Sunday, July 1, 2007

ytj 100 Bob Roberts- Home theater

One of my passions is collecting movies on DVD and VHS.
My categories are
1. The "A" List..these are the "must have" classics in MY opinion
a. The Godfather's I and II
b. Kubrick collection ( Barry Lyndon, Clockwork Orange, 2001, Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Dr Strangelove)
c. more 70's classics ( Alien, Exorcist, Monty Python's Life of Brian/Holy Grail, Network, Deliverance, Bang the Drum Slowly, Taxi Driver, Tommy, Apocalypse Now, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, The Three and Four Musketeers, The Bad News Bears (damn straight), Paper Moon
d. Sixties Classics- The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, A Hard Day's Night
e. The FEW good movies of the '80's ..Aliens, The Meaning of Life, Revenge of the Jedi, Do the Right Thing
f. 90's and 00's the Return of good filmmaking- Goodfellas, Forrest Gump,Three Kings, Basquiat, Before Night Falls, My Own Private Idaho, He Got Game, 25th Hour, JFK, The Talented Mr Ripley
2. Fan and Special Interests, Including- The Rolling Stones 25 x 5, The Kids are Alright, Monty
Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl, Beatle's Anthology, Comic Book Artists, etc

Today I added Tim Robbin's "Bob Roberts" to my collection.
"Bob Roberts" is a special movie. I don't think it's necessarily a classic, just very good and does classify as a movie that made a difference for me. "JFK" was the movie of that year that to me was REALLY the must have- but this movie was great. I do think though it could have been EVEN better if it skewered the Democratic party as well. I just had my radio smashed by a homeless guy in Dupont Circle so I am not about the whole " nobel victim" ideology.

White Actin'- White Action

“Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”
—Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, 2004

Acting white was once a label used by scholars, writing in obscure journals, to characterize academically inclined, but allegedly snobbish, minority students who were shunned by their peers.

Now that it has entered the national consciousness—perhaps even its conscience—the term has become a slippery, contentious phrase that is used to refer to a variety of unsavory social practices and attitudes and whose meaning is open to many interpretations, especially as to who is the perpetrator, who the victim.

I cannot, in the research presented here, disentangle all the elements in the dispute, but I can sort out some of its thicker threads. I can also be precise about what I mean by acting white: a set of social interactions in which minority adolescents who get good grades in school enjoy less social popularity than white students who do well academically.

My analysis confirms that acting white is a vexing reality within a subset of American schools. It does not allow me to say whose fault this is, the studious youngster or others in his peer group. But I do find that the way schools are structured affects the incidence of the acting-white phenomenon. The evidence indicates that the social disease, whatever its cause, is most prevalent in racially integrated public schools. It’s less of a problem in the private sector and in predominantly black public schools.

With findings as potentially controversial as these, one wants to be sure that they rest on a solid base. In this regard, I am fortunate that the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Adhealth) provides information on the friendship patterns of a nationally representative sample of more than 90,000 students, from 175 schools in 80 communities, who entered grades 7 through 12 in the 1994 school year. With this database, it is possible to move beyond both the more narrowly focused ethnographic studies and the potentially misleading national studies based on self-reported indicators of popularity that have so far guided the discussion of acting white.

The Meaning of the Phrase

Only some of these behaviors have a direct connection to academic engagement. However, as the remarks of Barack Obama, who would later win a seat in the United States Senate, suggest, it is the fact that reading a book or getting good grades might be perceived as acting white that makes the topic a matter of national concern. Indeed, negative peer-group pressure has emerged as a common explanation for the black-white achievement gap, a gap that cannot be explained away by differences in demographic characteristics alone. If minority students today deliberately underachieve in order to avoid social sanctions, that by itself could explain why the academic performance of 17-year-old African Americans, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), has deteriorated since the late 1980s, even while that of nine-year-olds has been improving. It may also help us understand the shortage of minority students in most elite colleges and universities.

Ethnography vs. Statistics

But is this well-publicized aspect of African American peer-culture reality or urban legend? Most ethnographers who examine school life in specific locations present acting white as a pervasive fact of high-school life for black adolescents. But the only two quantitative studies that analyze data from nationally representative samples of high-school students dismiss it altogether as cultural lore. My findings confirm the existence of acting white among blacks as well as among Hispanics, but offer important qualifications about its pervasiveness.

Although they did not coin the term (its origins are obscure), it was an ethnographic study by anthropologists Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu, published in the Urban Journal in 1986, that did the most to bring it to the attention of their fellow academics. Their “Capitol High,” a pseudonym for a predominantly black high school in a low-income area of Washington, D.C., had what the researchers said was an “oppositional culture” in which black youth dismissed academically oriented behavior as “white.”

In the late 1990s, Harvard University economist, Ron Ferguson, found much the same thing in quite another setting, an upper-class suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, called Shaker Heights. Although that city had been integrated for generations, large racial disparities in achievement persisted. When Ferguson detected an anti-intellectual culture among blacks in the local high school, Shaker Heights became virtually synonymous with the problem of acting white.

Fordham and Ogbu traced the roots of the “oppositional culture” to institutionalized racism within American society, which they contend led blacks to define academic achievement as the prerogative of whites and to invest themselves instead in alternative pursuits. Other observers, however, place the blame for acting white squarely on the shoulders of blacks. The Manhattan Institute’s John McWhorter, for example, contrasts African American youth culture with that of immigrants (including blacks from the Caribbean and Africa) who “haven’t sabotaged themselves through victimology.” These two theories, the former blaming acting white on a racist society, the latter on self-imposed cultural sabotage, have emerged as the predominant explanations for acting white among American blacks.

