I’ve recently received a couple of emails promoting the New York Academy of Medicine’s Color Our Collections week, February 5-9. I haven’t really paid too much attention to the emails until today when I thought that a post on the diversity blog might be in order. The body of this post takes the form of a colloquy.

“Color our collections, eh? That sounds like an interesting initiative to highlight diversity in rare materials collections”

“And it’s promoted by the National Academy of Medicine—this is going to be really interesting! I’m sure there is loads of fascinating material relating to people of color in the collections of medical institutions!”

“Just think of all the medical literature surrounding traditional and indigenous medical practices.”

“Yes. I’m also thinking early journals and travel narratives of European medical practitioners as they ventured into new territories and encountered indigenous peoples.”

Click. Scroll.

“Oh, I was wrong! It’s nothing to do with diversity—it’s a bunch of coloring books from libraries”

“But I still want to do a blog post”

[Read more…]

Several people from the UCI Libraries attended yesterday’s event from the Office of Inclusive Excellence to ‘Celebrate Inclusive Excellence’ (mentioned previously in this space). The goal of the event was to describe some of the resources available at UCI, and also to talk specifically about sexual harassment and DACA—both highly topical subjects. The form the event took was as follows:

• an introduction by Doug Haynes, Vice Provost for Academic Equity, Diversity & Inclusion;
• a talk by Michele Goodwin, Chancellor’s Professor of Law, describing the situation that led her to write the piece Complicit Bias: Sexual Harrassment and Communities that Sustain it;
• a talk by Theresa Truman, Assistant Director/Deputy Title IX Officer in the Office of Equal Opportunity & Diversity. She described resources available at UCI for faculty, staff and students who are dealing with discrimination or harassment;
• a panel discussion including Truman; Oscar Teran, Director of the Dreamers Resource Center, which provides assistance to undocumented immigrants; and a graduate student who is in the DACA program (whose name I didn’t write down).

There were a couple of common threads running through all part of the program, including the fact that all of the discussion in the room was to an extent ‘preaching to the choir’. Here are two facts that I thought worth repeating:

• The Dreamers Resource Center here on campus provides free legal assistance not just to students, but also to the student’s immediate family, based on the fact that students perform much better academically when they come from a stable family situation (ie, not one in which their parents are getting deported without legal assistance)
• At UCI, students who are eligible for DACA are 60% Latino, 30% Asian and Pacific Islander (mostly South Korean), and 10% rest of the world (ranging from sub-Saharan Africa to western European backgrounds)

[Read more…]

We are just over halfway through Filipino American History month.

The month is being marked by a number of different organizations, including:

• Filipino American National Historical Society – This year, the theme is the 70 years since the US-Philippines Military Bases Agreement, which “provided for continuation of the imperial relationship between the United States and the Philippines, and the proud service and settlement of thousands of Filipinos who were enlisted in the US military, particularly US Navy sailors.”In previous years, this month has been the occasion for the organization to write about:
  • The Significance of 1946 for Filipina/o Americans (spoiler alert: the independence of the Philippines was granted on July 4, 1946, and the same year brought access to naturalization for the Filipina/o American community and ended Filipino exclusion);
  • The Immigration and Naturalization act of 1965, of which “The Philippines, after Mexico, has been the largest beneficiary”
  • The making of the History Month resolution, which can be read here.(note that as I write this their website is down, so all the above links go to the cached version of their website)
• Filipino American History Month on Facebook, which is posting daily information about relevant history and events (museum exhibitions, talks, publications, etc)
• University of California Press observed the month on its blog, with information about Filipino-Americans in California and Hawaii, and particularly their involvement in (and leadership of) labor movements
• Unrelated to the occasion, here’s a list of the best Filipino restaurants in LA

For further reading, see the following books, all in Langson:

• Little Manila is in the heart : the making of the Filipina/o American community in Stockton, California / Dawn Bohulano Mabalon (2013)F870.F4 M33 2013
• Creating masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila : working-class Filipinos and popular culture, 1920s-1950s / Linda España-MaramHD8085.L73 E86 2006
• Common destiny : Filipino American generations / Juanita Tamayo LottE184.F4 L68 2006
• Re-positioning ethos : rhetorics of hybridity and the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) / by Terese Guinsatao MonbergE184.F4 M66 2002a  (a thesis from RPI)
• Filipino reporter : New York/Manila newsweekly (online)
• Faith, family, and Filipino American community lifeBX1407  (online)

 

I thought this article was really compelling and wanted to share it. It gives a powerful example of people working across groups to increase understanding and mutual respect– and provides several concrete examples:

… Rida Hamida and Ben Vazquez decided to take their “Tacos at Every Mosque” Muslim-Mexican unity tour to a seemingly unlikely place: Rosarito. The seaside town … has a mosque, Masjid El Noor, and they welcomed Hamida and Vazquez to set up a taquiza earlier this month during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha for prayer, preaching, and feasting.

