Tags: art/music, bodies, crime/law/deviance, gender, immigration/citizenship, inequality, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, religion, sex/sexuality, burqa, burqa ban, chandra talpade mohanty, femininity, feminism, male gaze, niqa, postcolonialism, racism, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2010
Length: 2:17
Access: YouTube

Summary: This clip features a protest against France's recent Burqa ban, which went into force in 2011. The new law stipulates that anyone caught wearing the niqab or burqa in public could face a fine of €150, or be forced to take lessons in French citizenship. The performance of the two women in the video challenges the resistance/subordination binary, which typically frames discussions about what it means when non-Western women don the veil. By sexualizing their veiled bodies, the women challenge ideas about whether wearing a veil is necessarily an expression of women's oppression, just as it challenges whether wearing hot pants and high heels is necessarily an expression of women's ability to resist oppression (Note that the ban went into force after the video was made). Moreover, by performing a sexualized femininity they are apparently able to navigate the streets of Paris without being disciplined, and their short walk raises a number of provocative questions. First, to what extent are the two women able to “break” the law because they have garnered the approval of the heterosexual male gaze? How might people react to these women if they did not fit the archetype of attractive females? This clip provides an excellent window into Chandra Mohanty's acclaimed paper “Under Western Eyes.” Mohanty takes issue with the way that Western feminists assume that wearing the veil is a symbol of oppression and fail to give a voice to the women who wear these clothes. It is unfair for Westerners to assume that the way they themselves dress is a symbol of empowerment without unpacking the systems of patriarchy that inform Western modes of dress. Viewers can also consider whether Westerners have the authority to make judgments about the way non-Westerners dress. Does the government have the right to create laws that ban certain styles of dress? If so, why aren't the religious symbol laws enforced for nuns who wear veils?

Submitted By: Pat Louie

Tags: inequality, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, integration, segregation, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2013
Length: 2:17
Access: ABC news

Summary: As ABC news reported, "For any teenager, prom is a monumental night, but for students at a Georgia high school, it has been more than 40 years in the making. For the first time ever, students at Wilcox County High School, in Rochelle, Ga. danced together at a prom that wasn’t segregated. For decades, the school board has avoided officially endorsing prom festivities, instead relying on parents to host and control invitations leading to year after year of two dances — one for white students, and one for the black students. Students have lobbied over the years to end the practice. This year, a group of Wilcox County seniors decided to take matters into their own hands." The students successfully organized their own prom event, attended by "nearly half" of the school's seniors. However, white parents and/or students organized another segregated whites-only prom. This serves as an example of how racial segregation continues to be reproduced in everyday life through the actions of students and parents, and supported through institutions (i.e. schools). These different actions illustrate competing racial ideologies, or the frameworks for understanding race that either legitimate and justify racial difference or challenge existing race relations. While we do not hear from proponents of the racially segregated prom, viewers can speculate on how and why those individuals might explain and justify their actions. Viewers can be encouraged to reflect on how racial segregation continues to persist in neighborhoods and cultural events such as this prom. Like many other videos here on race/ethnicity, it serves as another example of how race continues to shape social outcomes today.

Submitted By: Vicky Herbel

Tags: art/music, intersectionality, lgbtq, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, sex/sexuality, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 4:12
Access: YouTube

Summary: This poem, performed by two young women in the youth poetry competition Brave New Voices, is an excellent way to introduce students to the concepts of intersectionality and Oppression Olympics. "Oppression Olympics is a term used when two or more groups compete to prove themselves more oppressed than each other." Intersectionality is the theory of thought that draws attention to the ways in which inequalities are intersecting and interlocking, and thus proves the difficulties associated with comparing one group's experience with oppression to another's. The poem specifically chronicles what happens when members of the African American community and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community engage in comparisons of who has had it worse. While the practice of comparing the harms of racism to homophobia isn't new, as sociologist Eric Anthony Grollman points out in this blog post, "the supposed black-versus-gay divide is old, and frankly a little tired." Indeed, as Grollman and the youth poets show, the experiences and activist histories of these two marginalized groups have much in common. Such insight supports what the bisexual Caribbean-American activist poet June Jordan wrote in her book, Some of Us Did Not Die: "Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine." In addition to pairing this video with Jordan's work, the clip would work well with scholarship by other intersectional thinkers such as Audre Lorde, Allan Johnson, and Patricia Hill Collins.