In fact, however, shunning the academic is hardly the exclusive prerogative of contemporary African American culture. James Coleman’s classic work The Adolescent Society, published in 1955, identified members of the sports teams and cheerleaders, not those on the honor role, as the most popular students in public schools. (See an excerpt from Coleman’s original Harvard Education Review article, p. 40.) The former bring honor to the entire school, reasoned the University of Chicago sociologist; the latter, only to themselves. Since Coleman, ethnographers have found similar tensions between self-advancement and community integration. Indeed, variants on acting white have been spotted by ethnographers among the Buraku outcasts of Japan, Italian immigrants in Boston’s West End, the Maori of New Zealand, and the British working class, among others.

Even so, the question remains whether the tension that Coleman identified is more severe in some cultural contexts than others. On this topic, two sets of scholars weighed in with quantitative studies based on nationally representative surveys. Writing in 1998 in the American Sociological Review, James Ainsworth-Darnell of Georgia State University and Douglas Downey of Ohio State University reported that anti-intellectualism is no more severe a problem among black or Hispanic adolescents than it is among whites. Meanwhile, in a 1997 study, economists Phillip Cook of Duke and Jens Ludwig of Georgetown found that high-achieving black students are, if anything, even more popular relative to low-achieving peers than are high-achieving whites.

Of course, it is possible that the social rewards for achievement do not vary among ethnic groups in the United States. But both studies, each of which is based on data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), have a common shortcoming in that they depend solely on a self-reported measure of personal popularity. The NELS contains a question that asks if the student “thinks others see him/her as popular.” The answer choices are: very, somewhat, or not at all. Unfortunately, when students are asked to judge their own popularity, they can be expected to provide a rosier scenario than is warranted.

New Data and Methods

Fortunately, the Adhealth data I used in this study allow me to measure popularity in a more subtle way. All the students surveyed were asked to list their closest male and female friends, up to five of each sex. I first counted how often each student’s name appeared on peers’ lists. I then adjusted these raw counts to reflect the fact that some friends count more than others. The more frequently a peer is listed by others, the more weight I assign to showing up on his or her list.

The advantage of this research strategy is that one never has to ask a student about his or her own popularity. Students’ natural tendency to brag, in this case by listing popular students as their friends, only gives us a more accurate picture of the school’s most desirable friends. Students listed as a friend by many peers who are themselves popular, rise to the top of the social hierarchy. Those who are listed by only a few peers, who in turn have few admitted friends, stand out as the marginal members of the community.

Armed with an objective measure of social status, I could examine more systematically whether or not the ethnographers were correct in identifying a distinctive acting-white phenomenon within African American communities. Do high-achieving minority students have fewer, less-popular friends than lower-achieving peers? How does this compare with the experience of white students?

I first report my findings using a measure of each student’s popularity within his or her own ethnic group, as that is the most direct test of the acting-white hypothesis. But as I explain below, I obtain the same set of results when I analyze the data without regard to the friends’ ethnicity.

I measure student achievement with a composite of grade-point average (GPA) based on student self-reports of their most recent grades in English, math, history/social studies, and science. When comparing the popularity of high- and low-achieving students, I compare students only with students who attend the same school, ensuring that the results are not skewed by unmeasured characteristics of specific schools. Even then, I take into account a number of factors, measured by the survey, that could affect popularity differently for students from different ethnic backgrounds. These factors include parental education and occupation and participation in various school activities, such as varsity sports, student government, and cheerleading.

Finally, to subject my findings to the strongest possible test, I adjust students’ popularity to reflect variation in self-reported effort in school. Recall that some types of acting-white theory say that students are penalized only for trying hard, not for achievement per se. The bright kid who can’t help but get good grades is not subjected to scorn. It’s the plodding rate busters with books constantly in their faces who are annoying. By adjusting for the effort students are putting into their studies, I do my best to separate the social consequences of achievement from those of effort to achieve.

New Evidence of Acting White

Even after taking into account many factors that affect student popularity, evidence remains strong that acting white is a genuine issue and worthy of Senator Obama’s attention. Figure 1, which plots the underlying relationship between popularity and achievement, shows large differences among whites, blacks, and Hispanics. At low GPAs, there is little difference among ethnic groups in the relationship between grades and popularity, and high-achieving blacks are actually more popular within their ethnic group than high-achieving whites are within theirs. But when a student achieves a 2.5 GPA (an even mix of Bs and Cs), clear differences start to emerge.

As grades improve beyond this level, Hispanic students lose popularity at an alarming rate. Although African Americans with GPAs as high as 3.5 continue to have more friends than those with lower grades, the rate of increase is no longer as great as among white students.

The experience of black and white students diverges as GPAs climb above 3.5. As the GPAs of black students increase beyond this level, they tend to have fewer and fewer friends. A black student with a 4.0 has, on average, 1.5 fewer friends of the same ethnicity than a white student with the same GPA. Put differently, a black student with straight As is no more popular than a black student with a 2.9 GPA, but high-achieving whites are at the top of the popularity pyramid.

My findings with respect to Hispanics are even more discouraging. A Hispanic student with a 4.0 GPA is the least popular of all Hispanic students, and Hispanic-white differences among high achievers are the most extreme.

The social costs of a high GPA are most pronounced for adolescent males. Popularity begins to decrease at lower GPAs for young black men than young black women (3.25 GPA compared with a 3.5), and the rate at which males lose friends after this point is far greater. As a result, black male high achievers have notably fewer friends than do female ones. I observe a similar pattern among Hispanics, with males beginning to lose friends at lower GPAs and at a faster clip, though the male-female differences are not statistically significant.

