Studying Culture
Wow - can't believe it's been a week since I posted. It's been crazy.
Spent the weekend going back and forth on email with my daughter, helping her answer some questions for her final in cultural studies, so thought I'd share them and see what others had to say.
1. Is the concept of race becoming more or less important in culture and society? Response is to include examples of identity, politics, economics, and enterprise culture, and the media which could include type,TV, internet, music, etc.
If you look at the importance of race in the context of all the examples posed, then I would have to say that race is indeed becoming more important in culture and society. Taken merely from the viewpoint of how marketing is done in the culture, racial identities are an important and growing trend in demographic representations of markets for all kinds of media (music, literature, internet websites, tv programming) all aimed at niche markets. We see very targeted advertising, web sites, tv shows, musical genres, magazine genres and such all aimed at black, hispanic and other cultural and racial identities. We also see very targeted attempts, even in the world of commerce and economics to create a race-based approach to creating communities of wealth. Robert Johnson, the former head of BET (Black Entertainment Television) is now creating an entity called Urban Trust, which is a banking model aimed at the black community, attempting to concentrate growing black middle class money into black ventures, as well as taking into account a purely race-based view of how loans are given out, taking into account circumstances that may be different than broader white establishments are willing to consider.
Within the realm of politics, we have racially based organizations, even within Congress, like the Black Congressional Caucas, the Hispanic Caucas - and then outside the purely political arena, though attempting to influence it are long time organizations like the NAACP and CORE in the black community and ? in the Hispanic community. We also see both political parties putting more money and resources into trying to either maintain traditional bases within race-based portions of the electorate (the democrats) or attempting to make inroads into these portions of the electorate by reframing economic and cultural questions and questioning whether the current alignments are serving minority (race-based) voters (the republicans).
So, can we look at these trends in light of overall racial identity?
Plato famously divided the soul into three parts: reason, eros (desire) and thymos (the hunger for recognition). It is probably the third part of this equation, or thymotics, as one place to start looking at the question of identity in general and how it affects racial identity, whether that be minority race identity or the majority cultural identity. Recognition is a key human element.
Whether it be success or wealth, it can identify a person and their relationship to the world. We see in many arenas how this can contribute to racial identity, whether it be the trend towards violence in the sports arena, where it is too often perceived as a lack or respect or recognition
that leads to trash talking on the one hand and the identity associated with the merchandising of athletes on the other. This creates some interesting situations where we see semi-illiterate members of one race (white fans) glorifying members of another race (black and latino athletes) by wearing paraphenalia and cheering them on the field of battle while decrying the loss of jobs at home within their own narrowly race-based communities.
Unfortunately, you can also see this in the sub-cultures of gang, street and prison life, where race is everything and the separation of races leads to gang warfare and race-oriented associations like the Aryan Brotherhood, La Familia and other organizations.
This has also played itself out in the recent brouhaha over the purchase of port operations by an Arab owned company from Dubai. While attempting to portray ourselves as a homogenous society, open to all races, the xenophobic tendencies of the political arena called into question our recognition of the Arab race as capable of being responsible enough to work within our culture and society to protect it, thus creating a situation where a society supposedly blind to race (highly questionable) has made one race an example of untrustworthiness for inclusion into our broader society.
Culturally and societally this is playing itself out in many countries, from the racial and religious tensions between Muslims and secular society in France and other European countries to the response to Danish cartoons in the Muslim world, which is portraying Danes (and Europeans) as racist, as well as insulting to their religious beliefs.
It's playing out in Africa with the current situations in Darfur (Sudan) and Chad, where Arabs are supporting genocide on Black Muslim tribes because of the color of their skin, as well as in Zimbabwe where white farmers have been thrown off their land in favor of black farmers in the name of rectfying past colonial inequities.
All of this is to say that race wants to be recognized. The failure of some races to recognize others and to treat them with equal respect and dignity has been going on throughout history and we have not yet reached a place where race is blind or unimportant, despite some trends
generationally where we see increased interracial relationships and much more of a mixing of racial ideas and genres to create a broader context for the discussion of race. These are good and important trends, but they have not subsumed the need for racial recognition within various components of culture and society, whether it be white, black, asian, latin or arabic.
Race can be a positive aspect of cultural, societal and community life, and does seem to be very important within race-based communities. The question is, does this serve society or the broader global culture as well as it could. From all appearances, this seems to raise as many
questions for society as it answers, and we continue to struggle with it culturally all the more as races cross borders and attempt to assimilate themselves into more established (racially
societies, forcing them back into their own race-based communities and cultures when broader society is less than inclusive.
ok - so this is my argument and thinking.
I could probably make arguments for race being less important as well, but it would likely be narrower based on where I live and the culture of the Bay Area. There are a lot of things going on culturally in some areas where things like black music are being co-opted by white society and accepted (eg - the rap group that won the Academy Award for the song "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp") and cross-over things in fashion where Snoop-Dog is dressing white teenagers and Tommy Hilfiger is dressing black teenagers. But overall, I think we still have issues with race
and that it tends to have more negative influence on society than positive at this point.
