Whiteness | Jotup

Winnie Dunn’s debut novel Dirt Poor Islanders is an impassioned response to detrimental stereotypes

Retrieved on:

Friday, April 5, 2024

Review: Dirt Poor Islanders – Winnie Dunn (Hachette) Although Dirt Poor Islanders is her debut novel, Dunn is not new to the literary scene.

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Review: Dirt Poor Islanders – Winnie Dunn (Hachette) Although Dirt Poor Islanders is her debut novel, Dunn is not new to the literary scene.
That Dirt Poor Islanders draws on Dunn’s lived experience is crucial to its mission.
The novel is an impassioned response to dangerous and detrimental stereotypes, such as Chris Lilley’s character Jonah from Tonga.

Whiteness and dirt

Dirt Poor Islanders traces young Meadow Reed’s negotiation of this tension. The novel is a work of autofiction – a blend of autobiography and fiction – which includes metafictional reflections on the genesis of the resulting book.

The first chapter of Dirt Poor Islanders is a story she writes in her “gifted and talented” class.
Dirt Poor Islanders contributes to a tradition of Australian narratives of young second- and third-generation migrants, often blending autobiography and fiction.
They go as far back as Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi (1992) and Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded (1995).
But Meadow is even more disgusted by the bugs, dirt and mould that infest the family homes and her body.
Being both Scottish and Tongan, she thinks, meant “we were made out of – whiteness and dirt”.

Togetherness

Despite the cultural insistence that “togetherness was what it meant to be Tongan”, Meadow resents this idea for most of the novel.
Togetherness seems to consist primarily of the expectation that the family are together in suffering and poverty, rather than love and community.
It is only when she recognises the togetherness of “kith and kin – blended not just by blood but by skin and soil too”, rather than perceiving her abjection, that she begins to understand her identity and heritage.

In a scene that brings the abjection and resistance full circle, she refuses to use the dirty toilet outside the family home.
She ends up with constipation: a literal blockage or denial of her body.
Her anguish is only resolved when her grandmother takes her to a sacred site, promising “Tonga making betta you”.
And her grandmother is right: as Meadow squats on the ground, she realises they are matched in their abjection.

Jessica Gildersleeve does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Is America enduring a 'slow civil war'? Jeff Sharlet visits Trump rallies, a celebrity megachurch and the manosphere to find out

Retrieved on:

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Nor is its author, Jeff Sharlet, focused only on the ominous events of January 6, 2021, at the US Capitol.

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Nor is its author, Jeff Sharlet, focused only on the ominous events of January 6, 2021, at the US Capitol.
Sharlet believes that event is part of a “slow civil war” that threatens the future of the American republic.
Review: The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War – Jeff Sharlet (W.W. Norton)

American racism

Sharlet documents Belafonte’s lifelong struggle against racism, through a series of conversations.
Sharlet uses Belafonte to argue racism is at the heart of the American political and social malady.
Belafonte, a mainstream performer with cross-race appeal who still suffered intense discrimination, is Sharlet’s bearer of the bad news that racism resides in the core of American identity.
Read more:
From sit-ins in the 1960s to uprisings in the new millennium, Harry Belafonte served as a champion of youth activism

‘The American religion of winning’

While race may be at the heart of a contested American identity, Sharlet believes evangelical religion is propelling the narrative of discontent and rebellion.
Or rather, a distorted branch within evangelical religion: the prosperity gospel, which teaches that faith and positive thinking attract health, wealth and happiness.
Wilkerson is portrayed as a very “cool” Christian, with a talent for grabbing headlines and fraternising with celebrity friends.
Prosperity follows him.” The American prosperity gospel is a materialist practice full of (sometimes unaware) poseurs, a bit like Trump himself.
His braggadocio at rallies appeals to his acolytes because it operates within “the American religion of winning”.

Evangelical religion and QAnon

As the apostle Paul wrote: “We walk by faith, not by sight” (KJV, 2 Corinthians 5:7).
Through QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory provides secular breadcrumbs for those seeking answers for the strange condition of the modern American nation-state.
QAnon is rooted in Gnostic philosophy, which held that reality is not what it appears (and was expelled from the mainstream of early Christianity’s canon).
QAnon adherents believe that, with the addition of the conspiracy theories supplied by QAnon, menacing forces and hopeful signs can be effortlessly revealed.
Read more:
History repeats itself: From the New Testament to QAnon

A slow civil war

Hope cannot easily spring eternal, so grim are the signs of a slow civil war. Sharlet hints mass protest may be a democratic antidote to the American proto-fascism he fears.

