ways, to discriminatory social policies and Jim Crow laws instituted after the Civil War that condemned black people as a group based on biased crime statistics. Meanwhile, similar patterns of crime by white immigrant groups were instead humanized and individualized.
  • Key #3: Use new Jim Crow methods to legally profile black/brown men with “reasonable suspicion” 
    Our current legal system enforces a new kind of Jim Crow policing and segregation in urban black/brown communities, while largely ignoring suburban white communities, through the court sanctioned use of de facto racial profiling and discriminatory sentencing in the War on Drugs. This results in a disproportionate suspicion of black/brown men.
  • Key #4: Rely on whiteness to deny ‘neighborliness’ to black/brown neighbors
    White privilege shapes the ways people interpret and suspect the actions of their non-white neighbors. This happens even if the person suspecting the neighbor is non-white, because whiteness is a system of beliefs that we are all immersed in, so you don’t have to be white in order to uphold the normalcy of whiteness.
  • Key #5: Stand your (white) ground by supporting gun laws based on white supremacist talking points
    Laws like Stand Your Ground (which, by the way, was absolutely part of the Zimmerman defense) reflect fears and paranoias that once were the domain of white supremacist groups but are now a part of mainstream NRA talking points that openly encourage violent white vigilantism as a “reasonable” response to suspicious behavior in “your” neighborhood.

These keys interconnect to explain how so many Americans believe and act upon a deeply entrenched set of cultural prejudices that make black/brown bodies automatically suspicious in everyday encounters, suspicious enough to justify an aggressive and even violent pre-emptive response. However, there are also significant reasons for hope.

Ethnic Caucasian Male Wearing Bro Hijab: Why Is He Hiding? May 12, 2013 - hari stephen kumar Alarmed citizens have raised concerns about the increasing trend of ethnic Caucasian males wearing full head coverings to hide their faces from public view. Usually colored a sullen gray or ominous black, these “bro hijabs” are often worn over a dirty baseball cap whose brim obscures the top part of the wearer’s face. The combination shrouds their dark-browed scowls in menacing shadows that discourage anyone from engaging them in conversation. “It’s almost like they’re saying, within the limitations of their low-IQ home languages, that they don’t want to assimilate into our culture,” said Jason Richwine, a professor of Public Policy from Harvard University who studies the cultures of low-IQ groups in America. According to Prof. Richwine’s research, the consequences for such groups are “a lack of socioeconomic assimilation, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in unskilled workers.” Prof. Richwine relayed anecdotes of such patterns in the behaviors of ethnic Caucasian males wearing bro hijabs: “I can always pick out these guys in my classes,” he said, “they are the ones who sit in clusters by themselves, slumped into chairs and hidden in their bro hijabs and caps, looking down at their desks and sullenly chewing gum at anything I say to them.” While such dress choices might seem benign, there may be a more devious motive for why increasing numbers of ethnic Caucasian men are choosing the bro hijab, or “brojab” as they call it. “It’s really a law enforcement issue,” says a spokesman for a major state university’s campus police, “I mean, the majority of campus sexual assaults are committed by ethnic Caucasian males, but when we put out a crime alert for a ‘Caucasian male about 5’9” wearing gray hooded sweatshirt’ the problem is that describes over half the campus population, so these ethnic Caucasian males quietly slip on their bro hijabs and blend right in, knowing that we’re not gonna stop and frisk white males just because they match the brofile.” Recent reports have speculated that large numbers of ethnic Caucasian males at college campuses might be traveling overseas for radicalization at training camps specializing in campus sexual terrorism. The FBI has been asked to monitor known international hotbeds for sexual terrorist training camps, such as Cancun and the Bahamas, while there is also increasing concern that domestic sleeper cells may be developing in Florida and California. Unverified eyewitness accounts also report that ethnic Caucasian men often return from such trips with an increased tendency to wear bro hijabs, caps, and sometimes large-rimmed sunglasses. Given the strong links between wearing bro hijabs and suspicious anti-social activity, renowned commentators such as Ann Coulter have publicly called for an immediate arrest of white males wearing bro hijabs.
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Ethnic Caucasian Male Wearing Bro Hijab: Why Is He Hiding?

May 12, 2013 - hari stephen kumar

Alarmed citizens have raised concerns about the increasing trend of ethnic Caucasian males wearing full head coverings to hide their faces from public view. Usually colored a sullen gray or ominous black, these “bro hijabs” are often worn over a dirty baseball cap whose brim obscures the top part of the wearer’s face. The combination shrouds their dark-browed scowls in menacing shadows that discourage anyone from engaging them in conversation.

“It’s almost like they’re saying, within the limitations of their low-IQ home languages, that they don’t want to assimilate into our culture,” said Jason Richwine, a professor of Public Policy from Harvard University who studies the cultures of low-IQ groups in America. According to Prof. Richwine’s research, the consequences for such groups are “a lack of socioeconomic assimilation, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in unskilled workers.” Prof. Richwine relayed anecdotes of such patterns in the behaviors of ethnic Caucasian males wearing bro hijabs: “I can always pick out these guys in my classes,” he said, “they are the ones who sit in clusters by themselves, slumped into chairs and hidden in their bro hijabs and caps, looking down at their desks and sullenly chewing gum at anything I say to them.”

