Category: Racism

The Post-Election Surge in Hate Crimes and How it Differs From Past Surges

Many across the United States have been victims of or witness to election-related hate crimes or hateful incidents since Donald Trump became the apparent president-elect on November 8, 2016. Numerous media outlets reported incidents in which perpetrators invoked Trump’s name or referenced policy positions and stances of his, as they verbally or physically assaulted victims targeted for their race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, religion, or presumed national origin. Simultaneously, social media has been awash in first-hand accounts of such events.

Hardly isolated or rare, these events are evidence of a significant surge in hate crimes and hate-related incidents, according to Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a legal research and activist organization. In a report published on November 29, SPLC reported that it had documented 867 hate incidents that occurred in the 10 days following the election. However, it’s likely that figure could be much higher since the majority of hate crimes go unreported.

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How Race, Gender, Class and Education Influenced the Presidential Election

On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump won the election for President of the United States, despite the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. For many social scientists, pollsters, and voters Trump’s win came as a shock. The number one trusted political data website FiveThirtyEight gave Trump less than a 30 percent chance of winning on the eve of the election. So how did he win? Who came out for the controversial Republican candidate?

In this slideshow, we take a look at the demographics behind Trump’s win using exit poll data from CNN, which draws on survey insights from 24,537 voters from across the nation to illustrate trends within the electorate.

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Who are Trump supporters? Get the demographics here.

Which Social and Economic Trends Are Behind Trump’s Popularity?

Survey data collected throughout the 2016 presidential primary season reveal clear demographic trends among supporters of Donald Trump. They are composed of more men than women, skew older, have low levels of formal education, are at the lower ends of the economic stratum, and are predominantly white.

You can read more about the data behind these trends here in our in-depth coverage, but in this post, we take a close look at the social and economic trends that have changed American society since the 1960s, and consider how they worked together to create this particular political base that has come together in support of Trump.

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The water crisis in Flint is not an isolated incident: poor communities and those composed of people of color are facing environmental crises across the nation.

Beyond Flint: What You Need to Know About Toxic Communities

In January 2016 attention across the U.S. turned to Flint, Michigan, a poor, majority-minority community that has been poisoned by toxic drinking water polluted with lead. This tragedy of structural inequality resonates with many who study environmental inequality as an example of how poor communities and those that are majority non-white experience disproportionate levels of dangerous toxic pollution. But to date evidence to support this trend has been mostly anecdotal and small-scale in nature.

A new study that relies on big data to test this claim has revealed it to be true. The study, titled “Linking ‘toxic outliers’ to environmental justice communities,” and published in Environmental Research Letters in January 2016, found that across the U.S., the worst toxic polluters are mostly located in communities experiencing significant structural oppression–those that are primarily poor, and those composed of people of color.

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Learn how pride in ethnic heritage and ethnic studies courses can improve student performance.

Why Ethnic Studies Classes Improve Performance of At-Risk Students

For decades, teachers, parents, counselors, and activists have struggled to figure out how to raise the academic performance of high school students at risk of failing or dropping out, many of whom are Black, Latino, and Hispanic students in inner-city schools across the nation. In many school districts, emphasis has been placed on preparation for standardized tests, tutoring, and on discipline and punishment, but none of these methods seem to work.

A new study by education experts at Stanford University offers a simple solution to this problem: include ethnic studies courses in educational curricula. The study, published by The National Bureau of Economic Research in January, 2016, reports results from research into the effect of ethnic studies courses on student performance in San Francisco schools participating in a pilot ethnic studies program. The researchers, Drs. Thomas Dee and Emily Penner, compared academic performance and engagement between students enrolled in an ethnic studies course and those not, and found a clear and strong causal effect between ethnic studies courses and academic improvement.

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Why Feminists Are Fighting About Rihanna’s New Video

The internet is buzzing about the controversial video for Rihanna’s hit song “Bitch Better Have My Money” (BBHMM). The video has been viewed over 19 million times after just eight days online, and has boosted sales of the digital single, bringing the tally to 735,000 since its debut on March 26, 2015. The popularity of the video has even been credited with a spike in streaming of the single, which lifted the track to the number 15 spot on the Billboard Top 100 list during the second week of July.

But not all of the attention is praise. Some journalists and bloggers, who identify as feminists, have slammed the video for its theme of violence, especially that directed at a kidnapped woman who appears nude through much of the seven-minute long video.

Nine Things You Can Do to Help End Racism

 

If you are anything like me, the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri—the killing of an unarmed black teen, followed by the terrorization of a community by a combat-ready and brutal police force—have alarmed, angered, frustrated, and saddened you. You might feel overwhelmed by the destructive power of racism, and unsure of what to do about it. Depression and the desire to look away and disconnect might set in. Trouble is, that’s a big part of the problem: white people like me have the option to look away while our fellow citizens die in the streets.

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The Sociology of White Male Shooters

Originally published on About.com

“Sick,” “twisted,” “disturbed,” “psychotic,” “mentally ill,” “psychopath,” “acted alone.” These words are familiar to anyone who pays attention to news accounts of mass shootings carried out by white males over the last three decades. Trouble is, none of these guys–Eliot Rodger, Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Jared Loughner, Anders Breivik in Norway, among others–really acted alone. While news accounts typically frame mass shootings by white males as the work of deranged individuals, the actions of these men and boys are expressive of widely held patriarchal and white supremacist beliefs. They are the manifestation of a sick society.

The shooters who have left digital trails have made it clear that their actions were prompted by their perceived loss of power and status in society. They are slighted by women who do not obey them and their desires, by people of color and queer folks who have fought for, earned, and defend their civil rights, and by a society that doesn’t afford them the respect they believe they deserve by virtue of their maleness. They are the product of a changed and ever-changing social context in which historic forms of power and domination are being slowly but loudly destabilized, and of a society that socializes them to believe that this is wrong, and that they deserve to be in positions of power.

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