USC pledges new steps to increase diversity, multicultural understanding

By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times

Amid national student protests over racial bias, USC announced Monday that it would direct new funds, launch discussion forums and appoint several key staff members to spearhead efforts to increase campus understanding of multiculturalism.

"Universities should be spaces committed to showing the promise of diversity and helping everyone recognize, appreciate and respect difference," Michael W. Quick, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, wrote in a letter to the USC community.

Read the story here.

Related content:

• Occidental Faculty Weighs System for Reports of Microaggressions (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
• Brown to invest $100 million to address racism (Providence Journal)

Study: Workplace Diversity Must Include Buy-In From Whites

Diverse Issues in Higher Education
by Associated Press , January 18, 2011

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Organizational efforts to create and maintain an inclusive multicultural environment often face resistance by Whites, says a University of Michigan researcher.
“Without the support of Whites, organizations and educational settings will fail in their attempts to navigate and manage the complexities of diverse work forces and constituencies,” says Dr. Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, an associate professor of management and organizations at Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “In the face of the dramatic projected growth in demographic diversity, such failure could have severe economic, social and political consequences.

Full Story: http://diverseeducation.com/article/14628/

The rising tides of xenophobia

The Boston Globe
By James Carroll October 25, 2010

‘THE APPROACH [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side by side and to enjoy each other . . . has failed, utterly failed.’’ This statement at a political rally last week by German Chancellor Angela Merkel was greeted by a standing ovation from her listeners. She was speaking of how Germany’s immigrant population, mainly Turks, remains socially marginal. Using “we’’ to refer to the nation’s majority population, she continued, “We feel tied to Christian values. Those who don’t accept them don’t have a place here.’’
Hello? The 5 million Muslims living in Germany were on notice, but Merkel’s remarks reverberated across the continent — and the ocean. On both sides of the Atlantic, a rising tide of xenophobic hostility toward immigrants is threatening to swamp the foundation of liberal democracy. As if out of nowhere, American politics, too, shows this. Merkel’s overt affirmation of “Christian values’’ as a note of national identity, for example, has an echo in the sly deriding of the separation of church and state that came last week from Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell. Supposedly a gaffe, her “Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?’’ was actually code — a message to American Christian nationalists who understood her very well.
When Nevada candidate Sharron Angle told Hispanic students in Las Vegas, “I don’t know that all of you are Latino. Some of you look a little more Asian to me,’’ she was subtly upholding a white template of American identity. You “others’’ all look the same to “us.’’ Code again, not a gaffe. Angle and O’Donnell can seem like fringe characters, but broad public discourse (Juan Williams, writer of the civil rights classic “Eyes on the Prize,’’ flaunting his fear of Muslims) suggests that race and religion are back as notes of qualification for full citizenship.

Full Story: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/10/25/the_rising_tides_of_xenophobia/

Fear of a ‘Multicultural’ Nation

truthdig.com
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/fear_of_a_multicultural_nation_20100210/
Posted on Feb 10, 2010
By Marcia Alesan Dawkins

Last Thursday night former Congressman and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo made opening-night remarks at the inaugural National Tea Party Convention in Nashville. Tancredo fired verbal shots at Barack Obama, Sen. John McCain and “the cult of multiculturalism,” stating that people who “could not spell the word vote or say it in English” had elected the president. And that Obama’s election reveals the need for us to “have a civics [or] literacy test before people can vote in this country.”
Tancredo is wrong. United States political history reveals our long-standing tradition in this area. In “Before the Mayflower,” Lerone Bennett Jr. recounts how literacy tests were first employed at the federal level as part of the immigration process in 1917. Southern state legislatures adopted literacy tests once African-Americans were granted citizenship rights under the 15th Amendment, as part of the voter registration process. As practiced, the literacy test became notorious for denying suffrage to African-Americans. Adopted by a number of Southern states, the tests were applied in a patently unfair manner and were used, along with the poll tax, to disfranchise many literate Southern blacks while allowing many illiterate Southern whites to vote.
The literacy test—combined with other discriminatory practices that kept African-Americans from attending schools, from particular modes of transportation, from attaining mortgages and from careers in public service—effectively disfranchised the vast majority of people of color in the South from the 1890s until after the middle of the 20th century. Southern states abandoned the literacy test only when forced to by federal legislation in the 1960s. This legalized discrimination caused suffering and turmoil for all parties involved, especially during the slavery period and the Jim and Jane Crow segregation era. Tancredo’s call for the return of literacy and civics tests suggests that those (black and brown) who voted for Obama are incapable of making informed political decisions and are influenced primarily by identity politics. Moreover, it denies the fact that the majority of voters who elected Obama were white.
Then there’s the issue of affirmative action. Like many other reactionary politicians, Tancredo has fallen victim to the misperception that affirmative action policies have done away with institutional racism and moved society beyond equal access to opportunity and into an era of “reverse racism” and discrimination. This has resulted in anti-affirmative action legislation such as California’s Proposition 209, Washington’s Initiative 200 and Ward Connerly’s various racial privacy initiatives.

Full Blog Post: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/fear_of_a_multicultural_nation_20100210/