While such dress choices might seem benign, there may be a more devious motive for why increasing numbers of ethnic Caucasian men are choosing the bro hijab, or “brojab” as they call it. “It’s really a law enforcement issue,” says a spokesman for a major state university’s campus police, “I mean, the majority of campus sexual assaults are committed by ethnic Caucasian males, but when we put out a crime alert for a ‘Caucasian male about 5’9” wearing gray hooded sweatshirt’ the problem is that describes over half the campus population, so these ethnic Caucasian males quietly slip on their bro hijabs and blend right in, knowing that we’re not gonna stop and frisk white males just because they match the brofile.”

Recent reports have speculated that large numbers of ethnic Caucasian males at college campuses might be traveling overseas for radicalization at training camps specializing in campus sexual terrorism. The FBI has been asked to monitor known international hotbeds for sexual terrorist training camps, such as Cancun and the Bahamas, while there is also increasing concern that domestic sleeper cells may be developing in Florida and California. Unverified eyewitness accounts also report that ethnic Caucasian men often return from such trips with an increased tendency to wear bro hijabs, caps, and sometimes large-rimmed sunglasses. Given the strong links between wearing bro hijabs and suspicious anti-social activity, renowned commentators such as Ann Coulter have publicly called for an immediate arrest of white males wearing bro hijabs.

