Race Relations

"Modern Family" star Sofia Vergara remarked during a recent interview that she doesn't take issue with racial stereotypes. Her character Gloria on the show has often been criticized for fueling Latina stereotypes that create the impression that Hispanic women are overwhelmingly loud, crazy and melodramatic, to name few.

"I don't know why people think stereotypes are so terrible," she told TheWrap.com. "I am Gloria, my mother is Gloria, my aunts are Gloria. ...It might be a stereotype, but I think the character is fantastic. She's colorful, she's honest, she's out there, she cares about people. She's loud, but I am loud. She's crazy, but I am crazy. It's not a problem." Read More...

It's no secret in the golf world that Tiger Woods and Sergio Garcia have never been friends. But the men's adversarial relationship took a racially tinged turn on Tuesday when Garcia, a Spaniard, quipped that he would serve fried chicken if he and Woods dined together at the U.S. Open. After public outcry, Garcia predictably apologized. He tried to pass the comment off a "silly remark" and said that it "in no way was the comment meant in a racist manner." If that were true, however, why didn't Garcia suggest that the two have steak or pizza or fish or any number of other foods unassociated with racial stereotypes. Garcia wasn't simply trying to be silly he was trying to perpetuate myths about black people by telling a tired racist joke.

"The comment that was made wasn't silly. It was wrong, hurtful and clearly inappropriate," Woods stated via Twitter after Garcia's remarks were widely publicized. "I'm confident that there is real regret that the remark was made." Read More...

Jason Richwine's 2009 doctoral dissertation about Hispanic immigrants and IQ has been headline fodder for two weeks now. That's because conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, where Richwine worked as an analyst, recently slammed the Senate's proposed immigration bill as a financial disaster in the making. Because Richwine's dissertation posited that Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. have lower IQs than white natives, critics have accused Richwine and, by extension, the Heritage Foundation of opposing immigration reform due to racism. Moreover Harvard University, where Richwine presented his dissertation, has come under fire for not rejecting his argument as drivel rooted in racist pseudo science. In fact more than 1,200 Harvard students have urged the Ivy League university to repudiate the dissertation, according to the Boston Globe.

Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argued Wednesday that repudiating the dissertation would represent a violation of academic freedom, while Zack Beauchamp of Think Progress argues that Richwine's dissertation indeed lacked merit. Jacoby says that Richwine's critics don't care that "nothing in that dissertation expressed the slightest racial animosity, or that Richwine's data appeared unassailable, or that his former Harvard faculty advisers confirmed that he was a careful and honest researcher." How does arguing that one group of people is intellectually inferior to another group of people not constitute racial animosity? Furthermore, Richwine's dissertation is strongly problematic because it fails to capture exactly who Hispanics are. As Beauchamp pointed out: Read More...

Is it possible to determine the world's most racist countries through a single poll? Not likely. But the World Values Survey set out to do just that by asking citizens of more than 80 different nations to "identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors," the Washington Post reports. Race was among a list of qualities respondents could choose from to rule out people as neighbors.

"The more frequently that people in a given country say they don't want neighbors from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society," according to the Post. So which countries topped the list of world's most racist societies? India, Jordan, Bangladesh and Hong Kong turned out to be the least racially tolerant nations on Earth, according to the survey results. Read More...

The problem with white America, according to attorney Dawn Cutaia, is that "we are racist and we don't even know it." Cutaia, who's white herself, says in an opinion piece for the York Daily Record that many whites have the impression that they have to belong to the KKK to be racist. By denying the prevalence of racism, however, whites have done a disservice to America, Cutaia asserts.

"Slavery may have been outlawed 150 years ago, but the Civil Rights Movement was less than 50 years ago," Cutaia points out. "Fifty years ago blacks were still sitting in the back of the bus, drinking out of separate water fountains, being sprayed by fire hoses for peacefully protesting, and living in extreme poverty with substandard education." Read More...

An Arizona high school is in hot water after celebrating "Redneck Day" last week to stir up school spirit before prom. Students at Queen Creek High School in Maricopa County were encouraged to dress up as "rednecks" like the people featured on the reality program "Duck Dynasty," which chronicles a Louisiana family who cashed in on a duck-call hunting product called the Duck Commander.

Queen Creek High has not only faced criticism for indulging racial stereotypes about rural whites but also because a  student showed up to "Redneck Day" adorned in the Confederate Flag, a symbol that many African Americans associate with a pro-slavery agenda. Read More...

At the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday, President Barack Obama did not shy away from the xenophobic and Islamophobic smear campaigns that have dogged him throughout his presidency. Using humor, he took aim at the detractors who have accused him of being a Muslim born outside of the United States. The president also discussed the Republican Party's lackluster attempts to win over racial minority groups.

"These days, I look in the mirror and I have to admit--I'm not the strapping young Muslim socialist I used to be," Obama joked. Read More...

As Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" has pointed out, some of the media coverage following the bombing of the Boston Marathon on Monday has proven to be downright abysmal. It's not only that major news outlets have reported false information related to the bombing but also that some of this false information has had a racist and xenophobic streak that's impacted anyone who's watched television coverage of the event or read about it on or offline.

For one, news outlets such as the Daily Mail reported that those responsible for the bombing were "dark skinned." Others implicated a Saudi national in the bombing, and papers such as the New York Post featured an image of a young Moroccan-American and his coach on its cover, calling them "bag men." Turns out that was absolutely false. The feds were not in fact looking for these two males, but the damage has already been done. The high school student has had to defend himself against the media's reports and may live the rest of his life under a cloud of suspicion, as news outlets have distributed his image all over the world.  In addition to this, hate crimes have already occurred due to conjecture both in and out of the media that brown people carried out the Boston Marathon attack. Read More...

To say that Brad Paisley's new single "Accidental Racist" has sparked controversy would be an understatement. News outlets as diverse as NPR, CNN, The Atlantic and the Christian Science Monitor have been picked apart the song's lyrics. Critics such as The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates argue that the "Accidental Racist" is plain racist. I don't know if I would go that far, but I certainly find the song problematic because it simplifies U.S. history and the racism that characterized that history. In the song, which features rapper-actor LL Cool J, Paisley remarks:

"I'm proud of where I'm from but not everything we've done.

And it ain't like you and me can re-write history.

Our generation didn't start this nation

And we're still paying for the mistakes.

That a bunch of folks made long before we came.

And caught somewhere between Southern pride and Southern blame."

Read More...

April is Arab American Heritage Month. It's my first time in four years on the Race Relations website writing about this cultural observance month. I wish I hadn't waited so long to do so. That's because so many misconceptions persist about the Arab-American community. For one, Arab Americans are often viewed as outsiders even though the first large wave of Middle Eastern immigrants arrived in the United States in the late 1800s. There's also the notion that all Arab Americans are Muslims.

Remember when Barack Obama ran for president during the 2008 campaign? When he wasn't being called a secret Muslim, he was being described as an "Arab," as one elderly woman notoriously characterized Obama during a John McCain campaign event. This was meant to be an insult. To show that Obama wasn't really an American and that he was a Muslim, to boot. In fact anywhere from 3.5 to 4 million Americans are of Arab descent and most of these individuals identify as Christians. That hasn't stopped Islamophobes from targeting Arab Americans with hate crimes. Read More...