Class 2: Race, Class, & Fullilove
September 3, 2009
First, recapping last week
• CI: the study or practice regarding the continuity of
local, historical communities meeting the transformation
of information technologies
• Libraries by reinventing themselves (I&R, job centers,
OPACs) invented community networks (made of siliconplus-carbon)
• From social informatics comes three key ideas: network
society, hacker ethic, and digital divide
…the LOCAL community is the central focus here
GSLIS 590CO and GSLIS 590COL:
Let’s locate our communities
Small group & big group discussions
• Race: three huddles
• Class: let’s consider the newest ideas
• Fullilove: student-led discussion
Talk amongst yourselves (1)
Define the word race.
How many are there?
How do you know?
So what?
Two kinds of arguments for race:
Phenotype and genotype
• Phenotype
– What the bones say
• Remains indicate we are all Africans
– What we think we see
• Skin is only skin-deep (same as hair, eyes, etc) and
not associated with any other traits (intelligence, strength, diseases)
• The Mismeasure of Man (Gould): no differences in brain size
• Genotype
– At least 85% of human genetic variation is within group
– While we are 99.9% the same, there is no single trait that
every X person has
Migration, thus
homogeneity
100 years, 5 generations, 32 ancestors…
1000 years, 50 generations, 1015 ancestors
Do you know who yours were?
See the
handout
from PBS’s
Race: the
Power of
an Illusion
Talk amongst yourselves (2)
Define the word race.
How do you know?
Why does it matter?
The US Census has tried hard with race…
1850 “Under heading 5, entitled Color, insert, in all
cases, when a slave is Black the letter B; when he
or she is mulatto, insert M. The color of all slaves
should be noted.”
1870 “Be particularly careful in reporting the class
Mulatto. The word is here generic and includes
quadroons, octoroons, and all persons having any
perceptible trace of African blood.”
1890 “Be particularly careful to distinguish between
blacks, mulattos, quadroons, and octoroons.”
“Race” in 2000...
…and 2010.
What does this indicate?
The dominant western intellectual
tradition, racist to the core with a few
notable exceptions
“At some future period,
not very distant as
measured by centuries, the
civilized races of man will
almost certainly
exterminate, and replace,
the savage races
throughout the world.”
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save
or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do
it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by
freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”
Tuskegee Institute recorded
3700+ lynchings from 1882-1968
Ida B. Wells,
newspaperwoman
and anti-lynching
campaigner
The one drop rule:
“One drop of Black blood makes you Black”
“As the European war scene became more violent and
the need for blood plasma intensified, Drew, as the
leading authority in the field, was selected as the full-time
medical director of the Blood for Britain project. He
supervised the successful collection of 14,500 pints of vital
plasma for the British. In February 1941, Drew was
appointed director of the first American Red Cross Blood
Bank, in charge of blood for use by the U.S. Army and
Navy. During this time, Drew agitated the authorities to
stop excluding the blood of African-Americans from
plasma-supply networks, and in 1942, he resigned his
official posts after the armed forces ruled that the blood
of African-Americans would be accepted but would have
to be stored separately from that of whites.”
Charles Drew
1904-1950
In 1982-83, Susie Guillory Phipps unsuccessfully sued the Louisiana Bureau
of Vital Records to change her racial classification from black to white.
“Race,” the social construction of a lie.
How do they pull this off in plain view?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
The dominant ideology – the “big” lie
Laws – the backing of government
The census – social science
Language – public opinion
Culture – cultural values and morality
Talk amongst yourselves (3)
“Most of the benefits [of white privilege]
can be obtained without ever doing anything
personally. For whites, they are getting the
spoils of a racist system, even if they are not
personally racist.”—john a. powell
What does this mean?
What can we/our profession do about it?
Class: Community informatics
research is teaching us about this
Jack Linchuan Qiu, Working Class
Information Society (2009)
Class 2: Race, Class, & Fullilove
September 3, 2009
Class 2: “Race,” Class, & History
September 3, 2009