Potential Objections

Could high-achieving minority students be more socially isolated simply because there are so few of them? The number of high-achieving minority students in the average school is fewer than the number of high-achieving white students. To see whether this disparity could explain my findings, I adjusted the data to eliminate the effect of differences in the number of students at each school with similar GPAs. This adjustment, however, did little to temper the effect of acting white.

It might also be hypothesized that high-achieving minority students are able to cultivate friendships with students of other ethnic groups. If so, I should obtain quite different results when I examine popularity among students of all ethnic groups. While one finds some evidence that high-achieving students are more popular among students of other ethnicities, the increment is not enough to offset the decline in popularity within their own ethnic group—a predictable finding, given that black and white students have only, on average, one friend of another ethnicity, and Hispanics just one and a half.

Indeed, when minority students reach the very highest levels of academic performance, even the number of cross-ethnic friendships declines. Black and Hispanic students with a GPA above 3.5 actually have fewer cross-ethnic friendships than those with lower grades, a finding that seems particularly troubling.

Finally, I examined whether high-achieving blacks and Hispanics can shield themselves from the costs of acting white by taking up extracurricular activities. There are many opportunities in schools for students to self-select into activities, including organized sports, cheerleading, student government, band, and the National Honor Society, that should put them in contact with students with similar interests.

Unfortunately, when I look separately at minority students who participate in each of these activities, I find only one within which ethnic differences are eliminated: the National Honor Society. Among students involved in every other activity, new friends made outside the classroom do not make up for the social penalties imposed for acting white.

A Private-School Edge

The patterns described thus far essentially characterize social dynamics of public-school students, who constitute 94 percent of the students in the Adhealth sample. For the small percentage of black and Hispanic students who attend private school, however, I find no evidence of a trade-off between popularity and achievement (see Figure 2). Surprisingly, white private-school students with the highest grades are not as popular as their lower-achieving peers. The most-popular white students in private schools have a GPA of roughly 2.0, a C average.

These data may help to explain one of the more puzzling findings in the research on the relative advantages of public and private schools. Most studies of academic achievement find little or no benefit of attending a private school for white students, but quite large benefits for African Americans. It may be that blacks attending private schools have quite a different peer group.

The Segregated School: Is It an Advantage?

I also find that acting white is unique to those schools where black students comprise less than 80 percent of the student population. In predominantly black schools, I find no evidence at all that getting good grades adversely affects students’ popularity.

But perhaps this changes when school desegregation leads to cross-ethnic friendships within the school. To see how the degree of internal integration within a school affects acting-white patterns, I calculated the difference from what I would expect in the total number of cross-ethnic friends in a school based on the ethnic make-up of the student body. Schools with a greater percentage of cross-ethnic friendships than expected are considered to be internally integrated. I divide schools into two groups of equal size: those with higher and lower degrees of internal integration.

Unfortunately, internal integration only aggravates the problem. Blacks in less-integrated schools (places with fewer than expected cross-ethnic friendships) encounter less of a trade-off between popularity and achievement. In fact, the effect of acting white on popularity appears to be twice as large in the more-integrated (racially mixed) schools as in the less-integrated ones. Among the highest achievers (3.5 GPA or higher), the differences are even more stark, with the effect of acting white almost five times as great in settings with more cross-ethnic friendships than expected. Black males in such schools fare the worst, penalized seven times as harshly as my estimate of the average effect of acting white on all black students!

This finding, along with the fact that I find no evidence of acting white in predominantly black schools, adds to the evidence of a “Shaker Heights” syndrome, in which racially integrated settings only reinforce pressures to toe the ethnic line.

In Search of an Answer

That acting white is more prevalent in schools with more interethnic contact hardly passes the test of political correctness. It nonetheless provides a clue to what is going on. Anthropologists have long observed that social groups seek to preserve their identity, an activity that accelerates when threats to internal cohesion intensify. Within a group, the more successful individuals can be expected to enhance the power and cohesion of the group as long as their loyalty is not in question. But if the group risks losing its most successful members to outsiders, then the group will seek to prevent the outflow. Cohesive yet threatened groups—the Amish, for example—are known for limiting their children’s education for fear that too much contact with the outside world risks the community’s survival.

In an achievement-based society where two groups, for historical reasons, achieve at noticeably different levels, the group with lower achievement levels is at risk of losing its most successful members, especially in situations where successful individuals have opportunities to establish contacts with outsiders. Over the long run, the group faces the danger that its most successful members will no longer identify with its interests, and group identity will itself erode. To forestall such erosion, groups may try to reinforce their identity by penalizing members for differentiating themselves from the group. The penalties are likely to increase whenever the threats to group cohesion intensify.

Applying this model of behavior to minority and white students yields two important predictions: A positive relationship between academic achievement and peer-group acceptance (popularity) will erode and turn negative, whenever the group as a whole has lower levels of achievement. And that erosion will be exacerbated in contexts that foster more interethnic contact. This, of course, is exactly what I found with regard to acting white.

Understanding acting white in this way places the concept within a broader conceptual framework that transcends specific cultural contexts and lifts the topic beyond pointless ideological exchanges. There is necessarily a trade-off between doing well and rejection by your peers when you come from a traditionally low-achieving group, especially when that group comes into contact with more outsiders.

Alternative Explanations

Such a conceptualization is preferable to both of the two theories that have so far dominated discussions of acting white: the notion of oppositional culture and the allegation of cultural self-sabotage.