Spent the weekend going back and forth on email with my daughter, helping her answer some questions for her final in cultural studies, so thought I'd share them and see what others had to say.
1. Is the concept of race becoming more or less important in culture and society? Response is to include examples of identity, politics, economics, and enterprise culture, and the media which could include type,TV, internet, music, etc.
If you look at the importance of race in the context of all the examples posed, then I would have to say that race is indeed becoming more important in culture and society. Taken merely from the viewpoint of how marketing is done in the culture, racial identities are an important and growing trend in demographic representations of markets for all kinds of media (music, literature, internet websites, tv programming) all aimed at niche markets. We see very targeted advertising, web sites, tv shows, musical genres, magazine genres and such all aimed at black, hispanic and other cultural and racial identities. We also see very targeted attempts, even in the world of commerce and economics to create a race-based approach to creating communities of wealth. Robert Johnson, the former head of BET (Black Entertainment Television) is now creating an entity called Urban Trust, which is a banking model aimed at the black community, attempting to concentrate growing black middle class money into black ventures, as well as taking into account a purely race-based view of how loans are given out, taking into account circumstances that may be different than broader white establishments are willing to consider.
Within the realm of politics, we have racially based organizations, even within Congress, like the Black Congressional Caucas, the Hispanic Caucas - and then outside the purely political arena, though attempting to influence it are long time organizations like the NAACP and CORE in the black community and ? in the Hispanic community. We also see both political parties putting more money and resources into trying to either maintain traditional bases within race-based portions of the electorate (the democrats) or attempting to make inroads into these portions of the electorate by reframing economic and cultural questions and questioning whether the current alignments are serving minority (race-based) voters (the republicans).
So, can we look at these trends in light of overall racial identity?
Plato famously divided the soul into three parts: reason, eros (desire) and thymos (the hunger for recognition). It is probably the third part of this equation, or thymotics, as one place to start looking at the question of identity in general and how it affects racial identity, whether that be minority race identity or the majority cultural identity. Recognition is a key human element.
Whether it be success or wealth, it can identify a person and their relationship to the world. We see in many arenas how this can contribute to racial identity, whether it be the trend towards violence in the sports arena, where it is too often perceived as a lack or respect or recognition
that leads to trash talking on the one hand and the identity associated with the merchandising of athletes on the other. This creates some interesting situations where we see semi-illiterate members of one race (white fans) glorifying members of another race (black and latino athletes) by wearing paraphenalia and cheering them on the field of battle while decrying the loss of jobs at home within their own narrowly race-based communities.
Unfortunately, you can also see this in the sub-cultures of gang, street and prison life, where race is everything and the separation of races leads to gang warfare and race-oriented associations like the Aryan Brotherhood, La Familia and other organizations.
This has also played itself out in the recent brouhaha over the purchase of port operations by an Arab owned company from Dubai. While attempting to portray ourselves as a homogenous society, open to all races, the xenophobic tendencies of the political arena called into question our recognition of the Arab race as capable of being responsible enough to work within our culture and society to protect it, thus creating a situation where a society supposedly blind to race (highly questionable) has made one race an example of untrustworthiness for inclusion into our broader society.
Culturally and societally this is playing itself out in many countries, from the racial and religious tensions between Muslims and secular society in France and other European countries to the response to Danish cartoons in the Muslim world, which is portraying Danes (and Europeans) as racist, as well as insulting to their religious beliefs.
It's playing out in Africa with the current situations in Darfur (Sudan) and Chad, where Arabs are supporting genocide on Black Muslim tribes because of the color of their skin, as well as in Zimbabwe where white farmers have been thrown off their land in favor of black farmers in the name of rectfying past colonial inequities.
All of this is to say that race wants to be recognized. The failure of some races to recognize others and to treat them with equal respect and dignity has been going on throughout history and we have not yet reached a place where race is blind or unimportant, despite some trends
generationally where we see increased interracial relationships and much more of a mixing of racial ideas and genres to create a broader context for the discussion of race. These are good and important trends, but they have not subsumed the need for racial recognition within various components of culture and society, whether it be white, black, asian, latin or arabic.
Race can be a positive aspect of cultural, societal and community life, and does seem to be very important within race-based communities. The question is, does this serve society or the broader global culture as well as it could. From all appearances, this seems to raise as many
questions for society as it answers, and we continue to struggle with it culturally all the more as races cross borders and attempt to assimilate themselves into more established (racially
societies, forcing them back into their own race-based communities and cultures when broader society is less than inclusive.
ok - so this is my argument and thinking.
I could probably make arguments for race being less important as well, but it would likely be narrower based on where I live and the culture of the Bay Area. There are a lot of things going on culturally in some areas where things like black music are being co-opted by white society and accepted (eg - the rap group that won the Academy Award for the song "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp") and cross-over things in fashion where Snoop-Dog is dressing white teenagers and Tommy Hilfiger is dressing black teenagers. But overall, I think we still have issues with race
and that it tends to have more negative influence on society than positive at this point.
posted by Paul Salinger at 11:37 AM
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