Radical light skinned “freedom fighters” declare “culture war” against Americans May 5, 2013 Several predominately “light skinned” men at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Houston this weekend terrified millions of Americans with extreme rhetoric advocating armed violence against mainstream American culture. Calling themselves freedom fighters, their senior leaders thundered that they were engaging in a “culture war” and urged their supporters to “stand and fight,” presumably against the American government. Alarmed by these developments, most Americans searched for explanations for this violent radicalism. Many asked in puzzlement, “Why do they hate us? How did they come here?” Several light-skinned people were also seriously concerned that they might be racially profiled based on the aberrant and extreme behavior of these paranoid white men. Most mainstream organizations of light-skinned people were quick to deny any connections between their communities and the well-organized radical extremists in light of the recent spate of mass shootings committed by white males. An official light-skinned spokesman stated: “While we mourn for the victims of such terror, we cannot emphasize enough that the white ETHNIC European males who committed these acts were self-radicalized and seriously mentally ill random criminals. Their actions do not speak for all light skinned citizens: we are Americans too, and we stand ready to cooperate with any law enforcement investigation into the reach of violent extremism in our community.” Nevertheless, the general American population remains unnerved by what seems to be a frequent pattern of such radical actions by light-skinned males. An anonymous observer said: “Sure, not all light-skinned males say and do these extreme things, but most people who do are light-skinned males.” Meanwhile, preliminary reports speculate that these radical extremists might have infiltrated all levels of government, major media outlets, large corporations, and the highest courts of the land. Many worried Americans are now wondering if they should also “stand and fight” in order to protect their civil rights against the threat posed by these extremists. However some leaders are urging wisdom and compassion. A coalition of community groups released the following statement: “Clearly if we give in to their demands and arm ourselves, the extremists will have won. In these difficult times, we must remind ourselves of the truly inclusive message of America. While we sometimes only see light skinned people as greedy bankers or soulless corporate lawyers, they also live among us as hard-working neighbors: they are our soccer coaches and our librarians, our teachers and our firefighters. What is needed now is not more hate but more outreach: to bring those who distrust us out of the shadows, and put them on a path to genuine American citizenship.” Commentary/Analysis: The extremist rhetoric from the NRA would be laughably absurd if it were not for so many gun-related fatalities in America. In the last 30 years there have been 62 mass shootings resulting in 513 dead and 494 injured. And the pace of mass shootings is increasing: 25 of those 62 shootings happened since 2006, and there were 7 mass shootings in 2012 alone. Meanwhile, since 1980 over 900,000 people have died in America due to gun violence, compared to over 3,400 due to terrorism. Such radical rhetoric would also provoke quite different reactions if the organization or leaders in charge were “dark skinned” or “Muslim”: their ideologies would immediately be labeled as ‘jihadist’ and the actions of mass shooters who were ‘Muslim’ would be treated as ‘terrorism’. Instead, evidence shows that since 9/11 acts of terror committed by mass shooters caused more deaths than ‘Islamic’ homegrown terrorists: 261 people died due to mass shootings since 9/11, compared to 33 due to ‘jihadists’. The radical violence-driven message of the predominately white men (and women) who lead the NRA seems to advocate for a terrifying vision of America as a society armed to the teeth. NRA members are fond of quoting from the science-fiction writing of Robert Heinlein that "an armed society is a polite society,” an idea of society that more reality-based commentators have astutely pointed out is not really a free society. However, the NRA has consistently promoted that vision through extreme anti-government paranoia. A recent poll found that over 44% of Republicans now feel that armed revolution is needed to protect their rights. So here’s a thought experiment: would the NRA approve of such a violent vision if it were advocated by “dark skinned” or “Muslim” groups? What if a large group of Muslim-Americans decided to hold a gun rights rally to recognize and celebrate their 2nd Amendment rights? What if major Muslim-American leaders exhorted their supporters to “stand and fight” against “tyranny”? What if a poll found that 44% of Muslim-Americans felt that an armed revolution was necessary? Would the same Republican leaders who spoke at the NRA convention this weekend agree to headline a Muslim-American gun rights convention? Something tells me they would have a very different response. Indeed, the history of gun rights in America shows a stance by “light skinned” leaders to systematically take away guns from minorities who were labeled as ‘militants’ if they took up arms as part of their struggle for civil rights. For example, the 2nd Amendment traces its roots partially to the demands of Southern states for Constitutional guarantees that the Federal government would not infringe on the rights of Southern white militias to arm themselves in order to suppress slave rebellions. Ironically, some (predominately “light skinned”) gun rights supporters today claim that slaves would have been free if only they had been armed. Meanwhile, the powerful leaders of the NRA and other organizations (like Fox News and Republican legislative bodies) continue to block evidence-based attempts at reasoning with extremist ideological propaganda. Here are a few examples: NRA leaders and their allies incite fear and paranoia through repeated claims that the “government” is out to “take our guns,” especially since Obama’s inauguration in 2009. However, in the four years since 2009, 99 laws have been passed by federal and state governments making it easier for people to own, carry, and conceal guns. NRA leaders and their allies repeatedly claim that the only solution to mass shootings is more guns in more places. This is despite the facts that (a) many of the mass shootings occurred in places where armed guards were nearby, such as Virginia Tech and the Ft. Hood (army base!) killings; (b) armed civilians actually make things worse by wounding/killing themselves or other civilians; and (c) law enforcement officials uniformly disapprove of having armed civilians in an active crime scene, where they interfere with the work of highly trained officers. NRA leaders and their allies continually scoff at arguments for gun control by saying “where’s the proof?” Hypocritically, these same leaders have been responsible for eliminating any federal funding for research into gun violence. They have convinced lawmakers that simply asking questions about gun violence is a violation of the 2nd amendment. No other research activity is as severely curtailed as research into gun violence. As a result, there is a dearth of scientific data on how many guns are owned by Americans and on how many deaths are a result of gun violence. However, even the limited data thus available still shows that gun violence is the second leading cause of deaths of young people in America, behind car accidents. While 44 of the 62 mass shootings in the last 30 years were caused by white males, many with right-wing extremist or white supremacist connections, NRA leaders and their allies persistently dismiss any efforts to study patterns in these shootings. Instead, they highlight only one common thread: the majority of perpetrators were mentally ill. Even so, the NRA and its allies dismiss any efforts to study the connections between mental illness and gun violence. The NRA and its allies also perpetuate demonstrably nonsensical arguments such as “criminals don’t follow laws” (to which Jon Stewart succinctly pointed out that even though people who steal do not follow our laws against stealing, “we still have them!” ), or “you can’t stop a criminal from getting a gun illegally” (although 80% of mass shooters acquired their weapons legally), or that high-capacity magazines and assault-style weapons are not to blame for mass shootings (although a majority of the 62 mass shooters used these kinds of weapons), or that gun control is a slippery slope to Prohibition and Tyranny (when the data shows instead that if there is a slippery slope it has been well lubricated toward the side of gun proliferation and deregulation of gun laws). Finally, the NRA and its allies rail against any effort to restrict the purchase of weapons of mass violence, claiming that doing so would somehow reduce the ability of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves (although they would still be able to buy more reasonable guns). They ask, in outrage, “Whose side are you on?!” However, Americans owned about 200 million guns in 1995 compared to over 300 million in 2012, a jump of over 100 million guns in 17 years. In the same time frame, the NRA’s messaging and ads shifted from promoting the use of guns for hunting and sportsmanship to a more ominous anti-government anti-crime fear-mongering. Meanwhile, since 1980, over 900,000 people died due to gun fatalities. Given the only possible benefactor of such increased sales in weapons and the resulting deaths, it’s fair for millions of ordinary Americans of every color and ideology to ask of the NRA and their allies, “Just whose side are they on?!” [Inspired by Timothy Koechlin’s excellent brofile The “Light-Skinned” Men Threat To America. Also inspired by these Onion articles: Crazed Sociopaths Enter Congressional Chambers, and Unstable Man Plots to Bring Guns to Schools.]
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Radical light skinned “freedom fighters” declare “culture war” against Americans

May 5, 2013

Several predominately “light skinned” men at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Houston this weekend terrified millions of Americans with extreme rhetoric advocating armed violence against mainstream American culture. Calling themselves freedom fighters, their senior leaders thundered that they were engaging in a “culture war” and urged their supporters to “stand and fight,” presumably against the American government.