The oppositional culture theory, developed by Fordham and Ogbu in the wake of their experiences at “Capitol High,” accounts for the observed differences between blacks and whites as follows: (1) white people provide blacks with inferior schooling and treat them differently in school; (2) by imposing a job ceiling, white people fail to reward blacks adequately for their academic achievement in adult life; and (3) black Americans develop coping devices which, in turn, further limit their striving for academic success. Fordham and Ogbu suggest the problem arose partly because white Americans traditionally refused to acknowledge that black Americans were capable of intellectual achievement and partly because black Americans subsequently began to doubt their own intellectual ability, began to define academic success as white people’s prerogative, and began to discourage their peers, perhaps unconsciously, from emulating white people in striving for academic success.

However plausible it sounds, the oppositional culture theory cannot explain why the acting-white problem is greatest in integrated settings. If Fordham and Ogbu were correct, the social sanctions for acting white should be most severe in places like the segregated school, where opportunities are most limited. The results of my studies, of course, point in precisely the opposite direction.

The notion that acting white is simply attributable to self-sabotage is even less persuasive. According to its proponents, black and Hispanic cultures are dysfunctional, punishing successful members of their group rather than rewarding their success. That theory is more a judgment than an explanation. A universal, it cannot explain the kinds of variations from one school setting to another that are so apparent in the data I have explored.

The Need for New Identities

How important are these social pressures? Although that story has yet to be fully told, in my view, the prevalence of acting white in schools with racially mixed student bodies suggests that social pressures could go a long way toward explaining the large racial and ethnic gaps in SAT scores, the underperformance of minorities in suburban schools, and the lack of adequate representation of blacks and Hispanics in elite colleges and universities.

Minority communities in the United States have yet to generate a large cadre of high achievers, a situation as discouraging as the high incarceration rates among minorities who never finish high school. In fact, the two patterns may be linked. As long as distressed communities provide minorities with their identities, the social costs of breaking free will remain high. To increase the likelihood that more can do so, society must find ways for these high achievers to thrive in settings where adverse social pressures are less intense. The integrated school, by itself, apparently cannot achieve that end.

Roland G. Fryer is assistant professor of economics, Harvard University and a faculty research fellow, the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The Symbolic Order

Symbolic order

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Although the Symbolic order is an essentially linguistic dimension, Lacan does not simply equate the symbolic with language, since the latter is involved also in the Imaginary and the Real. The symbolic dimension of language is that of the signifier, in which elements have no positive existence but are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences. It is the realm of radical alterity: the Other. The unconscious is the discourse of the Other and thus belongs to the symbolic order. Its is also the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. The symbolic is both the "pleasure principle" that regulates the distance from das Ding, and the death drive which goes beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition: "the death drive is only the mask of the symbolic order." This register is determinant of subjectivity; for Lacan the symbolic is characterized by the absence of any fixed relations between signifier and signified.

The Symbolic Order

Symbolic order

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"Ackin white"

Acting white

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Acting white, from an epithet applied by some blacks to other blacks (also other minorities such as Asians and Hispanics), refers to a perceived betraying of one's race by incorporating the social expectations of mainstream white society, particularly in the United States. This encompasses such things as speaking Standard English, dressing conservatively, living in suburbs, and otherwise attempting to conform to behavior approved of by the dominant culture.

Though not all scholars define acting white in precisely the same way, most definitions include a reference to situations where some minority adolescents ridicule their minority peers for engaging in behaviors perceived to be characteristic of whites. In 1986, Nigerian sociologist John Ogbu co-authored, along with Signithia Fordham, a study that concluded African American students in a Washington, D.C., high school did not live up to their academic potential because of the fear of being accused of "acting white," echoed in his 2003 book Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement. He concluded that the black students' own cultural attitudes hindered academic achievement and that these attitudes are too often neglected. However, as Ogbu made clear in his seminal work, Minority Education and Caste (1978), school disengagement among caste-like minorities occurs because of the glass ceiling placed by white society on the job-success of their parents and others in their communities. He reasoned that non-whites "failed to observe the link between educational achievement and access to jobs." ^[1]

Though the study's conclusion gained a popular foothold and has been espoused by figures such as Bill Cosby, a later study refuted its validity. In 2003, Karolyn Tyson, a sociologist, and William Darity Jr, an economist, both at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, directed an 18 month study at eleven North Carolinian schools. The study found that white and black students have essentially the same attitudes about scholastic achievement; students in both groups want to succeed in school and show higher levels of self-esteem when they do better in school. ^[2]

A 2006 study titled An Empirical Analysis of "Acting White" by Roland G. Fryer, Jr. at Harvard University and Paul Torelli suggested that the phenomenon probably had little to no effect on students achieving at average levels, but might explain a significant role in the disparities between black and white students at high achievement levels.^[3]

[hide]

[edit] Popular culture references

Carlton Banks of the television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air characters was referred to as "acting white."
Barack Obama is often questioned on whether he is "black enough" to represent the African American community as a potential presidential candidate, since he is not the descendant of slaves but the son of an African immigrant.[1]
The words Bounty (chocolate bar) and Oreo are sometimes used by the black community as insult similar to acting white

[edit] See also

[edit] References

^ Carter, Prudence (2005). Keepin' It Real: School Success Beyond Black and White, Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities. Oxford University Press, USA, 29. ISBN 0-1951-6862-3.
^ NYTimes
^ Harvard.edu Economics

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white"

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Black People Wikipedia

Black people

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Though Africans possess relatively dark skin, they exhibit much variation in physical appearance. Clockwise from upper left: South Africa, Sudan, Kenya, Congo.