In the end, Sharlet can only offer the slender hope that democratic practice, one small step at a time, might prevail through the will of sensible people.
But what if the problem went deeper than an internal culture war?
Read more:
In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein says the world is broken: conspiracy theorists 'get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right'

Not unique to America

Certainly, Australia has experienced white racism – and violent, organised attacks on non-whites.
Alternatively, follow the unfolding story of the two policemen and a neighbour, gunned down in an ambush in Southern Queensland in 2022.
But it is harder to channel racist and religious fanaticism into an attack on the political state in Australia.
They will not be assured of America’s future role as a reliable world bastion of liberal democracy.
Nor can they be assured the United States will remain the politically stable centre of an increasingly unstable global economic system.

Ian Tyrrell received funding from the Australian Research Council's grant schemes on five occasions from 1996 to 2015.

Most Employees From Marginalized Racial and Ethnic Groups Have Experienced Racism in the Workplace

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, October 11, 2023

Catalyst study across six countries finds 66% of employees from marginalized racial and ethnic groups experience racism at work.

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Catalyst study across six countries finds 66% of employees from marginalized racial and ethnic groups experience racism at work.
New report analyzes the insidious ways racism shows up in the workplace, and what organizations can do.
The report, How Racism Shows Up at Work—And the Antiracist Actions Your Organization Can Take , surveyed more than 5,000 women, men, transgender, and nonbinary employees and reveals the pervasive and insidious ways racism exists in the workplace.
Participants also report experiencing racism in the form of racial stereotypes and degrading commentary about their bodies or cultures.

ALL ARTS announces Mahogany L. Browne, Marlena Myles and Kenneth Tam as 2024 Artists in Residence

Retrieved on:

Thursday, September 28, 2023

NEW YORK, Sept. 28, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- ALL ARTS, the multimedia platform covering visual art, music, theater, dance, film, literature and more, will commission new works from three artists as part of the fourth annual Kate W. Cassidy Artist in Residence program. The works produced through the program will premiere on the ALL ARTS broadcast channel, streaming app and other digital platforms in spring 2024 as part of the ongoing ALL ARTS Artist in Residence series.

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The works produced through the program will premiere on the ALL ARTS broadcast channel, streaming app and other digital platforms in spring 2024 as part of the ongoing ALL ARTS Artist in Residence series.
ALL ARTS announces Mahogany L. Browne, Marlena Myles and Kenneth Tam as 2024 Artists in Residence.
"We are thrilled to spotlight a new cohort of artists through our annual Artist in Residence commission," said James King, senior artistic director of ALL ARTS.
Past seasons of ALL ARTS Artist in Residence are available to stream nationwide on the free ALL ARTS app and AllArts.org/ArtistInResidence.

Ghassan Hage is one of Australia's most significant intellectuals. He's still on a quest for a multicultural society that hopes and cares

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, July 19, 2023

The Racial Politics of Multicultural Australia – Ghassan Hage (Sweatshop) The publication of The Racial Politics of Multicultural Australia by the Sweatshop Literacy Movement represents a significant collaboration.

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The Racial Politics of Multicultural Australia – Ghassan Hage (Sweatshop) The publication of The Racial Politics of Multicultural Australia by the Sweatshop Literacy Movement represents a significant collaboration.
Hage is an Australian Arab immigrant, whose forebears came to Australia in the 1930s and settled in Lithgow, where they established a clothing factory.
Sweatshop is an urban political project created in western Sydney by a younger generation of Australians from Arab and other immigrant and refugee backgrounds.
While the republished works were mainly written early in the second generation, their continuing relevance is both salutary and disturbing.

What is a White person?

For Hage, it is a self-referential category into which White people put themselves.
That is, people who think of themselves as White are White people.
Nor is it racial, in the older sense of race as a bio-social category, with shared DNA clusters associated with territories of origin.
Rather, it is a “fantasy position” born out of colonial history, one that is essentially European.
It is imagined to be rooted in the stories of north-western Europe: stories of empires won and an Enlightenment project sustained.

