Voice of Consciousness

20 Marks of a Criminal Record [Poem] -- A Tribute to Devah Pager (1971-2018) I have to  write:  Devah Pager died  of pancreatic cancer  two days ago, y'all —  a write up in the Times spells out an in-depth obituary of some type called,  “When a Dissertation Makes A Difference” —  Wow.  Pancreatic cancer.  I need to eat better,  one .  Which one  will take me out?  Two .  Why live?  Three.   Because you have so much  to give  with only one  lifetime to give it,  four .  It is ok  to feel these ways,  right now —  she was that enormous  for everyone,  five .  Why I have to be Ok  with getting up at 3am  and trying to write --  papers do not write  themselves,  six .  Because she still with us  through the work she created,  seven...

It is my delight to return to the blogosphere with news from The Race and Policing Project. In the first week of April 2017, we will host our first public event ! We are still rounding up co-sponsors (feel to volunteer!), so the flyer may be updated closer to the event. Just wanted to get the word out there! Please visit our Facebook Event page and share the word widely!  The State of Orange: Policing Practices Impacting People of Color An Interactive Panel Thursday, April 6, 2017 5:30-7:00pm PAIS 290 On Thursday, April 6, 2017 from 5:30-7pm, The Race and Policing Project will present "The State of Orange: Policing Practices Impacting People of Color” in PAIS 290. “The State of Orange” is an interactive panel that will address surveillance practices shaping ethnoracially-marginalized communities through immigration, deportation, national security, and mass incarceration policies. In particular, we will highlight pedagogical approaches to addressi...

There was a time I thought this paper would never be published. As the rejections piled on, I grew more emotionally detached from the paper. I also grew more frustrated: Where would this paper find a home? At least six anonymous peer reviewers said that this paper should not be published. I am guessing six, which reflects one from every journal to which I sent the paper, including the journal that finally accepted the paper. In due time, however, after seven years, five journal rejections, and countless revisions, a portion of my M.A. thesis -- "Race and Trust: The Case of Medicine" -- is finally published in Social Science Research  (SSR). The journal released the online first version of the article  --  Disaggregating Ethnoracial Disparities in Physician Trust  -- on Monday, July 13, 2015. I am unsure of when the printed article is set for publication. Aside from a few Facebook updates, I've been fairly quiet about this final leg of the peer-revi...

after reading Adolph Reed Jr.'s eloquently-written  recent piece on #RachelDolezal  and continuing to see people (including Reed) trip themselves all up in making (in)comparisons between transgender and transrace people, i felt the need to rehash -- in a more cohesive manner -- some comments i recently made to my inner circle on the identity politics of #RachelDolezal. the ascriptive/achieved dichotomization, and the fluidity between the two, is too simplistic to make to gain clarity on the complex problematics of #RachelDolezal's identity politics. race and gender are both sociopolitical constructs. but, unlike gender’s corollary to sex, there is no precise biological language for talking about race. and that is the conceptual incongruence with comparing transgender with transrace identities. the race concept encompasses both biological and sociopolitical meanings in everyday society, whereas the women’s movement has been (mostly) successful at divorcing gender from sex. t...

Note: On December 10, 2008, The Herald Times published a guest column written by me titled, "Despite transformative moments, racism still common in America." This is a shortened version of the blog I posted online in November under the title of "Transformative Moments: Election 2008 and The Continued Saliency of Race." If you have a subscription to HeraldTimesOnline.com, you can follow the online commentary about the editorial (see link above). I have reproduced the original column at the end of this blog. Over the past week, I have received noticed that bloggers were concerned that I omitted the fact that 95% of blacks voted for Obama when highlighting the following: ...Today, the symbolic meaning of race is changing again: some whites look beyond race (44 percent of whites voted for Obama), some blacks garner... Bloggers felt that the 95% figure was relevant to my discussion of transformative moments and racism. The discussion that ensued has allowed me to hone in...

A browser for blacks, a heart drug for blacks. Where do we draw the line between the salience of race to social life and racism? The creation of the Blackbird technology smells of the racial controversy around the marketing of Bidil--a heart medication--as a black drug . Admittedly, the issues surrounding Bidil are a bit more complex. Steven Epstein states: Having failed to demonstrate the drug’s efficacy in the overall population, BiDil’s manufacturers reinvented it as an “ethnic drug” and tested it only on African Americans. Nonetheless, both of these instances clearly capture the capitalistic economic aspects of niche marketing and the implicit (and explicit) acceptance of attitudes that blacks are a monolithic group--whether it be the presumption that all blacks have the same physiological makeup or that all blacks seek the same kinds of information. But to what extent are they evidence of racism? Before I go any further, I must define how I use the term racism. According to the U...

Acts of Omission I am typically not one to speak of anything political publicly. However, in the back rooms, I have been privy to a conversation that sympathizes with the highly-publicized fight for gay marriage but finds itself unable to overlook the acts of omission that have come with it. As a person who has lived the predominant part of her adulthood in rural areas as a triple minority, I find several things lacking in the modern gay rights movement that if addressed would assert a more inclusive and progressive agenda. First , I would like someone to take more seriously the prosecution of hate crime statutes that already exist, statutes that have been unable to cease the physical brutality enacted against gay bodies, particularly racialized ones. Second , it would also be nice if someone attended to the spread of AIDS to previously-uninfected communities, an epidemic spread that is exacerbated by the inadequate screening practices of prisons, the patronizing attitudes of scient...