Black is a racial, political, sociological or cultural classification of people. No people are literally colored black, but many people who have dark skin color are conventionally considered to be so.

Some assert that only people of relatively recent African descent are black, while others argue that black may refer to individuals with dark skin color, regardless of ethnic origin.^[1]^[2]

The human race

Main article: Race and genetics

In the early twentieth century many scientists held the view that biologically distinct races existed. The races corresponded to the major continental regions of Africa, Europe Asia and the Americas. These races were distinguished from each other based on a few visible traits such as skin color and hair texture. Black people were largely defined by their dark skin and sometimes frizzy hair. The belief at that time was that not only did the races differ in appearance but in behavior, intellect and origins. Some scientists such as Carleton S. Coon believed the different races to have evolved separately over millions of years and that racial differences were thus extremely significant.

Today most scholars have abandoned these views and see race as a social construct with no biological basis. Breakthroughs in genetics and the mapping of the human genome in the late twentieth century have helped dispel many of the previous myths about race. Ninety-nine point nine percent of any one person's DNA is exactly the same as any other person regardless of ethnicity. Twins are an exception as the their DNA is a 100% match.^[3] Of the remaining 0.1% variation, there is an 8% variation between ethnic groups within a race, such as between the French and the Dutch. Only 7% of all human genetic variation lies on average between major human races such as those of Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. Eighty-five percent of all genetic variation lies within any local group. Thus there is more genetic variation within a race than between the various "races".^[4]

Because the genetic difference between any two random individuals is roughly the same, a few traits such as skin color and appearance are arbitrary ways to classify race. There is general agreement among biologists that human racial differences are too small to qualify races as separate sub-species. However there is still much controversy regarding the interpretation of these small differences. Some scholars argue that even though there is more variation within a population than between populations, the small between population variation may have implications in medical science.^[5]^[6]

Single origin hypothesis

See also: Recent single origin hypothesis

A Maasai man in Kenya

The low level of genetic variation across populations surprised many in the scientific community. Scientists believe the reason for this low level of variation is because the entire world population of 6.5 billion is descended from a small group of people, probably numbering no more than 2,000, who lived in Africa 70,000 years ago.^[7]^[8] From this small group, an even smaller group left Africa by crossing the Red Sea and proceeded to populate the rest of the world. The differences in physical appearance between the various peoples of the world is as a result of adaptations to the different environments that the early pioneers who left Africa made in order to conquer the new lands to which they traveled.

The African population retains the great degree of physical variation. Even though all Africans share a skin color that is dark relative to other peoples of the world, they actually differ significantly in physical appearance. Examples include the Dinka, some of the tallest people in the world and the Mbuti, the shortest people in the world. Others such as the Khoisan people have an epicanthal fold similar to the peoples of Central Asia. A recent study found that Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest skin color diversity within population.^[9]

Dark skin

Further information: Human skin color

A Black mother and her albino son from Tanzania

Scientists now believe that humans first appeared in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.^[10] Dark skin helped protect against skin cancer that develops as a result of ultraviolet light radiation, causing mutations in the skin. Furthermore, dark skin prevents an essential B vitamin, folate, from being destroyed. Therefore, in the absence of modern medicine and diet, a person with dark skin in the tropics would live longer, be more healthy and more likely to reproduce than a person with light skin. Scientists point to the fact that white Australians have some of the highest rates of skin cancer as evidence of this expectation.^[11] Conversely, as dark skin prevents sunlight from penetrating the skin it hinders the production of vitamin D₃. Hence when humans migrated to less sun-intensive regions in the north, low vitamin D₃ levels became a problem and lighter skin colors started appearing. The people of Europe, who have low levels of melanin, naturally have an almost colorless skin pigmentation, especially when untanned. This low level of pigmentation allows the blood vessels to become visible and gives the characteristic pale pink color of white people. The difference in skin color between black and whites is however a minor genetic difference accounting for just one letter in 3.1 billion letters of DNA.^[12]

Africans in the Americas

Approximately 12 million Africans were shipped to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade from 1492 to 1888. Today their descendants number approximately 150 million.^[13] Many have a multiracial background of African, Amerindian, European and Asian ancestry. The various regions developed complex social conventions with which their multi-ethnic populations were classified.

United States

Main article: African American

In the first 200 years that blacks had been in the US they commonly referred to themselves as Africans. In Africa, people primarily identified themselves by tribe or ethnic group and not by skin color. Individuals would be Asante, Yoruba, Kikongo or Wolof. But when Africans were brought to the Americas they were forced to give up their tribal affiliations for fear of uprisings. The result was the Africans had to intermingle with other Africans from different tribal groups. This is significant as Africans came from a vast geographic region, a coastline stretching from Senegal to Angola and in some cases from the south east coast such as from Mozambique. A new identity and culture was born that incorporated elements of the various tribal groups and also European elements such as Christianity and English. This new identity was now based on skin color and African ancestry rather than any one tribal group.^[14]

When the trans-atlantic slave trade was declared illegal in 1807 the vast majority of blacks were US born, hence use of the term African became problematic. Though initially a source of pride, many blacks feared its continued use would be a hindrance to their fight for full citizenship in the US. They also felt that it would give ammunition to those who were advocating repatriating blacks back to Africa. In 1835 Black leaders called upon Black Americans to remove the title of African from their institutions and replace it with Negro or Colored American. A few institutions however elected to keep their historical names such as African Methodist Episcopal Church. Negro and colored remained the popular terms until the late 1960s.^[15]

The term black was used throughout but not frequently as it carried a certain stigma. In the 1963, I Have a Dream speech,^[16] Martin Luther King uses the terms Negro 15 times and black 4 times. Each time he uses black it is in parallel construction with white (e.g., black men and white men).^[17] With the successes of the civil rights movement a new term was needed to break from the past and help shed the reminders of legalized discrimination. In place of Negro, black was promoted as standing for racial pride, militancy and power. Some of the turning points included Kwame Toure's (Stokely Carmichael) use of the term "Black Power" and the release of James Brown's song "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud".