White Nation

In White Nation, Hage draws on two methods: one provided by his studies with Pierre Bourdieu in Paris, and another developed in the social anthropological space of ethnography and listening.
White people, suggests one letter, are more immediately seen as Australian (part of the dominant cultural group), even when they have only recently arrived.
As Hage notes, White multiculturalism evades any commitment that “we are a multicultural community in all our diversity”.
Moreover, argues Hage, these views, be they for or against multiculturalism, all stand upon an edifice that assumes White superiority – and fantasises Australia as a place in which White superiority “should reign supreme”.

The politics of White decline

In the decades since White Nation first appeared, the politics of White decline have become an increasingly mainstream concern.
This narrative played a key part in the anti-vaxx movement, despite the multicultural makeup of that movement.
Both played a role in White Nation – but they foreground Against Paranoid Nationalism.

Worrying and caring

In Against Paranoid Nationalism, Hage proposes that two opposing stances – worrying and caring – establish the parameters of the narcissism and paranoia engulfing Australia.
Worrying about the nation’s present and future breeds an intense fear and hatred of outsiders who might threaten the interests of those who claim a unique right to worry.
In the process, people become less willing to hope for a more caring future.
We are all the better off for Hage’s eclectic, systematic, imaginative and penetrating assessment of the human condition in this time of late imperialism.

Dehumanisation, animalisation: inside the terrible world of Swiss human zoos

Retrieved on:

Thursday, June 22, 2023

After a stay in Leukerbad, James Baldwin affirmed:

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After a stay in Leukerbad, James Baldwin affirmed:
“From all available evidence, no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came.
Fifty years before the American writer set foot in the Alps, about two third of the Swiss population visited the “Village noir” in Geneva.
How is it possible that, half a century later, the exhibition of 200 African people that two million people visited has fallen into oblivion?

A “Black village” in the heart of the Alps

Back in 1896, during the Swiss Second National Exhibition, it hosted a human zoo.
There are very few visible references to it, except for one street called after its corresponding “white” exhibition, the “Village Suisse”.
However, several researchers’ archival work helped unearth the history of the first Swiss “Village noir”.
Inhabited by more than 200 individuals from Senegal, the village was situated a few streets from the city’s central square, the Plaine de Plainpalais.

From freak shows to human zoos

Far from being a Swiss peculiarity, human zoos were spread around the West.
Human exhibitions were a form of entertainment invented in the early 19th century in Great Britain.
Turned into a film in 2010, one of the most famous shows was Sara Baartman, the “Hottenton Venus”.
Geneva Graduate Institute’s Mohamed Mahmoud Mohamedou suggests that human zoos were common entertainment in the second half of the 19th century.

Two faces of the same racist coin

This was when the pseudo-scientific attempts to create a superior race thrived within Western anthropology and biology academic departments.
For eugenicists, human zoos provided ‘samples’ for racist theories.
Thus, scientific racism developed within academia went hand in hand with popular racism: human zoos were places where these two faces of the same coin met.

Tackling the legacies of human zoos

Human exhibitions were the result of Western colonial thinking – says Patrick Minder – in which the Genevan’ “Village noir” fits perfectly.
Unlike other countries, Switzerland did not stop its human exhibitions during the interwar period.
Against this backdrop, talking about human zoos in Switzerland should not only be of interest to historians.
If we keep silent on human zoos, we cannot see how visiting a “typical” Maasai village echoes the old colonial habits of the mise en scène of rural, primitive life.

What a viral meme about Evander Kane can tell us about white supremacy in hockey

Retrieved on:

Monday, May 15, 2023

While the incident that resulted in the meme may not have been racially motivated, it is still about race and white supremacy.

Key Points:

While the incident that resulted in the meme may not have been racially motivated, it is still about race and white supremacy.
The meme challenges viewers to consider the role of white women’s fandom in upholding and normalizing white supremacy in hockey culture.

Defining white supremacy

Scholars have defined white supremacy as the “institutionalization of Whiteness and White privilege.” Institutionalization occurs when rules, standards or practices are nomalized to the extent that it has become so common we do not question it.
White privilege describes the unearned advantages white people receive based on the colour of their skin.
White supremacy is invisibilized and normalized in hockey culture.