Alarmed by these developments, most Americans searched for explanations for this violent radicalism. Many asked in puzzlement, “Why do they hate us? How did they come here?” Several light-skinned people were also seriously concerned that they might be racially profiled based on the aberrant and extreme behavior of these paranoid white men.

Most mainstream organizations of light-skinned people were quick to deny any connections between their communities and the well-organized radical extremists in light of the recent spate of mass shootings committed by white males. An official light-skinned spokesman stated: “While we mourn for the victims of such terror, we cannot emphasize enough that the white ETHNIC European males who committed these acts were self-radicalized and seriously mentally ill random criminals. Their actions do not speak for all light skinned citizens: we are Americans too, and we stand ready to cooperate with any law enforcement investigation into the reach of violent extremism in our community.”

Nevertheless, the general American population remains unnerved by what seems to be a frequent pattern of such radical actions by light-skinned males. An anonymous observer said: “Sure, not all light-skinned males say and do these extreme things, but most people who do are light-skinned males.” Meanwhile, preliminary reports speculate that these radical extremists might have infiltrated all levels of government, major media outlets, large corporations, and the highest courts of the land.

Many worried Americans are now wondering if they should also “stand and fight” in order to protect their civil rights against the threat posed by these extremists. However some leaders are urging wisdom and compassion. A coalition of community groups released the following statement: “Clearly if we give in to their demands and arm ourselves, the extremists will have won. In these difficult times, we must remind ourselves of the truly inclusive message of America. While we sometimes only see light skinned people as greedy bankers or soulless corporate lawyers, they also live among us as hard-working neighbors: they are our soccer coaches and our librarians, our teachers and our firefighters. What is needed now is not more hate but more outreach: to bring those who distrust us out of the shadows, and put them on a path to genuine American citizenship.”

Commentary/Analysis:

The extremist rhetoric from the NRA would be laughably absurd if it were not for so many gun-related fatalities in America. In the last 30 years there have been 62 mass shootings resulting in 513 dead and 494 injured. And the pace of mass shootings is increasing: 25 of those 62 shootings happened since 2006, and there were 7 mass shootings in 2012 alone. Meanwhile, since 1980 over 900,000 people have died in America due to gun violence, compared to over 3,400 due to terrorism.

Such radical rhetoric would also provoke quite different reactions if the organization or leaders in charge were “dark skinned” or “Muslim”: their ideologies would immediately be labeled as ‘jihadist’ and the actions of mass shooters who were ‘Muslim’ would be treated as ‘terrorism’. Instead, evidence shows that since 9/11 acts of terror committed by mass shooters caused more deaths than ‘Islamic’ homegrown terrorists: 261 people died due to mass shootings since 9/11, compared to 33 due to ‘jihadists’.

The radical violence-driven message of the predominately white men (and women) who lead the NRA seems to advocate for a terrifying vision of America as a society armed to the teeth. NRA members are fond of quoting from the science-fiction writing of Robert Heinlein that "an armed society is a polite society,” an idea of society that more reality-based commentators have astutely pointed out is not really a free society. However, the NRA has consistently promoted that vision through extreme anti-government paranoia. A recent poll found that over 44% of Republicans now feel that armed revolution is needed to protect their rights.

So here’s a thought experiment: would the NRA approve of such a violent vision if it were advocated by “dark skinned” or “Muslim” groups? What if a large group of Muslim-Americans decided to hold a gun rights rally to recognize and celebrate their 2nd Amendment rights? What if major Muslim-American leaders exhorted their supporters to “stand and fight” against “tyranny”? What if a poll found that 44% of Muslim-Americans felt that an armed revolution was necessary? Would the same Republican leaders who spoke at the NRA convention this weekend agree to headline a Muslim-American gun rights convention? Something tells me they would have a very different response.

Indeed, the history of gun rights in America shows a stance by “light skinned” leaders to systematically take away guns from minorities who were labeled as ‘militants’ if they took up arms as part of their struggle for civil rights. For example, the 2nd Amendment traces its roots partially to the demands of Southern states for Constitutional guarantees that the Federal government would not infringe on the rights of Southern white militias to arm themselves in order to suppress slave rebellions. Ironically, some (predominately “light skinned”) gun rights supporters today claim that slaves would have been free if only they had been armed.

Meanwhile, the powerful leaders of the NRA and other organizations (like Fox News and Republican legislative bodies) continue to block evidence-based attempts at reasoning with extremist ideological propaganda.