In 1988 Jesse Jackson urged Americans to use the term African American because the term has a historical cultural base. Since then African American and black have essentially a coequal status. There is still much controversy over which term is more appropriate. Some strongly reject the term African American in preference for black citing that they have little connection with Africa. Others believe the term black is inaccurate because African Americans have a variety of skin tones.^[18] Surveys show that when interacting with each other African Americans prefer the term black, as it is associated with intimacy and familiarity. The term "African American" is preferred for public and formal use.^[19]

One drop rule

According to the United States' colloquial term one drop rule, a black is any person with any known African ancestry.^[20] The one drop rule is virtually unique to the United States and was applied almost exclusively to blacks. Outside of the US, definitions of who is black vary from country to country but generally, multiracial people are not required by society to identify themselves as black. The most significant consequence of the one drop rule was that many African Americans who had significant European ancestry, whose appearance was very European, would identify themselves as black.

The one drop rule originated as a racist attempt to keep the white race pure, however one of its unintended consequences was uniting the African American community and preserving an African identity.^[20] Some of the most prominent civil rights activists were multiracial but yet stood up for equality for all. It is said that W.E.B. Du Bois could have easily passed for white yet he became the preeminent scholar in Afro-American studies.^[21] He chose to spend his final years in Africa and immigrated to Ghana where he died aged 95. Other scholars such as Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass both had white fathers.^[22] Even the more radical activists such as Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan both had white grandparents. That said, colorism, or intraracial discrimination based on skin tone, does affect the black community. It is a sensitive issue or a taboo subject. Open discussions are often labeled as "airing dirty laundry".^[23] ^[24]

Many people in the United States are increasingly rejecting the one drop rule, and are questioning whether even as much as 50% black ancestry should be considered black. Although politician Barack Obama self-identifies as black, 55 percent of whites and 61 percent of others classified him as biracial instead of black after being told that his mother is white. Blacks were less likely to acknowledge a multiracial category, with 66% labeling Obama as black.^[25] However when it came to Tiger Woods, only 42% of African-Americans described him as black, as did only 7% of White Americans.^[26]

Blackness

The concept of blackness in the United States has been described as the degree to which one associates themselves with mainstream African American culture and values. This concept is not so much about skin color or tone but more about culture and behavior. Spike Lee may be considered authentically Black by some for his contribution to Black consciousness through film. Muhammad Ali may also be considered authentically black as a global symbol of the Black identity.

Blackness can be contrasted with acting white in which black individuals are said to behave more like mainstream white Americans than fellow blacks. This includes choice in fashion, the way one speaks or listening to stereotypically white music. ^[27]

The notion of blackness can also be extended to non-blacks. Toni Morrison once described Bill Clinton as the first black president^[28]. This because of his warm relations with African Americans, his poor upbringing and also because he is a Jazz musician. Paula Abdul is sometimes mistaken for being black in part because of her association with black music and dance.

The question of blackness arose in the early stages of Barack Obama's campaign for the 2008 presidential campaign. Some have questioned whether Obama is black enough since his upbringing was unlike that of many African Americans. His father is from Kenya and he was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia. Polls at the start of the campaign showed Hillary Clinton to be more popular amongst black voters than Obama, which can be ascribed to the influence of Bill Clinton's "Blackness". On the other hand much of Obama's support is derived from white liberals^[29]. ^[30]^[31]

Race in Brazil

Main article: Race in Brazil

Capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art.

Unlike in the United States race in Brazil is based on skin color and physical appearance rather than ancestry. A Brazilian child was never automatically identified with the racial type of one or both parents, nor were there only two categories to choose from. Between a pure black and a very light mulatto over a dozen racial categories would be recognized in conformity with the combinations of hair color, hair texture, eye color, and skin color. These types grade into each other like the colors of the spectrum, and no one category stands significantly isolated from the rest. That is, race referred to appearance, not heredity.^[32]

There is some disagreement among scholars over the effects of social status on racial classifications in Brazil. It is generally believed that upward mobility and education results in reclassification of individuals into lighter skinned categories. The popular claim is that in Brazil poor whites are considered black and wealthy blacks are considered white. Some scholars disagree arguing that whitening of one's social status may be open to people of mixed race, but a typically black person will consistently be identified as black regardless of wealth or social status.^[33]^[33]^[34]

Statistics

see also Admixture in Latin America

Demographics of Brazil
Year	White	brown	black
1835	24.4%	18.2%	51.4%
2000	53.7%	38.5%	6.2%

From the year 1500 to 1850 an estimated 3.5 million Africans were forcibly shipped to Brazil.^[33] An estimated 80 million Brazilians, almost half the population, are at least in part descendants of these Africans. Brazil has the largest population of Afro-descendants outside of Africa. In contrast to the US there were no segregation or anti-miscegenation laws in Brazil. As a result miscegenation has affected a large majority of the Brazilian population. Even much of the white population has either African or Amerindian blood. According to the last census 54% identified themselves as white, 6.2% identified themselves as black and 39.5% identified themselves as Pardo (brown)- a broad multiracial category.^[35]

