Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Culture
NEA Study Says Fewer Blacks and Latinos in Arts Classes and Events
010 months ago
According to Los Angeles Times, the National Endowment for the Arts has been compiling data since 1982 that suggests black and Latino young adult rates of arts attendance, for both art classes and art events, have declined far more than for whites.
An education study found that the percentage of blacks ages 18 to 24 who have taken at least one arts class during their life dropped from 51 percent in 1982 to 26 percent in 2008, while it went from 47 percent to 28 percent for Latinos. Whites experienced only a 2 percent drop, to 58 percent.
The study found that declines began with the generation that entered school in 1972, which coincides with reductions in school budgets.
The study’s findings also suggest arts education is another form of hereditary wealth. Among children of college graduates, the percentage that have taken at least one art class dropped from 88 percent in 1982 to 73 percent in 2008. For children of high school graduates, however, that figure dropped from 54 percent to 13 percent.
Another study on age and art-events attendance found the percentage of 18- to 29-year-olds in arts audiences fell from 33 percent in 1982 to 21 percent in 2008. But that change may be more about generational size than interests–the population of young folks today is comparatively smaller than their baby boomer parents. Mike Boehm of the LA Times explained that “using mathematical adjustments that accounted for
the difference in size between the generations, Stern found that the
decline was just 3% rather than 12%–a difference that’s ‘extremely
modest.’”
Still, the percentage of nonwhites, aged 18-24 who have attended at least one arts event fell from 38 percent to 25 percent during the 26 year period, while whites dropped 2 percent, from 44 percent to 42 percent. Examples of art events are “jazz, classical music, opera, musical or non-musical plays, dance or art museums.”
Of coures, communities of color do consume much art that is underground and not counted in studies like these. The legendary but soon-to-be-demolished Five Pointz street art cite in New York City, for instance, didn’t likely make the survey.
Gil Scott-Heron Hits A Nerve With New Video
01 year ago
In their new music video for “New York is Killing Me,” Gil Scott-Heron and director Chris Cunningham turn popular characterizations of the Big Apple completely on their heads. The video, which was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan last week, has one simple message: it can be a cold, brutal place. But as a legendary artist, Heron’s bitter break up letter with the city has prompted some of hip-hop’s leading players to openly challenge its evils.
In this case, it’s a matter of cleverly mixed mediums that get the message across. Heron’s raspy vocals blend well with Cunningham’s visuals of alternating shots of the city, all in constant, dizzying motion. Subway tunnels, bridges, extreme aerial long shots of the city cloaked in darkness create a menacing mood for viewers. They easily conjure up feelings of destitution and grittiness for a city that over the past twenty years has become largely represented as the entertainment capital of the world.
When I first heard the track, I immediately thought of all the other highly-touted New York anthems. There’s Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” and the recent Jay-Z-Alicia Keys collaboration “Empire State of Mind.” Those types of love letters contrast sharply with Heron’s gritty city journal. This is not a song about a glitz and glam New York whose “streets will inspire you.” According to Heron, it’s a lonely, cold, and bare city. For a die-hard New Yorker like myself, the song is a hard pill to swallow but once it goes down, it’s difficult not to sober up and realize how much this city’s inhabitants are hurting.
Of course, Heron knows a thing or two about overcoming struggles, and his words have inspired others.
Known best in the pop culture world for his spoken word poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” Heron has become a hip-hop favorite tempting emcees like Nas and Mos Def to provide their own remixes to ‘New York is Killing Me.” Here’s Nas’ second verse that provide less abstract thoughts of the once enamored city. Nas spits:
And the gangs in New York are like wolves in sheep clothing Navy men off the ships in sidewalks strolling Ladies watching shopping stressing hard With maxed out credit cards and her depressing job Grey skies, anekatips winter’s cold US Open Tennis, charity dinners for the rich and old Giving nothing to the poor to strengthen their soul I can see why some get up and go, and move where it’s slow
And there’s plenty of unsettling realities in New York.
According the daily report provided by the Department of Homeless Services, there are 35,490 reported homeless people that are living in a shelter. Taking the point even further, 14,193 of those are children. According to the Coalition for the Homeless, in the past decade the rate of homelessness has reached near-Great Depression levels. And these numbers don’t include the many folks who go unaccounted for while living on the streets or in subways.
If one thing’s certain, it’s that Gil Scott-Heron is still aptly reading the pulse of America.
Pocahontas Gets a Makeover in New Video Mash-Up
01 year ago
This is one dope mashup. Courtesy of Latoya Peterson over on Racialicious, here’s a clever splice of the classic Disney flick Pocahontas and Adriel Luis’ spoken word poem Slip of the Tongue.
