On Katrina

http://www.snopes.com/katrina/photos/looters.asp

I think this basically says all that is necessary about Katrina and African Americans. While I think it is unrealistic to expect massive amounts of community-level organization in preparation for disasters that may or may not ever happen, I think it's important for people to participate at these levels.

And anyway, I think it's possible that this may more accurately depict Katrina for most Americans: http://www.snopes.com/katrina/photos/disaster.asp

African american-ness

Before reading this chapter, I thought this debate was just a pointless semantic exercise that was not really worth addressing. Now that I have a bit more perspective, I can see that there is definitely more to it. The point of self-naming and racial identification is empowerment, and names have a historical link to oppression as well. I'm reminded of Roots...

For the most part, I think any questions about Barack's heritage are bullshit brought up to stir rancor or try attempt to satisfy the media's constant thirst for controversy. It seems to me that a news anchor who spends fifty percent of their time covering celebrities and the other half violent crimes is not likely to be talking about a person's African American heritage in order to explicate the intricacies of identity with the two identities implied.

The "Obama Watch"

Though it is painful to see how superficial and nitpicking most of the coverage of the Obamas as a family has been, I think the obvious conclusion, that they are functional and loving and normal, is something that much of america needs to see. I've talked earlier about how the simple example of a black political family not fulfilling any negative stereotypes and really succeeding is something that will make the country less racist just because the image is now ingrained into the public consciousness. I also think Obama's victory in the 2012 election is all but assured because this image will stick in peoples minds. Despite all the talk on the AM dial and in email forwards about the antichrist or secret muslim leanings, Obama will gain simply because these wild accusations will hold even less water than they did before.

Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the spectrum among blacks who did vote for Obama and among people who can now look up to his family as role models, I think it is absolutely groundbreaking that there is now -finally- a positive black public figure that did not come out of sports or entertainment.

The White Mainstream

An unfortunate relic of our evolutionary past is our propensity to characterize and type every person we see. People are pattern-seeking, and stereotypes were a useful tool for the nomadic people of the plains. They hadn't the time to really get to know the animal before they decided it was dangerous or edible. Suspicion is an instinct that was selected through evolution and is ingrained within people.

The White Mainstream is a series of goals that most white parents attempt to instill in their children. Suburban lifestyle, middle-class existence.

Myself

I'm a 23 year-old english major with authority issues, anxiety issues, and I am in this class to pick up an ECCE requirement. I've actually had a previous African American studies class called African American Women's literature. My career goals are actually in the medical field, so my coursework is split between chemistry and english, which actually works out much better for me as I am an extremely slow and deliberate writer who has a lot of problems hitting deadlines and producing.

I'm applying for medical school next april, fulfilling a dream that started a few years back when I dropped out of SIUE. I attended college after my high school graduation, but I never really got a real direction and should have probably never gone. I attended under many false assumptions, including the assumption that I would "find" a direction, and it wasn't until I had worked and lived on my own that I realized that college requires  commitment and the thing that you find isn't direction but the ability to work and live in spite of that lack. Life's a sandbox, as they say.

More on Obama's win

Nate Silver, an esteemed baseball statistician turned esteemed political statistician has done a ton of work on the 2008 election results. He recently did a presentation at TED where he talked about racism in the election. While he himself actually predicted that racism would be a non-factor in the election (whether he simply discounted the magnitude of its effect or had some other reasoning is unclear) he has also done retrospective analysis on exit polling data. His analysis took into account voters who actually told pollsters that race did factor into their decision  not to vote for Barack Obama, and his conclusion was that racism is predictable and treatable-in his words "solvable" just like any other problem.

In addition, in his conclusion he talks about Obama becoming even more electable in 2012 because the simple presence of an African-American president whose election did not destroy the country should make people less racist. Naturally he won't have the numbers to back it up for a few years.

www.fivethirtyeight.com

Electoral Politics and Party Identity and Ingroup Morality

Moral Foundation theory deals with inborn centers of morality in order to find commonalities between people of different cultures. There are five delineated areas of morality highlighted by this analysis and they are Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, In-group/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. These are universal, however what is found in research is that different cultures value them with different magnitudes. So, for instance (and this is a made up example), Japanese culture values loyalty most highly, whereas the culture of the United States values harm most highly, so people within the two are likely to behave differently overall.

In actuality, most cultures value Harm and Fairness highest above all others. An analysis of these traits was done on the two political parties in the US, and it found that while both parties value harm and fairness highly, democrats give much lower values to authority, in-group loyalty, and purity. This is consistent with the idea that democrats are more diverse, and that they are more socially liberal.

Other analyses have been done that find interesting results such as a split among democrats between Clinton and Obama that correlates to emphasis on loyalty=Clinton, whereas emphasis on fairness=Obama.

While either party can be seen as ascending or descending in relevance at any time, it seems quite unlikely that the democrats are more likely to fracture than the republicans.