A philosophy of whitening emerged in Brazil in the 19th century. Until recently the government did not keep data on race. However statisticians estimate that in 1835 half the population was black, one fifth was Pardo (brown) and one fourth white. By 2000 the black population had fallen to only 6.2% and the Pardo had increased to 40% and white to 55%. Essentially most of the black population was absorbed into the multiracial category by miscegenation.^[32]. A recent study found that at least 29% of the middle class white Brazilian population had some recent African ancestry.^[36]

Race relations

Because of the ideology of miscegenation, Brazil has avoided the polarization of Society into black and white. The bitter and sometimes violent racial tensions that divide the US are notably absent in Brazil. However the philosophy of the racial democracy in Brazil has drawn criticism from some quarters. Brazil has one of the largest gaps in income distribution in the world. The richest 10% of the population earn 28 times the average income of the bottom 40%. The richest 10 percent is almost exclusively white. One-third of the population lives under the poverty line of which blacks and other non-whites account for 70 percent of the poor.^[37]

In the US blacks earn 75% of what what whites earn, in Brazil non-whites earn less than 50% of what whites earn. Some have posited that Brazil does in fact practice the one drop rule when social economic factors are considered. This because the gap income between blacks and other non-whites is relatively small compared with the large gap between whites and non-whites. Other factors such as illiteracy and education level show the same patterns.^[38] Unlike in the US where African Americans were united in the civil rights struggle, in Brazil the philosophy of whitening has helped divide blacks from other non-whites and prevented a more active civil rights movement.

Though Afro-Brazilians make up half the population there are very few black politicians. The city of Salvador, Bahia for instance is 80% Afro-Brazilian but has never had a black mayor. Critics indicate that in US cities like Detroit and New Orleans that have a black majority, have never had white mayors since first electing black mayors in the 1970s.^[39]

Non-white people also have limited media visibility. The Latin American media, in particular the Brazilian media, has been accused of hiding its black and indigenous population. For example the telenovelas or soaps are said to be a hotbed of white, largely blonde and blue/green-eyed actors who resemble Scandinavians or Anglos more than they resemble the typical whites of Brazil, who are mostly of Southern European descent. ^[40]^[41] ^[42]

These patterns of discrimination against non-whites has lead some to advocate for the use of the Portuguese term 'negro' to encompass non-whites so as to renew a black consciousness and identity, in effect an African descent rule.^[43]

Blacks and the middle east

See also: Afro-Arab

Africans and Middle Easterners have interacted since prehistoric times. Afro-Asiatic languages which include the semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew are believed by some scholars to have originated in Ethiopia. This is because the region has very diverse language groups in close geographic proximity, often considered a telltale sign for a linguistic geographic origin.

In more recent times, about 1000 CE, interactions between blacks and Arabs resulted in the incorporation of several Arabic words into Swahili which became a useful language for merchants. As a result Arab influence spread along the east coast of Africa and to some extent into the interior.

In West Africa Timbuktu was trading outpost that linked west Africa with Berber, Arab, and Jewish traders throughout north Africa.

As a result of these interactions many in the middle east have black ancestry and many Africans on the east coast of Africa and along the Sahara have Arabic ancestry^[44]. According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had to be canceled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. (In fact, the 1983 television movie Sadat, starring Louis Gossett, Jr., was not canceled; although the Egyptian government refused to let the drama air in Egypt, partially on the grounds of the casting of Gossett, the objections did not come from Sadat, who had been assassinated two years earlier.) Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, much like black looking Latin Americans consider themselves white because they have some distant white ancestry.^[45] Similarly, 19th century slave trader Tippu Tip is often identified as Arab^[46] despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of patrilineality.^{[citation needed]}

In general, Arabs had a more positive view of black women than black men, even if the women were of slave origin. More black women were taken across the Sahara to North Africa than men, and some even gave birth to the children of Arab rulers. When an enslaved woman became pregnant with her Arab captor's child, she became “umm walad” or “mother of a child”, a status that granted her privileged rights. The child, however, would have prospered from the wealth of the father and been given rights of inheritance.^[47]. Because of patrilineality, the children were born free and sometimes even became successors to their ruling fathers, as was the case with Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, (whose mother was a Fulani concubine), who ruled Morocco from 1578-1608. Such tolerance, however, was not extended to wholly black persons, even when technically "free," and the notion that to be black meant to be a slave became a common belief.^[48]

Apartheid era in South Africa

Main article: Coloureds

This extended family has too much non-African descent to have been classified as black under South Africa's former apartheid laws.

In South Africa during the apartheid era, the population was classified into four groups: Black, White, Asian (mostly Indian), and Coloured. The Coloured group included people of mixed Bantu, Khoisan, and European descent (with some Malay ancestry, especially in the Western Cape). There is still much discomfort in publicly discussing the Coloured identity in South Africa. Even the use of the term coloured is quite sensitive. The Coloureds occupy an intermediary position between blacks and whites in South Africa.