Submitted By: Kendra Barber

Tags: art/music, bodies, gender, intersectionality, race/ethnicity, sex/sexuality, feminism, rap music, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2007
Length: 4:25
Access: YouTube

Summary: In this music video, rap artist Missy Elliott fills the void in the discussion of pro-sex black feminism. Historically, black voices have been excluded from the sex-positive feminist revolution. In part, the marginalization of black voices is a product of a colonial past that has stereotyped the black body as always already hypersexual (see Saarjite Baartman). As a result, black academics have taken up a “politics of silence” to resist these stereotypes. A potential site to begin the discussion of a pro-sex black feminist discourse is rap music (Skeggs 1993). The female rappers “talk back, talk black” (hooks 1989) to the colonialist system that attempts to contain the expression of women’s sexuality. In Missy Elliott’s hit song “Work It” (lyrics here), she expresses her own kind of sexuality, effectively creating a dialogue for us to rethink our analyses of black women’s sexuality. How does Missy (re)claim her body as a site of desire and empowerment? How does Missy establish herself as an active sexual subject in the song? Does this challenge patriarchal notions of female sexuality? How does she subvert traditional understandings of the black body? Does Missy challenge conventional (white) beauty standards (i.e. celebration of hips, large butt etc)? How, if at all, does Missy’s music differ from other female artists and, specifically, other popular women rappers? Does Missy create a language for other black women to start understanding and theorizing about their sexual experiences? Can we understand the black female body as separate from representations of Saartje Baartman? How does this enhance our understanding of active black female desire? Do you think that rap music is a legitimate medium to begin theorizing about black sexual scripts?

Submitted By: Pat Louie

Tags: du bois, methodology/statistics, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, theory, africana studies, public sociology, 21 to 60 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 36:51
Access: YouTube

Summary: On February 17th, 2012 three intellectual panels convened at the University of Pennsylvania in conjunction with the posthumous appointment of Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois as Honorary Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies. The video features a wide array of remarks and reflections from a number of intellectuals, including Tukufu Zuberi, Lawrence D. Bobo, Mary Patillo, Anthony Monteiro, Howard Winant, and Elijah Anderson. Excerpts from the video can be readily used to spur discussions about particular aspects of Du Bois' scholarship. The video begins with sociologist Tukufu Zuberi (1:40 to 4:10) outlining many of Du Bois' early accomplishments, including the fact that in 1895 he became the first African American to receive a PhD in history from Harvard University. Highlighting Du Bois' methodological contributions, sociologist Aldon Morris (4:45 to 6:00) discusses Du Bois' advancement of empirical methodologies, and later in the video Zuberi (10:00 to 11:10) notes that Du Bois arrived at a number of his remarkable insights in Black Reconstruction of Democracy in America, despite being barred from primary source materials due racial segregation. Underscoring the enduring significance of Du Bois' work, sociologist Howard Winant (13:40 to 15:10) notes the fact that Du Bois reclaimed the narrative that African Americans were central in the movement to achieve an advanced democracy, and Winant explains that Du Bois' work powerfully argues that Blacks were also centrally involved in their own emancipation. At the 11:10 mark, Zuberi argues for the significance of Du Bois' work in the face of persistent racism within the academy. He notes that despite the fact that Du Bois' work foreshadowed a number of celebrated sociological works from authors like Immanuel Wallerstein, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Theda Skocpol, Du Bois is not cited by these authors. Finally, a number of panelists passionately argue that Du Bois was one of the first truly public intellectuals. For instance, Stephanie Y. Evans (6:00 to 6:50) likens Du Bois to a conductor, facilitating communication and exchange between intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike. At the 6:50 mark, Mary Patillo similarly discusses the way Du Bois' concepts have permeated outside the academy, and how his work has contributed to black studies movements that seek to make connections between campus and off-campus struggles.

