Communicating Gender, Race, and Class: 2020

The two readings assigned for Wednesday's discussion extended earlier conversations about controlling images and media representations. Read the summaries and click on the links to read/skim and/or view the supplemental materials for your comments.  Please note, this is not optional. All students are required to post a comment or a question for each post. From Ch. 46: In life history interviews with Latino men, Vasquez-Tokos and Norton-Smith found two recurrent themes: gangs and sports. Most respondents had not been involved in either gangs or sports, but they felt forcibly constrained by these  controlling images , which had limited their educational opportunities, access to jobs, and sense of self-expression. Whereas prejudice involves negative emotions and stereotypes, controlling images are systemic and cultural instruments of power. They are not individual ideas, but rather ideological collective  representations  that offer “strategies of action” that bri...

The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence compiles facts about the prevalence of DV in the United States, including these statistics . Gendered violence must be examined through a lens of intersectionality if we are to have more compassionate communication about victim/survivors, as well as abusers. We read Rosemary Clark 's 2016 essay from Feminist Media Studies about hashtag activism in the context of domestic violence. Below is a short news clip about one of the viral stories that ignited the #WhyIStayed online movement. Here or on the Scholar Discussion Board be prepared to discuss one of the following questions: 1. How is intimate partner violence an important issue for gender/race/class and feminist discussion? 2. What dominant discourses exist around DV? 3. How does hashtag activism invite intersectional feminist organizing? 4. What outcomes did #WhyIStayed lead to? Please note, this is not optional. All students are required to post a comment or...

42. “The Myth of Immigrant Criminality and the Paradox of Assimilation,” Rubén G. Rumbaut and Walter Ewing Although some of you may not have access to the book, the information in that short reading is available from the American Immigration Council . In a post-9/11 climate of fear and ignorance, assumptions have flourished that immigration and criminality are associated. However, systematic evidence shows that crime is not caused or even aggravated by immigrants to the United States, regardless of their legal status. Crime rates in the nation have declined even at the same time that immigration rates have increased. Among all ethnic groups in the United States, immigrants have lower incarceration rates than those who are native-born. For all ethnic groups, incarceration rates are highest among high school dropouts, yet immigrants who are high school dropouts have lower incarceration rates than other high school dropouts. Although immigrants’ risk of incarceration increases the l...

35. “Michael’s Story: ‘I Get Into So Much Trouble Just by Walking’: Narrative Knowing and Life at the Intersections of Learning Disability, Race, and Class,” David J. Connor  Connor analyzes the intersections of learning disabilities with race and class through the narrative of Michael, a young, Black working class man with dyslexia. Using Michael’s own personal narrative, Connor applies  Collins’ domains of power —structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal—to examine the discourses of disability, race, and class that organize  domination  and oppression in Michael’s everyday life. In the structural realm, the interconnected forces of segregated housing patterns, limited schooling options, and restricted opportunities for employment serve to limit and constrain Michael’s experiences.  In the disciplinary realm, the ultra-bureaucratic realm of special education, pervasive criminalization, and labor management practices form a sprawling apparatus th...

We continued our discussion of intersectional education issues, this time particularly for undocumented Latinx students. Ch. 34, “Academic Resilience Among Undocumented Latino Students,” William Perez, Roberta Espinoza, Karina Ramos, Heidi M. Coronado, and Richard Cortes Undocumented Latino youth face additional risk factors and sources of stress above and beyond the challenges of biculturalism they share with documented Latino youth. Perez et al.’s study examines the role of protective resources in mediating the academic achievement of 110 undocumented Latino high school, community college, and university students across the United States. They found that even in the presence of multiple sources of psychosocial risk (high school employment, low parental education, large family size, and alienation resulting from undocumented status), personal and environmental resources increased resilience and improved academic performance. Students with lower risk factors (protected) an...

For today's reading on the achievement gap and education debt, we will discuss the video below, as well as an article from the Everyday Feminism blog. The reading addresses that white women have benefited the most from affirmative action. Research confirms the argument that gender was a "blindspot" in the original design of affirmative action policies. Ch. 33, “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools,” Gloria Ladson-Billings Ladson-Billings addresses the “achievement gap,” a catchphrase to describe the difference in academic performance between White, minority, and lower socio-economic status students. This gap has been found to be most significantly affected by race and ethnicity, with a brief review of some of the potential causes. Ladson-Billings suggests avoiding too much focus on the gap, because most of the solutions are short-term in nature, and instead to look at the longer standing “educational debt” akin...