Here are a few examples:

  1. NRA leaders and their allies incite fear and paranoia through repeated claims that the “government” is out to “take our guns,” especially since Obama’s inauguration in 2009. However, in the four years since 2009, 99 laws have been passed by federal and state governments making it easier for people to own, carry, and conceal guns.
  2. NRA leaders and their allies repeatedly claim that the only solution to mass shootings is more guns in more places. This is despite the facts that (a) many of the mass shootings occurred in places where armed guards were nearby, such as Virginia Tech and the Ft. Hood (army base!) killings; (b) armed civilians actually make things worse by wounding/killing themselves or other civilians; and (c) law enforcement officials uniformly disapprove of having armed civilians in an active crime scene, where they interfere with the work of highly trained officers.
  3. NRA leaders and their allies continually scoff at arguments for gun control by saying “where’s the proof?” Hypocritically, these same leaders have been responsible for eliminating any federal funding for research into gun violence. They have convinced lawmakers that simply asking questions about gun violence is a violation of the 2nd amendment. No other research activity is as severely curtailed as research into gun violence. As a result, there is a dearth of scientific data on how many guns are owned by Americans and on how many deaths are a result of gun violence. However, even the limited data thus available still shows that gun violence is the second leading cause of deaths of young people in America, behind car accidents.
  4. While 44 of the 62 mass shootings in the last 30 years were caused by white males, many with right-wing extremist or white supremacist connections, NRA leaders and their allies persistently dismiss any efforts to study patterns in these shootings. Instead, they highlight only one common thread: the majority of perpetrators were mentally ill. Even so, the NRA and its allies dismiss any efforts to study the connections between mental illness and gun violence.
  5. The NRA and its allies also perpetuate demonstrably nonsensical arguments such as “criminals don’t follow laws” (to which Jon Stewart succinctly pointed out that even though people who steal do not follow our laws against stealing, “we still have them!” ), or “you can’t stop a criminal from getting a gun illegally” (although 80% of mass shooters acquired their weapons legally), or that high-capacity magazines and assault-style weapons are not to blame for mass shootings (although a majority of the 62 mass shooters used these kinds of weapons), or that gun control is a slippery slope to Prohibition and Tyranny (when the data shows instead that if there is a slippery slope it has been well lubricated toward the side of gun proliferation and deregulation of gun laws).
  6. Finally, the NRA and its allies rail against any effort to restrict the purchase of weapons of mass violence, claiming that doing so would somehow reduce the ability of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves (although they would still be able to buy more reasonable guns). They ask, in outrage, “Whose side are you on?!” However, Americans owned about 200 million guns in 1995 compared to over 300 million in 2012, a jump of over 100 million guns in 17 years. In the same time frame, the NRA’s messaging and ads shifted from promoting the use of guns for hunting and sportsmanship to a more ominous anti-government anti-crime fear-mongering. Meanwhile, since 1980, over 900,000 people died due to gun fatalities. Given the only possible benefactor of such increased sales in weapons and the resulting deaths, it’s fair for millions of ordinary Americans of every color and ideology to ask of the NRA and their allies, “Just whose side are they on?!”

[Inspired by Timothy Koechlin’s excellent brofile The “Light-Skinned” Men Threat To America. Also inspired by these Onion articles: Crazed Sociopaths Enter Congressional Chambers, and Unstable Man Plots to Bring Guns to Schools.]