Submitted By: Tukufu Zuberi

Tags: crime/law/deviance, race/ethnicity, rural/urban, drug war, incarceration, poverty, prisons, school-to-prison pipeline, the wire, 21 to 60 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 24:11
Access: Al Jazeera

Summary: This short news documentary examines the relationships between race, poverty, incarceration, crime, and the war on drugs. It focuses on Baltimore, and its very high crime rates, showing how poor residents get attracted to crime and the drug business as a means of economic survival. With the war on drugs and its harsh prison sentences, many poor people are getting put behind bars. But despite harsh prison sentences and incarceration, these individuals continue to be drawn into selling drugs. Ed Burns, one of the writers behind The Wire, says "I don't know how much progress is being made because we're not dealing with the root causes." For example, jobs have been leaving Baltimore (and other US cities) since the late 1960s as a result of suburbanization and deindustrialization. Donnie Andrews (the real-life inspiration for Omar, a popular character from The Wire) notes that when people come out of prison, they are not able to find affordable housing, jobs, or health care, so people are likely to end up back in crime to survive. But rather than addressing the causes, since Nixon started the war on drugs in the early 1970s, our means of addressing the problem is through punishment and incarceration. This has caused an explosion in the US prison population, and the US now incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. This issue of drugs and incarceration also has a significant racial dimension. Despite the fact that black people are only slightly more likely to be involved in drugs than white people, they are seven times more likely to be incarcerated for drugs. The narrator notes that "if current incarceration rates remain unchanged, 1 in 3 black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime." In the video, Ed Burns adds that it is not really a war on drugs, but a war on black people (which has also now spread to a war on poor whites) that was started to take away energy from the Civil Rights movement. Viewers may be encouraged to reflect on what is the objective in the war on drugs? To what degree is it successful? What kind of policies would help rehabilitate perpetrators and help them to avoid returning to prison? For a shorter 2008 news clip (6:40) that more narrowly focuses on drug use in Baltimore, see here.

Submitted By: Paul Dean

Tags: culture, discourse/language, inequality, knowledge, media, race/ethnicity, colonialism, neocolonialism, postcolonialism, privilege, rule of colonial difference, white savior industrial complex, subtitles/CC, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 3:45
Access: YouTube

Summary: The broad claim that certain groups have power over others—that racism, sexism, and classism exist—is hardly controversial. Yet mention privilege and tempers flare. But privilege is simply the other side of the power coin. Just as some racial groups are systematically oppressed and marginalized, other racial groups are systematically privileged, and just as forms of oppression vary, so too do forms of privilege. For instance, a white privilege might simply be living in a world where one can count on being paid more on average than Blacks or Latinos. While pay gaps may be easily quantified, forms of privilege that are less amenable to statistical analysis exist as well. Consider the male privilege of being immersed in a media environment that consistently depicts men as important and powerful. Or consider the white privilege of living in a media environment that assures audiences that white heroes are nearly always capable of transcending adversity. The above clip is from "Africa for Norway" and parodies the narrative typically deployed by Western charity organizations in their campaigns to secure funds and drum up support. It draws attention to a kind of Western privilege, a privilege both forged from and bound up with the experience of colonialism, the application of the rule of colonial difference (i.e., representing the 'other' as inferior and radically different), and Western racism. Whether it is the Kony 2012 campaign or the 1985 song "We Are the World," the story being peddled to publics is of a compassionate West saving the 'other' from unbearable poverty or some other grave injustice. Author Teju Cole famously named this dominant cultural narrative and the practices it calls forth the white savior industrial complex. While the components of the narrative can be spotted in the viral videos of these NGOs, Cole points out that it can also be found in countless Hollywood films, such as Out of Africa and The Constant Gardener. Time and again, moviegoers and YouTubers are asked to consider a rather narrowly defined hero. He's a compassionate white westerner, who stands apart in his uncommon ability to recognize the basic humanity of the many black and brown foreigners he has encountered while on his journey through an unfamiliar land; and against the advice of civilization, he heroically commits himself to the mission of saving these people from their plight. Although the perception that it is a criticism against charity will likely be a point of contention with viewers, the real critique, which is aimed at neocolonialism and the privileges it supports is incisive. It is a peculiar kind of Western privilege to be able to wade through the media pool each day, soaked by the various incarnations of this narrative, a day full of subtle reminders of one's intrinsic goodness and extraordinary abilities.