We first spotted the mash-up on Sociological Images, where a student, Samantha Figueroa, did the editing for a class project. The task was to combine two loosely related art forms in order to produce an inspirational and critical piece.
Humorous, informative and fast-paced, the manipulated visuals compliment Luis’ poem so well that you sort of wished the actual Disney film was just as good.
The Names Will be Changed
01 year ago
When my very Norwegian mother was selling ads for the Chicago Daily News in the 1930’s, the company assigned her the name “Miss Kelly.” This was so that irate or flirtatious customers could not track her to her home address. How different from today when people will tell 350 million total strangers every bit of their so-called private lives on their Facebook pages!
Obviously there are sound commercial reasons for changing a name. Would you flaunt a polo shirt from Lifshitz? Fraydl and Frank Lifshitz were immigrants from Belarus and named their son Ralph Ruben Lifshitz. But he changed his name to Ralph Lauren to sell his wildly successful ultra-preppie clothing line emblazoned with polo ponies. According to Forbes, Ralph “Lauren” is the 224th richest man in the world worth $2.8 billion (tied with Georgio Armani, after Steven Spielberg and before Oprah Winfrey), so it was a very smart move.
Would earnest anti-war protesters want to hear from Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota? How about Bob Dylan from Greenwich Village? When his parents emigrated from Odessa in Russia, they were named Zimmerman, but as Bob “Dylan” he became the voice of a generation and won world-wide fame and fortune.
But sometimes there are more serious reasons for changing a name. When my best friend Barb was the manager of the cosmetics department in the glory days of Marshall Field’s department store, a tough part of her job was being the Rules Police for the 124 people who reported to her. This meant she had to write up employees for minor infractions of company policies like not wearing their name badge that would say “Miss Pierce.” In those days the sales associates were professionals and always referred to by their last names.
One day she saw one of her most reliable saleswomen who had replaced her badge that should have her last name (Silverman) with only her first name (Joyce), so Barb had to call her in to the office to review the rules. The saleswoman Joyce said someone had called her a name for being Jewish. She said “I don’t want my name in his mouth…on his tongue. I’m proud of my name but it shouldn’t be in his mouth.”
There was also a rule that everyone had to sign in by name and their employee number so that payroll could separate the people with the same names, like the three men named Mike Adams. She had a guy working in the stockroom who would never use his employee number. The policy said that she had to get him to use his number.
Barb recalls, “But when I called him in to talk about this, he showed me a number burned into his arm from a World War II Concentration Camp. He said he would no longer be a number.” She asked payroll to give him an exemption and they did. He didn’t have to sign in with his number like every other employee. In fact, they discovered they had four employees who had been in concentration camps, and granted all four survivors the right to skip the number at sign in.
The best sermon I ever heard was called “There are no secular jobs.” Pastor Steve Dahl, preaching at the Historic Methodist Campground of Des Plaines, said that although most people think that ministers and rabbis are the ones to care for people, actually every person in every job can help people get more peace in their lives. Because she was such a good listener, the lifelong Methodist Barb was able to comfort an employee who had been hurt by anti-Semitic remarks and to change the company policy for holocaust survivors. You might not think of the cosmetics counter as the place to do justice work, but why not? And why not where you work?
Joan Flanagan is the Fundraiser for the Center for New Community. Barbara Pierce was one of “Field’s Finest” employees from 1972 to 2007 and is now proud to be a monthly donor to the Center for New Community.
Exhibit Provides Opportunity to Understand Race
02 years ago
By Katie Irwin
A few months ago I came across an exhibit about race by the American Anthropological Association and the Science Museum of Minnesota. It explains the realities and myths surrounding race, and how the concept has evolved through time. The Association is encouraging people across America to discuss and examine their thoughts on race. The What is Race? exhibit shows how the concept of race has changed and is still changing, and it uses biology, culture and history to educate the public. From the exhibit’s website it states:
“Racial and ethnic categories, which have changed over time, are human-made. We now know that human beings are more alike genetically than any other living species. Scientifically, no one gene, or any set of genes, can support the idea of race.”
As an anthropology student, I discussed these issues regularly. Every week my peers and I would talk about the articles or books we were reading and our own experiences we had regarding racial issues. Hearing, talking and discussing events that my friends or I have witnessed and been involved in has been beneficial in understanding this ongoing issue. My professor would say that these conversations don’t happen in the real world, and generally they don’t. This exhibit can help change that.