The apartheid bureaucracy devised complex (and often arbitrary) criteria in the Population Registration Act to determine who belonged in which group. Minor officials administered tests to enforce the classifications. When it was unclear from a person's physical appearance whether a person was to be considered colored or black, the pencil test was employed. This involved inserting a pencil in a person's hair to determine if the hair was kinky enough for the pencil to get stuck.^[49]

During the apartheid era the coloureds were also oppressed and discriminated against. However they did have limited rights and overall had slightly better socioeconomic conditions than blacks. In the post apartheid era the government's policies of affirmative action have favored blacks over coloureds. Some Black South Africans openly state that coloureds did not suffer as much as they did during apartheid. The popular saying by coloured South Africans to illustrate this dilemma is:

Not white enough under apartheid and not black enough under the ANC

Other than by appearance coloureds can be distinguished from blacks by language. Most speak Afrikaans or English as a first language as opposed to Bantu tribal languages such as Zulu or Xhosa. They also tend to have more European sounding names than Bantu names.^[50]

Sub-Saharan Africa

Map depicting the geographical origins of racial classifications as used by the United States Census Bureau in 2000. Self identification options also included "Some other race" and the option of selecting one or more races.^[51]

Sub-Saharan Africa is the term used to describe African countries located south of the Sahara desert. It is used as a cultural and ecological distinction from North Africa. Because the indigenous people of this region are primarily dark skinned it is sometimes used as a politically correct term or euphemism for Black Africa.^[52] Some criticize the use of the term in defining black Africans because the Sahara desert spans across many countries such as Chad, Mali, Sudan, Niger, and Mauritania that belong to both North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Some also argue that it is a racist code word. Owen 'Alik Shahadah argues that the term sub-Saharan Africa is a product of European imperialism:

Sub-Saharan Africa is a racist byword for "primitive", a place which has escaped advancement. Hence, we see statements like “no written languages exist in Sub-Saharan Africa.” “Ancient Egypt was not a Sub-Saharan African civilization.” Sub-Sahara serves as an exclusion, which moves, jumps and slides around to suit negative generalization of Africa.^[14]

However some Africans actually prefer to be culturally distinguished from their northern neighbors.^[53]

The U.S. census race definitions says a black is a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as "Black, African Am., or Negro," or who provide written entries such as African American, Afro American, Kenyan, Nigerian, or Haitian. However, the Census Bureau notes that these classifications are socio-political constructs and should not be interpreted as scientific or anthropological.^[51]

Ancient Egyptians

Main article: Ancient Egypt and race

From left: Libyan, Nubian, Syrian, and Egyptian

There is considerable controversy over who the Ancient Egyptians were. Afrocentrist scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop argue that ancient Egypt was primarily a black civilization. As evidence they cite quotes from Herodotus, who stated around 450 B.C.:

The Colchians, Ethiopians and Egyptians have thick lips, broad nose, woolly hair and they are burnt of skin."^[54]

Mainstream scholars tend to avoid the issue of race but contend that Ancient Egypt was a multicultural society of Middle eastern and African Influences^[55]^[56]. They also state that the Egyptians viewed themselves as a distinct people separate from their neighbors.

Ancient Egypt was at the time the most advanced of civilizations. Egyptians in the media were often portrayed as Caucasians^[57]. However recent evidence has begun to shed light on the influence of black Africa in ancient Egypt. Based on archaeological evidence black or Africoid people were present in Ancient Egypt. What remains controversial is when they arrived, their exact roles, significance and influence.^[58]

Biblical perspective

Further information: Hamitic myth

According to some historians, the tale in Genesis 9 in which Noah cursed the descendants of his son Ham with servitude was a seminal moment in defining black people, as the story was passed on through generations of Jewish, Christian and Islamic scholars.^[59] According to columnist Felicia R. Lee, "Ham came to be widely portrayed as black; blackness, servitude and the idea of racial hierarchy became inextricably linked." Some people believe that the tradition of dividing humankind into three major races is partly rooted in tales of Noah's three sons repopulating the Earth after the Deluge and giving rise to three separate races.^[60]

The biblical passage, Book of Genesis 9:20-27, which deals with the sons of Noah however makes no reference to race. The reputed curse of Ham is not on Ham, but on Canaan, one of Ham's sons. This is not a racial but geographic referent. The Canaanites, typically associated with the region of the Levant (Palestine, Lebanon, etc) were later subjugated by the Hebrews when they left bondage in Egypt according to the Biblical narrative.^[61]^[62] The alleged inferiority of Hamitic descendants also in not supported by the Biblical narrative, nor claims of three races in relation to Noah's sons. Shem for example seems a linguistic not racial referent. In short the Bible does not define blacks, nor assign them to racial hierarchies.^[62]

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.^[63] According to Benjamin Braude, a professor of history at Boston College:

in 18th- and 19th century Euro-America, Genesis 9:18-27 became the curse of Ham, a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery.^[63]

Author David M. Goldenberg contends that the Bible is not a racist document. According to Goldenberg, such racist interpretations came from post-biblical writers of antiquity like Philo and Origen, who equated blackness with darkness of the soul.^[64]

Asia and Australasia

Blond black from the South Pacific^[65]

There are several groups of dark-skinned people who live in various parts of Asia, Australia and the South Pacific. They include the Indigenous Australians, the Melanesians and various indigenous peoples sometimes collectively known as Negritos. The term "negrito" is sometimes considered pejorative.

By their external physical appearance such people resemble Africans with dark skin and sometimes tightly coiled hair. Genetically they are distant from Africans and are more closely related to the surrounding Asian populations.^[66]

The Dutch colonial officials considered the Taiwanese aborigines to be "Indians" or "blacks", based on their prior colonial experience in what is currently Indonesia.

Australian Aboriginal flag

The Black War refers to a period of conflict between the British colonists and Tasmanian Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in the early years of the 1800s.

The Aboriginal Flag was designed by Harold Thomas, an artist and an Aboriginal, in 1971. The flag was designed to be an eye-catching rallying symbol for the Aboriginal people and a symbol of their race and identity.The black represents the Aboriginal people, the red the earth and their spiritual relationship to the land, and the yellow the sun, the giver of life.