Race and Gender Issues

Latinos swell Twin Cities churches

http://www.startribune.com/614/story/183022.html

"The archdiocese views Latinos as an important part of its future, and is taking steps to respond to them, said McDonough. It has created formal ties to a religious order in Ecuador to create a pipeline for Spanish-language priests, he said. It now requires seminarians to study Spanish and has speeded up the hiring of bicultural deacons.

"But with roughly a dozen fluent Spanish-speaking priests, and dozens of congregations poised to become the spiritual homes to immigrants in the future, the challenges are clear, archdiocese officials said.

"Likewise the opportunities are clear, at least to some Minnesota Catholics. Brenda Cooney, a parishioner at St. John's, says the recent arrivals have injected new life into a congregation where membership was flat. They have also forced people to re-examine themselves and their faith, she said."

The churches are finding, however, that blending the white English-speaking parishioners with the Latino largely Spanish-speaking parishioners is much more difficult than they initially thought. Not surprising that there's misunderstanding about each others' traditions.

The Human Rights Campaign, a group that advocates equal rights for gay, transgender and bisexual people, has put together
a little guide that shows what companies are more gay-friendly than others. Surprisingly, Wal-Mart is among the worst, and Best Buy and General Mills are among the best. The companies were judged on whether they had written non-discrimination policies that cover sexual orientation and whether they offer health and other benefits to same sex partners.

New study finds female execs of color sidelined by bias

About 42 percent of women of color in corporate America feel that they have to conform to the white male model, according to a new survey by the Center for Work-Life Policy, a New York-based think tank.

Here are some of the other findings:

• Nearly a third of minority female executives worry that their speaking style labels them as lacking leadership potential.
  
• 23 percent of minority female executives fear that colleagues perceive their animated hand gestures as inappropriate.
  
• 19 percent of minority female professionals feel that their dress is seen as too ethnic or flamboyant.
  
• 25 percent of minority businesswomen worry about the perception that they are “affirmative action” hires.

The study also found that, among Fortune 500 companies, 98 percent of the CEOs were white men. (This of course does not take into account the senior leadership, which may or may not be a little more diverse.)

It's good business to include women of color in hiring, of course. But retention is the major issue. When you have a talent pool that feels it has to fall in lock-step to the rest of the company in order to succeed, that's a major cultural problem. That means women of color have to deny their natures and possibly their talents. In competitive businesses that emphasize innovative thinking, this could be a major liability if women of color don't feel they can speak up.

Anita Hill

Wednesday night I saw Anita Hill speak on campus, and she was awesome.

From her speech, I really took away some good food for thought: she said when it comes to Supreme Court nominees, we need to worry more about judicial philosophy as much as we do about credentials. She said the fact that credentials are emphasized over philosophy is elitist (looking for Ivy League degrees) sexist, and racist.

She also said that the way that Bush introduced Harriet Miers versus the way he presented Samuel Alito and John Roberts shows his own sexist bias. Bush emphasized Alito's and Roberts's experience and legal pedigrees while saying of Miers that he "knows her heart."

To be fair, Miers has no experience as a judge, while Roberts had at least two years and Alito has 15 years.

At the end of the speech, I asked her who she would pick for the Supreme Court. She mentioned Sonia Sotomayor, a Yale classmate of hers. But she emphasized that if the president were looking for qualified women, that the list is long.

Just a personal note

Lately I've been working out a ton. So it irritates me when people say, "Wow, you don't look 150" like it's supposed to be a compliment. I'm about 5 feet, 6 inches, and I have naturally large thighs and glutes. So here's a clue: Not all women want to be lighter. It's not a compliment for you to say, "but you look so great!" I actually want to be heavier, maybe by about 10 pounds. I seriously want to make a T-shirt that says "Don't make me hit you with a clue stick."

I'm sure I'll comment more extensively about the gym, gender politics, and my general irritations with a gym environment, but that's all for now.

The CDC launched a campaign aimed at educating young men about sexual assault. (If you have trouble reading the article, go to bugmenot.com for a login.) One of the posters reads "So when she was too drunk to decide, I decided we shouldn't."

Obviously I like these. Whether they have the intended effect remains to be seen.

One thing I do know is that rapists and abusers only reform when their male peers disapprove of violence. So of course it's encouraging, but reducing sexual assualt and other violence is a complicated web of problems.

I'll be watching the case of Chai Suoa Vang, the Hmong immigrant who is accused of shooting six white hunters to death, with a great deal of interest. I am troubled by the fact that even though his trial was successfully moved to Madison, Wisc. the entire jury is white. Not only are Hmong in the minority in Minnesota (though there is a huge population of them there) there's a great deal of misunderstanding about these folk.

Call me cynical, but I'm willing to bet that there will be anti-Hmong demonstrations made outside the courtroom the minute that the trial begins.

How can people justify this?

I'm currently reading "Promises Betrayed: Waking up from the American Dream" by Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist. The reviews on this page are instructive, because they show how presumably "educated" people can be in denial of white privilege.

The reviewer "Mr. Truth" is especially blatant in his denial: "He describes a school in DC where the building is falling apart and never mentions that he is probably only writing about the school in failing condition because most or all of it's[sic] students and faculty are african-american! I think this particular school he wrote about is untypical[sic] of the rest of the USA ... I think the school Herbert wrote was just an untypical[sic] example of bad faculty or maybe bad city management on a higher level.

Wake up and smell the mocha, my friend. The school would be in much better condition if the school were primarily white. And don't go citing some stat about how some poor white folk in Appalachia have a horrible school system. Because obviously, they do. I'd bet even in the poorest parts of the country, the whites send their kids to one school and the blacks to another, and that there are still disparities there.

A little incoherence

I began to notice on oh, Tuesday, that the overwhelming majority of the people photographed as being stuck in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and its horrible aftermath were black.

I'm disappointed that I cannot find the "offending" picture and caption, in which an Agence-France Presse photographer wrote that a white family had "found" some food, while in almost every other caption, black families had "looted" food.

Protecting people who have little protection themselves is, at base, what I believe the job of the government is. The president would have you believe that that is the role of Christian organizations. (Let's get something clear — "faith-based programs" are really all Christian-based programs.) But they don't have the money, resources, power, and planning mechanisms to relieve suffering. For goodness sakes, the government wasn't even allowing the Red Cross into the center of New Orleans until yesterday.

Just a quick rant

I've been quite silent for some time, just absorbing the Katrina coverage. And I have to wonder: why was there a huge lack of response? Why was there no plan? Why, in a city that's 70 percent black and 20 percent below the poverty line, were folks told to just go to the Superdome and everything would be just fine? Why are black people being called looters and white people finders?