Unfortunately, there are extreme groups that do not want discussions about race to happen and have attacked the exhibit. The Council for Conservative Citizens (CofCC), a known white supremacist organization posted the exhibit’s introductory video on its website and labeled it biased and pseudoscience.
What these extreme groups ignore is that anthropologists try hard not to let the values and normality of their upbringing interfere with their research; what is normal for one culture might be considered strange in another culture, so we spend years learning to minimize bias. I think their attacks come from a place of hatred, and wanting to uphold racial divisions in this country.
In fact, this exhibit is helping dispel the myths of past scientists, philosophers, explorers, etc. who were influenced by their Euro-centric backgrounds which have led to some of the most biased and false science and propaganda about the “inferiority” of non-white “races.” One of the best books I read on this subject was “Mismeasure of Man” by Stephen J. Gould; he writes about the theories devised in the 18th century, when Europeans used science to try and justify slavery, and did the experiments himself to prove the biased nature of them.
This exhibit is a wonderful start in learning about the issues, and I believe we should be discussing this subject to truly understand that race is a social, political, and historic concept.
Melancholy for the Holidays
02 years ago
Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year for a lot of people but also the most nostalgic, melancholic, and difficult for others. With a beer in his hand and a sad expression on his face, Juan, an immigrant worker from Honduras said, “Cuanto daría por estar con mi familia en estos días” (“How much I would give to be with my family on this day”). Unfortunately, those moments are not something that you can buy with money.
Holding their hopes of some day being able to be with their families were a lot of immigrant workers, mainly single or with spouses and kids in their home countries, gathered in houses or apartments to celebrate Christmas or the New Year in order to mitigate the effect of the nostalgia as result of family separation.
“Because the situation in our country is very bad — that’s why we are suffering here, but it is better suffering here alone, than being there suffering with the whole family without food on the table, I hope the New Year brings something better and God touches the hearts of those in the government to pass an immigration reform,” remarked Ramiro, an immigrant worker. He has his wife and two children in Guatemala and has been in the USA for four years.
Carlos, an immigrant from El Salvador, said “Christmas is the celebration of Jesus’s nativity, who gave His life for all of us in this world regardless of being white or black, tall or short, fat or skinny and brought us a message of peace and love. A lot of people celebrate Christmas but I guess they forgot the real meaning of Christmas because they don’t even want to let us drive to work or to the grocery stores to buy our food. They don’t give us a driver license, but they had their dinners with the turkeys and hams that we produce and process.”
These are just some of the comments that I heard over the end of the year’s holiday while spending some time with immigrant workers. I hope and pray that next year the workers in Missouri’s meat packing communities can celebrate a Christmas with more respect and safety.
MELANCOLIA
Lo que para muchos es la temporada más maravillosa del año, para otros es la temporada más difícil y llena de nostalgia y melancolía. Con una cerveza en la mano y una expresión triste en su rostro, Juan, un trabajador inmigrante, de Honduras exclamaba: “Cuanto daría por estar con mi familia en estos días”. Desafortunadamente esos momentos no tienen un valor monetario.
Manteniendo las esperanzas de algún día poder reunirse con sus familias, varios trabajadores inmigrantes, en su mayoría solteros o que tienen a sus esposas (os) o hijos en sus países; se reunieron en sus casas o apartamentos para celebrar la navidad y el año nuevo, para mitigar un poco la nostalgia que produce la soledad y la separación familiar. “Porque la situación en nuestros países esta demasiado mala por eso venimos a sufrir aquí, pero es mejor estar aquí sufriendo solo que estar ayá sufriendo con toda la familia sin tener comida en la mesa, espero que el año nuevo traiga cosas mejores y que Dios toque los corazones de los que están en el gobierno para que pasen un reforma migratoria” expresó Ramiro un trabajador inmigrante quien tiene a su esposa y dos hijos en Guatemala y ha estado en los Estados Unidos por 4 años. Carlos un inmigrante Salvadoreño comento lo siguiente: “La Navidad es la celebración del nacimiento de Jesus quien di su vida por todos nosotros en este mundo sin importar que seamos blancos o negros, altos o bajos gordos o flacos y nos trajo un mensaje de paz y amor, muchas personas celebran la Navidad pero creo que se han olvidado del verdadero significado porque no quieren que manejemos a nuestros trabajos o a la tienda a comprar nuestra comida, no nos dan una licencia de manejo pero ellos en sus cenas sirvieron Pavo y Jamón que nosotros producimos y procesamos.
Estos son solo algunos de los comentarios que pude escuchar mientras pasaba un poco de tiempo con trabajadores inmigrantes durante las festividades de fin de año.