Submitted By: Lester Andrist

Tags: knowledge, media, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, internet, subtitles/CC, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 5:27
Access: Vimeo

Summary: This video, created by sociologist Jessie Daniels, explores how race is depicted on the Internet. It begins by arguing that how we think about the Internet is a utopian vision where "this is no race, there are no genders, there is no age ... there are only minds" (quoting from an MCI commercial). But as Daniels notes, "the reality is different. Rather than a 'raceless' utopia in the US today, hate groups are on the rise." The video illustrates quantitative data showing the rise of hate groups, and questions how this might be related to the Internet? Contrary to popular belief, Daniels argues the issue is not with people using the Internet to "recruit" people into hate groups; instead, the issue is how the Internet shapes knowledge and how people perceive realities of race. Everyday people use the Internet to spread racist messages. They create content themselves and share it with friends, normalizing common stereotypes. For example, the video documents "The Funny Racist" on Twitter with over 366,000 followers. She notes that one of the top searches for Martin Luther King, Jr, is a cloaked site that appears legitimate but was created by Storm Front, one of the largest hate groups online. Daniels argues the danger of this new medium is not its capacity to recruit people into hate organizations but through shaping knowledge, such as people's understanding of slavery or civil rights leaders. She argues we need more than "Internet literacy" but also "racial Internet literacy." Viewers may reflect on why Daniels argues that racism is built into the Internet? How does the Internet create new opportunities for promoting racism, and does this reflect the idealist notions we often associate with the Internet and "free information"?

Submitted By: Paul Dean

Tags: prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, cultural appropriation, representation, stereotypes, white privilege, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2013
Length: 2:16
Access: YouTube

Summary: This video is from the 2013 Mummer's Parade, a long-standing tradition of people dressing up in elaborate costumes to perform on New Year's Day in Philadelphia. Here, the Venetian New Year's Association enacts a show they call "Indi-Insourcing." It begins with 4 white males dressed as Indians with telephone headsets and unveiling the "New Delhi Call Center," while dancing Gangnam style. Images of the Taj Mahal are in the background. Next, a teepee is brought forward and a group of white men dressed as American Indians emerges on toy horses to take over the Indians and transform the call center into the "New Jersey Call Center" (emphasis added). They are joined by a larger number of other (white) people dressed as American Indians, and perform a group Gangnam dance while the commentators describe their performance theme as "bringing jobs back to America ... a tribe of American Indians emerge with the Tomahawk chop; they charge, surround and take over the call center." Referring to the costumes and performance, the second commentator describes "the posh culture of Gangnam" and that if PSY were here today, "he could really see how fancy we [Philadelphians] could go." Both the performance and the commentators' narration are highly problematic and can be used to expose white privilege, racism, and stereotypical portrayals of the groups mentioned above. Viewers may consider not only how the performers portray the groups through stereotypes, but the irony of American Indians in taking over Indian call centers. After all, it was white Europeans who colonized Native American land and destroyed their way of life, and it is white Americans who claim to have special rights to jobs that are outsourced to places like India. Through images of the "Tomahawk chop" and use of horses to "take over" a call center, the performers appropriate and misrepresent American Indian culture while disregarding the role of whites and their colonial past. Viewers should also consider the significance that the parade organizers allowed this performance, and the commentators had a positive reaction to it. For example, the female commentator refers to the costumes and performance as "fancy" (consistent with the event's descriptive language) while disregarding the underlying racist stereotypes and messages. What does this acceptance of such depictions suggest about American culture and how white privilege operates?

Submitted By: Nickie Michaud Wild

Tags: crime/law/deviance, inequality, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, violence, criminology, new york city, police, racial profiling, 11 to 20 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 13:15
Access: YouTube

Summary: [Trigger Warning: this clip contains profanity and some incidents of violence.] "We're gonna go out there and we're gonna violate some rights." These are the words of a police captain, as reported by a New York Police Department (NYPD) veteran of over 10 years. This exposé produced by The Nation reveals the NYPD's blatant racial profiling/stop-and-frisk practices. The video begins with an audio recording of an actual stop-and-frisk incident of a Latino man for "looking suspicious," then moves to interviews with anonymized police officers about the policy and practices involved with it. Not only does the video expose the racial profiling of the targets, but the pressure put on line officers by sergeants, lieutenants, and captains to continue issuing summons and performing arrests, both to keep their jobs and to get promoted through the ranks. This video would be excellent for any course on criminology, justice studies, race, or law to discuss the intersection of power, race, inequality, and/or corruption.

Submitted By: Anonymous