white privilege radically changes the appearance of Tsarnaev bros This is how brofiling actually works in real life. The Week Magazine ran with this image as their cover sketch. Just so it is said, clearly and unambiguously: the Tsarnaev brothers are white guys. They are white. The FBI’s own wanted poster for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lists his race as “white”, but you would never know it from the cover image on The Week. Hold up the cover to someone else, and ask them how many white people they can see on the cover. Chances are they will identify Gabby Giffords on the top left and the image of the Boston policemen (all white men) on the top right, but how about those two guys in the center? Nope, not a chance that anyone would say these caricatures look white. Why? Because in addition to being white they are also “Muslim”, which is the current dehumanizing “Other” label that whiteness has constructed as a sanctioned target for violence in US popular culture. This is how white privilege works in media representations and everyday life: when the criminal suspects are demonstrably white men, seize upon any aspect of difference and magnify it such that they become Othered, non-white, and menacing. If it is too hard to do so, simply dismiss them as aberrations and isolated cases of insanity. This is also how white culture, specifically the process of whiteness in conjunction with white privilege, portrays several non-white identities, including those that are now considered white but at one time were decidedly not so. For example, see here for how the Irish were depicted as violent apes or lazy drunks in the late 1800s to early 1900s. Addendum, posted 4.29.13: As Tim Wise said on April 18, there are consequences for these kinds of things. Here are a few reasons why this is important: Making white criminals who are Muslim appear to be more ‘brown’ than ‘white’ has serious consequences for brown people. Indeed, as we saw right after the Boston bombings, people that simply “looked” brown and Muslim were profiled and assaulted. Two men were escorted off a plane in Boston simply for speaking Arabic and thereby somehow making passengers “uncomfortable”. A Bangladeshi man in NYC was beaten up because he looked ‘Arab’. And this affects women too: a Muslim woman doctor in Boston who wears a headscarf was attacked by a man while she was out walking with her baby. And the white Muslim wife of the older brother has been demonized for simply being a Muslim American woman, especially after Ann Coulter called for women who wear hijabs to be arrested. People have pointed out to me that The Week Magazine’s cover images are regularly caricatures/sketches of the main events of that week’s news. I know this—I read their print edition every week, and all their previous cover images are available online. But there are two main problems with this argument: (a) why caricature them in a way that makes them so explicitly ‘darker’ and ‘Arabized’ in their appearance? Contrast the way they look on that page with the other white faces on that same page—would anyone say that these men look ‘white’? So why is the caricature done in such a ‘racializing' way? How is this any different from the more overt media racism that was used by Time Magazine (h/t @sarahkendzior), for example, to make OJ Simpson appear way more menacing? And (b) if The Week is simply trying to put a caricature of criminals who committed mass violence on their cover, then here are the covers for the weeks when Newtown happened, when Aurora happened, and when Tucson happened — where were their ‘racialized’ caricatures of Adam Lanza, James Holmes, and Jared Loughner? How come the ideologies and ethnicities and religions of those particular mass criminals were not profiled? And so here is the more subtle consequence: when white criminals are treated as if they are just aberrations, and when white criminals who are Muslim are portrayed as more brown than white not just by The Week but by mainstream propaganda outlets like Fox News, then the problems of white supremacist violence and extremism become hidden, unaddressed. When analyzed carefully, research has shown that right-wing extremism causes more deaths in America than “jihadist” groups. Also, of the terror attacks/plots since 1995 in America, 56% of them were by right-wing extremists and only 12% by Islamist/jihadist groups — and yet the DHS was told to back off reporting on that or on analyzing right-wing violence for fears of backlash from conservative political groups. So, my main point is that such a deliberate ignorance hurts ALL people. UPDATE 4/30/13: I discussed this on HuffPost Live
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white privilege radically changes the appearance of Tsarnaev bros

This is how brofiling actually works in real life. The Week Magazine ran with this image as their cover sketch.

Just so it is said, clearly and unambiguously: the Tsarnaev brothers are white guys. They are white. The FBI’s own wanted poster for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lists his race as “white”, but you would never know it from the cover image on The Week.

Hold up the cover to someone else, and ask them how many white people they can see on the cover. Chances are they will identify Gabby Giffords on the top left and the image of the Boston policemen (all white men) on the top right, but how about those two guys in the center? Nope, not a chance that anyone would say these caricatures look white.

Why? Because in addition to being white they are also “Muslim”, which is the current dehumanizing “Other” label that whiteness has constructed as a sanctioned target for violence in US popular culture.

This is how white privilege works in media representations and everyday life: when the criminal suspects are demonstrably white men, seize upon any aspect of difference and magnify it such that they become Othered, non-white, and menacing. If it is too hard to do so, simply dismiss them as aberrations and isolated cases of insanity. This is also how white culture, specifically the process of whiteness in conjunction with white privilege, portrays several non-white identities, including those that are now considered white but at one time were decidedly not so. For example, see here for how the Irish were depicted as violent apes or lazy drunks in the late 1800s to early 1900s.

Addendum, posted 4.29.13:

As Tim Wise said on April 18, there are consequences for these kinds of things. Here are a few reasons why this is important:

  1. Making white criminals who are Muslim appear to be more ‘brown’ than ‘white’ has serious consequences for brown people. Indeed, as we saw right after the Boston bombings, people that simply “looked” brown and Muslim were profiled and assaulted. Two men were escorted off a plane in Boston simply for speaking Arabic and thereby somehow making passengers “uncomfortable”. A Bangladeshi man in NYC was beaten up because he looked ‘Arab’. And this affects women too: a Muslim woman doctor in Boston who wears a headscarf was attacked by a man while she was out walking with her baby. And the white Muslim wife of the older brother has been demonized for simply being a Muslim American woman, especially after Ann Coulter called for women who wear hijabs to be arrested.
  2. People have pointed out to me that The Week Magazine’s cover images are regularly caricatures/sketches of the main events of that week’s news. I know this—I read their print edition every week, and all their previous cover images are available online. But there are two main problems with this argument: (a) why caricature them in a way that makes them so explicitly ‘darker’ and ‘Arabized’ in their appearance? Contrast the way they look on that page with the other white faces on that same page—would anyone say that these men look ‘white’? So why is the caricature done in such a ‘racializing' way? How is this any different from the more overt media racism that was used by Time Magazine (h/t @sarahkendzior), for example, to make OJ Simpson appear way more menacing? And (b) if The Week is simply trying to put a caricature of criminals who committed mass violence on their cover, then here are the covers for the weeks when Newtown happened, when Aurora happened, and when Tucson happened — where were their ‘racialized’ caricatures of Adam Lanza, James Holmes, and Jared Loughner? How come the ideologies and ethnicities and religions of those particular mass criminals were not profiled?
  3. And so here is the more subtle consequence: when white criminals are treated as if they are just aberrations, and when white criminals who are Muslim are portrayed as more brown than white not just by The Week but by mainstream propaganda outlets like Fox News, then the problems of white supremacist violence and extremism become hidden, unaddressed. When analyzed carefully, research has shown that right-wing extremism causes more deaths in America than “jihadist” groups. Also, of the terror attacks/plots since 1995 in America, 56% of them were by right-wing extremists and only 12% by Islamist/jihadist groups — and yet the DHS was told to back off reporting on that or on analyzing right-wing violence for fears of backlash from conservative political groups.

