iotic

recumbentgoat, posting in debunkingwhite @ 12:13am: When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"?
This is another review of Avatar that's been making the rounds and I thought it'd be great to post here, it's from io9, there are good pics and links on the original post, but i though i'd c&p the whole thing anyway:

By Annalee Newitz

Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers...

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

( Read more... )

**I guess there are no tags for this? If this review has already been discussed, i'll delete. thanks**

djeannot, posting in debunkingwhite @ 11:53pm: A rather sad development this holiday season
Black Jesus nativity scene in Verona, Italy angers 'White Christmas' Northern League party

BY NEIL NAGRAJ
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

A handful of bigots literally dreaming of a "White Christmas" are kicking up a row over a nativity scene that depicts a dark-skinned Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
( Read more... )

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2009/12/15/2009-12-15_black_jesus_nativity_scene_in_verona_italy_angers_white_christmas_northern_leagu.html#ixzz0aOASzvPc

I'm inclined to agree with Mr. Schinaia, that "History teaches us that baby Jesus and his parents were very probably dark-skinned," Schinaia told Reuters. "This nativity belongs to a universal Christmas tradition that brings together the whole of Christianity in celebration."

egretplume, posting in debunkingwhite @ 12:26am: possibly useful article: definitions of white ally
I came across this definition of a non-Native ally in a scholarly article from 1994 by Sam McKegney of Queens University in Canada. The article is about non-Native people studying and teaching Native American literature, but I thought the definition had wider implications and connections to discussions of being a white ally that have taken place in this community. Here is the definition: -- Silence -- just not saying anything -- Self-analysis -- focusing on one's own (white) self-consciousness about race -- Engaging in discussions only with other white people -- Qualifying and diminishing all one's statements until basically you haven't said anything The citation for the article is: McKegney, Sam. "Strategies for Ethical Engagement: An Open Letter Concerning Non-Native Scholars of Native Literatures." SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures. Series 2. 6.1(Spring 1994): 56-67. The article is from a special issue of SAIL focused on feminist and post-colonial approaches. You can find the entire article online here, but only as part of a big HTML file that includes the entire journal issue, so you have to scroll down for it. For those interested, SAIL has most of its back issues available free online here.

sanguinity, posting in debunkingwhite @ 7:56am: Perception of Biracial Candidates' Skin Tone
Via Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science: How light or dark is Barack Obama's skin? It depends on your political stance..., a summary of a recent study, "Political partisanship influences perception of biracial candidates' skin tone" (pdf).

From Ed Yong's writeup:

...a fascinating new study suggest that people literally change the way they see a mixed-race politician, depending on whether the candidate represents their own political views.

Liberal American students tend to think that lighter photos of Barack Obama are more typical of him, while conservatives think he's best represented by darker photos. You can see this effect even after adjusting for any racial prejudices, be they hidden or overt, and even with a person less famous than Obama. And regardless of political views, people who associated Obama with lightened photos were most likely to vote for him.

Eugene Caruso from the University of Chicago, who led the study, thinks that this effect is the result of two biases: the positive associations of white and lightness among some Western cultures; and the tendency to view people of the same group (political or otherwise) more favourably than those of another group. He says, "Group membership provides a lens through which people generate representations of reality."

A brief rundown of the experiment: ( methods, controls )

For both Obama and the fictitious mixed-race politician, subjects who shared the candidate's policies were more likely, by a two-to-one ratio, to pick the photo with lightened skin tone; students who disagreed with the candidate's policies were more likely to pick the darkened skin tone, also by a two-to-one ratio. This effect persisted even when subjects were controlled for conscious and subconscious racial prejudices. Agreement/disagreement with McCain's policies had no effect on preference for lightened or darkened photos of McCain.

In another part of the study, preference for lightened or darkened photos was shown to correlate with how people voted in the Obama/McCain presidential election. From the study itself (emphasis mine):

...the more participants saw a lightened photograph as representative of Obama, the more likely it was that they reported having actually voted for him in the election. No other effects or interactions were significant. Thus, the degree to which participants saw a lightened photograph of Obama as representative of him was significantly related to reported voting behavior one week later, even after controlling for political orientation, explicit prejudice, and implicit prejudice. These results refute the alternative explanation that biased perceptions of skin tone are solely the result of prejudicial attitudes.

The authors are using "prejudicial attitudes" differently than I would, because there's obviously prejudicial stuff going on here. But the prejudice isn't "I think white people are better than black people" (neither consciously nor subconsciously, because they surveyed for those attitudes, and those attitudes didn't explain the effect). Instead, the prejudice is about colorism and appears to be about how "us" and "them" is defined. Even when the (mostly white) students in this study didn't think of white people as being better than black people, they still mapped lighter and darker skin tones on black people to "people who agree with me" and "people who don't agree with me."

This study couldn't determine causal effects -- i.e., whether this observed colorism as perpetrated by white people makes election easier for lighter-skinned people of color and harder for darker-skinned people of color -- but they did explicitly mention that most black politicians are light-skinned.