White supremacy culture

As white settler Canadian women, we recognize that “the burdens of dismantling white supremacy and decolonizing the sport of hockey are more justly shouldered by white settler Canadians and the hockey establishment.” Men’s ice hockey upholds white supremacy through erasure, exclusion and mandated conformity.
The erasure of the history of the Colored Hockey League, as highlighted by sport researchers Alex Mackenzie and Janelle Joesph, is an example of how white supremacy erases those who aren’t considered white.
A total of 83.6 per cent of the NHL’s workforce is white and over 90 per cent of players and nearly all coaches and officials are white.

Whiteness and surveillance

Racialized hockey players are often held to a higher moral standard than their white counterparts.
But the racism Subban endured as a Black athlete in a white sport has not received the same attention.
White supremacy ensures we are constantly surveilling Black players and holding them to higher moral standards than white players.

Hockey fan culture

Fans also play a key role in upholding white supremacy in hockey — particularly white women because ice hockey has a predominantly white fan base in North America.
The exclusionary practices that keep men’s ice hockey elite, heterosexual and white are reflected in its fandom.
Legal scholar Martine Dennie has written about what it means to be a hockey fan in Calgary.

Combating white supremacy

Combating white supremacy involves exposing the way it operates as an undercurrent.
True interrogations of white supremacy don’t focus on individual acts of overt racism — instead, they reveal how normalized and systemic it is.
The Kane vs. Karen meme challenges white women to consider our role in perpetuating white supremacy.

The Whiteness line by FGM stands out in the worldwide market

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

FGM, Hypersensitivity, Cosmetics, Patient, Whiteness, Hydrogen peroxide, Ahmed Mekky (CEO), Ageing

One of the whitening solutions from the portfolio, Whiteness Perfect, is recognized by the North American agency Dental Advisor as the best take-home whitening gel.

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One of the whitening solutions from the portfolio, Whiteness Perfect, is recognized by the North American agency Dental Advisor as the best take-home whitening gel.
One of the leading brands in the dental sector, FGM offers a broad portfolio for a wide range of whitening techniques.
The Whiteness line has been in continuous development for 30 years and is now present in over 100 countries, being the leader in 15 of them.
Whiteness HP Automixx 6% can be used in association with the Whiteness take-home gels, which provide even more satisfactory results.

A Whites Organization for Good? Positive Whiteness Launches to Transform Society

Retrieved on:

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Trust, Violence, Whiteness, Race relations, Culture, White Americans, Social media, Marketing, White

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Positive Whiteness, a Whites Organization for Good, launches today to fight against record racial division with the goal of helping people of all races. For many, Whiteness has been used in malicious and discriminatory ways by hate groups and ideologies historically and in the modern era. Positive Whiteness breaks this cycle through a "support everyone" approach of charity, cultural work, and media with the goal of positive unity for all.

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As the first modern Whites organization, Positive Whiteness approaches our racial conflict through a robust infrastructure of non-partisan "include everyone" thought and action .
Positive Whiteness psychologically follows the model of other identity-based organizations and develops a Positive White Cultural Identity from that.
Yet the most important part is the charitable initiatives , in the name of Whiteness, to build trust, improvement, and positive unity for all.
Positive Whiteness is fundraising for its charitable work and can be found on most major social media networks.

NYU Launches the Latinx in Social Work Discussion Series

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, January 19, 2022

Racism, Bias, Student, Silver, Movement, School, Social, Weight, Whiteness, Mentorship, Color, Life, Awareness, Medicine, Latinx, Social work

NEW YORK, Jan.19, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The New York University Silver School of Social Work has partnered with alumna and Sandoval CoLab founder Erica Sandoval to launch the "Latinx in Social Work Discussion Series," virtual panels featuring authors from "Latinx in Social Work" exploring themes from the book.

Key Points:

NEW YORK, Jan.19, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The New York University Silver School of Social Work has partnered with alumna and Sandoval CoLab founder Erica Sandoval to launch the "Latinx in Social Work Discussion Series," virtual panels featuring authors from "Latinx in Social Work" exploring themes from the book.
An initiative from workplace wellness and equity consulting firm Sandoval CoLab, "Latinx in Social Work" is an anthology of personal essays written by 22 Latinx social workers that call awareness to the racism, bias, and discrimination experienced by social workers.
The book has been introduced in schools of social work curricula including the NYU Silver School of Social Work as a mirror to reflect the experiences of Latinx students and a tool to help students of other backgrounds understand the need for cultural humility in their practice.
"Latinx in Social Work" will soon be followed by a Spanish translation and a second volume.