So, my main point is that such a deliberate ignorance hurts ALL people.

UPDATE 4/30/13: I discussed this on HuffPost Live

The “Light-Skinned” Men Threat to America

Timothy Koechlin sets the gold standard for brofiling! Check out the intro to his terrific article here:

After the explosion in West, Texas, witnesses across the country report having seen groups of “light skinned” men plotting to endanger innocent Americans.

There is mounting evidence that the explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas — which killed 14 and injured more than 200 — was the result of “deregulation” and other extremist policies advocated by an extensive and powerful network of white men. This cabal of white extremists (many of them also intolerant proponents of “Christianity”) has reportedly infiltrated America’s most powerful institutions – including the supreme court and both houses of congress — in large numbers, spreading their anti-government, anti-union, free-market “gospel.”

Caucasian male carries improvised explosive device on train Eight days before the Boston bombings, authorities arrested a Caucasian male who built improvised explosive devices and carried them on a NJ train. Even though he claimed they were just fireworks, authorities detained him for several days of questioning, did not read him his Miranda rights, and the judge sent him to jail as a public safety exception. Meanwhile, his apartment building was evacuated as federal law enforcement officials scoured every detail of his rooms, and his roommate was also taken in for questioning as a precautionary measure. At least, that is what WOULD have happened to this dangerous ethnic Caucasian radical had he been a brown Muslim man. What ACTUALLY happened is detailed in this news report from the Jersey Journal: the judge charged him and then let him go, with no bail, on his own recognizance. Then, he (or at least someone who created a profile under his name) posted the following utterly clueless comment on the Jersey Journal story online: Mykyta Panasenko: “Well, it’s been a very stressful evening, and who knows what more harassment tomorrow will bring, but for the moment I am simply too tired to stay awake any longer. I suppose I just got a taste of the negative side of what it is like to be a celebrity or a member of a royal family, constantly facing intrusion of privacy and fabricated stories by low-brow media like the Jersey Journal. It’s a shame PATH has a stop named after that paper. I could tell this originated from a court reporter who, amid a usual monotonous sea of blacks and latinos charged with drug possession, picked out someone with a foreign-sounding name and rather unusual charges in an attempt to sensationalize it in the wake of the Boston terrorist attacks. Heck, they were lacking information on the case so they found nothing better than to copypaste exact wording of the charges from my summons sheet to fill up space in their article! To sum up again, I made improvised explosive fireworks with Pyrodex, took them on a train (which was a bad idea and that already apologized for) to the woods in upstate NY, watched them blow up some dirt and garbage, came back, roommate freaked out, notified LE through chain, LE came and asked questions, I hid nothing. They searched apartment, confiscated Pyrodex, filed charges a week later, asked me to come in to be formally arrested, released on own recognizance without bail.” Get that? He is just an innocent Caucasian male with an innocent and totally normal fascination with exploding things in the woods. And there he is, in that smelly courtroom, surrounded by all those “blacks and latinos” who are charged with much more dangerous crimes like “drug possession”, and just because this innocent Caucasian man has a “foreign-sounding name” and “rather unusual charges” (which, by the way, were of a more, uhm, explosive nature than possessing drugs) he gets unfairly characterized as a terrorist. Poor white man-boy. This is one of those moments where reality intrudes on satire. The thought experiment here is not just academic: imagine what would have happened if he was a brown Muslim man who liked fireworks a lot and just wanted to experiment with what would happen if he took the gunpowder from several fireworks and combined them to make a nice large firecracker that he could try out safely in the woods somewhere? Incidentally, the investigation into the Boston bombings is now indicating that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two suspects, fashioned his lethal bombs precisely through buying large fireworks in New Hampshire and taking the gunpowder out of them to make explosive material. You will soon have the usual Republican lawmakers calling for profiling of fireworks purchases by suspicious foreign-accented Muslim men. But you will not hear a single lawmaker calling for profiling of geeky Caucasian man-boys who think it’s okay to make explosive devices and carry them on mass transit. Put another way, this white boy’s sense of outrage at the fact that he got charged is an illustration of white privilege: of *course* he doesn’t think he should be suspected of doing anything dangerous, because that’s something only those evil brown men do, right? So this is one of those moments where, as Patricia Williams writes, “there is more in the news than my depression can consume.”
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Caucasian male carries improvised explosive device on train

Eight days before the Boston bombings, authorities arrested a Caucasian male who built improvised explosive devices and carried them on a NJ train. Even though he claimed they were just fireworks, authorities detained him for several days of questioning, did not read him his Miranda rights, and the judge sent him to jail as a public safety exception. Meanwhile, his apartment building was evacuated as federal law enforcement officials scoured every detail of his rooms, and his roommate was also taken in for questioning as a precautionary measure.