Hamida visited the mosque before the big day. Upon arriving, she was surprised to find out her cell phone service wasn’t working. After tirelessly driving around trying to find the mosque. she asked for help. She stepped out of her car and asked five men nearby for help. One of them, Joe Velasquez remembers the introduction well. “I wouldn’t even come up to myself and ask for help because of the stereotypes of us looking like gangsters,” he said.
…

I don’t know what immediate lessons this offers us (besides perhaps inviting more food trucks to library events… for diversity reasons!), but it’s a great article.

There’s obviously been a lot of discussion this past weekend about the (anti-)diversity memo that’s recently circulated at Google. See, for instance, the LA Times articles Google VP denounces worker’s views on women: ‘Diversity and inclusion are critical to our success’  and Here’s what Google workers are saying about an employee’s controversial diversity manifesto. It was at the bottom of this second article that the following creative defense of diversity was quoted:

 

Where do you keep your ketchup? Refrigerator, Cupboard, Other?

— brian rose (@brianrose) August 5, 2017

Race, gender, orientation, language, age, geography, personal junk, lots more, informs how we solve problems. So where we keep our ketchup:

— brian rose (@brianrose) August 6, 2017

If you run out of ketchup and you’re a fridge person, you might use mayo or mustard bc those are nearby. If cupboard, maybe malt vinegar.

— brian rose (@brianrose) August 6, 2017

So the more diverse the backgrounds in your circles, the more associations, ideas, possible paths there are towards solving hard problems.

— brian rose (@brianrose) August 6, 2017

Personally, I don’t have any ketchup in the house. I don’t know what that says about my commitment to diversity. But I do put both mayo and malt vinegar on my fries.

This is a couple of weeks old, but…

Jack Shaheen dies; scholar persuaded Disney to alter ‘Aladdin’ as he fought Hollywood’s racial stereotypes

Jack Shaheen, a prominent writer, scholar and activist who persistently — though diplomatically — challenged negative stereotypes of Arabs in film and television, has died at age 81.

…

“There is no escaping the Arab stereotype,” Shaheen wrote in the preface to his 2001 book “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People,” before digging into what he said was the unrelenting portrayal of Arabs and Muslims as barbaric, uncultured, wealthy and unspeakably violent.

“These notions are as false as the assertions that blacks are lazy, Hispanics are dirty, Jews are greedy and Italians are criminals,” he wrote in “The TV Arab,” a painstaking study of hundred of television shows, from sitcoms to cartoons.

See books and videos by Shaheen in the UCI Libraries. There’s an intriguing sounding DVD (in the MRC), Reel bad Arabs : how Hollywood vilifies a people / a Media Education Foundation production ; directed by Sut Jhally ; produced by Jeremy Earp. The summary note is:

Throughout its history Hollywood has portrayed Arabs as buffoons or bandits. The video seeks to rectify this sterotyping by comparing it to other forms of racist imagery and by suggesting alternative narratives that treat the Arabs as human, not demons

If you don’t click through to the article, the title of this post is from his daughter.

The RBMS (Rare Books and Manuscripts) conference last week in Iowa City was on the theme of ‘The Stories We Tell’. A large part of the conference was themed around the idea of making sure that the materials held in libraries’ special collections and archives are broad, diverse, and reflective of the population– not just filled with the stories of dead white men (as several presenters put it).

One of the most provocative speakers was Safiya Noble, who teaches at UCLA (and is about to move to USC). She’s just written a book entitled The Algorithms of Oppression, and her theme was the ways in which Google embeds and perpetuates racist and misogynistic themes. Professor Noble’s Twitter feed is here, her website is here, and this is a recent video of hers:

 

I’m not 100% convinced by what she was saying, but I’m not sure if that’s because (a) I am too forgiving towards Google; (b) I don’t notice the themes she’s talking about because I’m blind to them; (c) I’m part of the problem not the solution; or (d) a combination of all of these things. I tried a number of the searches that she mentioned while she was speaking, and they didn’t seem to give the results she was talking about. But Google has become far more personalized and bespoke in the past couple of years, so possibly this is a result of that change.

Nevertheless, it was a very interesting and provocative talk about a resource that we all rely on extensively.