At least, that is what WOULD have happened to this dangerous ethnic Caucasian radical had he been a brown Muslim man. What ACTUALLY happened is detailed in this news report from the Jersey Journal: the judge charged him and then let him go, with no bail, on his own recognizance. Then, he (or at least someone who created a profile under his name) posted the following utterly clueless comment on the Jersey Journal story online:

Mykyta Panasenko: “Well, it’s been a very stressful evening, and who knows what more harassment tomorrow will bring, but for the moment I am simply too tired to stay awake any longer. I suppose I just got a taste of the negative side of what it is like to be a celebrity or a member of a royal family, constantly facing intrusion of privacy and fabricated stories by low-brow media like the Jersey Journal. It’s a shame PATH has a stop named after that paper.

I could tell this originated from a court reporter who, amid a usual monotonous sea of blacks and latinos charged with drug possession, picked out someone with a foreign-sounding name and rather unusual charges in an attempt to sensationalize it in the wake of the Boston terrorist attacks. Heck, they were lacking information on the case so they found nothing better than to copypaste exact wording of the charges from my summons sheet to fill up space in their article!

To sum up again, I made improvised explosive fireworks with Pyrodex, took them on a train (which was a bad idea and that already apologized for) to the woods in upstate NY, watched them blow up some dirt and garbage, came back, roommate freaked out, notified LE through chain, LE came and asked questions, I hid nothing. They searched apartment, confiscated Pyrodex, filed charges a week later, asked me to come in to be formally arrested, released on own recognizance without bail.”

Get that? He is just an innocent Caucasian male with an innocent and totally normal fascination with exploding things in the woods. And there he is, in that smelly courtroom, surrounded by all those “blacks and latinos” who are charged with much more dangerous crimes like “drug possession”, and just because this innocent Caucasian man has a “foreign-sounding name” and “rather unusual charges” (which, by the way, were of a more, uhm, explosive nature than possessing drugs) he gets unfairly characterized as a terrorist. Poor white man-boy.

This is one of those moments where reality intrudes on satire. The thought experiment here is not just academic: imagine what would have happened if he was a brown Muslim man who liked fireworks a lot and just wanted to experiment with what would happen if he took the gunpowder from several fireworks and combined them to make a nice large firecracker that he could try out safely in the woods somewhere?

Incidentally, the investigation into the Boston bombings is now indicating that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two suspects, fashioned his lethal bombs precisely through buying large fireworks in New Hampshire and taking the gunpowder out of them to make explosive material. You will soon have the usual Republican lawmakers calling for profiling of fireworks purchases by suspicious foreign-accented Muslim men. But you will not hear a single lawmaker calling for profiling of geeky Caucasian man-boys who think it’s okay to make explosive devices and carry them on mass transit.

Put another way, this white boy’s sense of outrage at the fact that he got charged is an illustration of white privilege: of *course* he doesn’t think he should be suspected of doing anything dangerous, because that’s something only those evil brown men do, right?

So this is one of those moments where, as Patricia Williams writes, “there is more in the news than my depression can consume.”

Radical religious truck suspiciously abandoned near campus landmark A large truck displaying an ethnic religious slogan was conspicuously abandoned in a no-parking zone near a major landmark. Alert patriots notified authorities who immediately evacuated the building and detonated the truck from a safe distance. Submitted by an anonymous contributor. ============ Commentary Although not technically a ‘brofile’, this story does provide for a thought experiment: imagine if the truck said “MUSLIM PARTY RENTAL” and was left conspicuously unattended so near a major building in a location where no parking is allowed? This story also parallels a recent ‘bomb scare’ at a local mall, when police were called to investigate a Ryder truck that was apparently ‘suspiciously parked’. Police evacuated the entire mall and carefully inspected the truck, only to find that the truck contained … books.
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Radical religious truck suspiciously abandoned near campus landmark

A large truck displaying an ethnic religious slogan was conspicuously abandoned in a no-parking zone near a major landmark. Alert patriots notified authorities who immediately evacuated the building and detonated the truck from a safe distance.

Submitted by an anonymous contributor.

============

Commentary

Although not technically a ‘brofile’, this story does provide for a thought experiment: imagine if the truck said “MUSLIM PARTY RENTAL” and was left conspicuously unattended so near a major building in a location where no parking is allowed?

This story also parallels a recent ‘bomb scare’ at a local mall, when police were called to investigate a Ryder truck that was apparently ‘suspiciously parked’. Police evacuated the entire mall and carefully inspected the truck, only to find that the truck contained … books.