March 4, 2013

March 4, 2013

Ending Racism in About an Hour

Tonight I attended the lecture "Ending Racism in About an Hour" which was given by W. Kamau Bell, of FX's Totally Biased.

It was a very good lecture and tied in well with Social Media Week and ISCORE.  Bell's presentation was a mixture of laughter and comedy and racism.  Bell interlaced the comedic aspect with very real notions of racism in our society.  Bell presented news stories in recent times, pictures and tweets that people have posted.  One was over Jeremy Lin, the basketball player.  We all remember "Lin-sanity" and how Jeremy Lin proved to be an excellent basketball player.  Well, Lin got into a slump where he started playing bad, and ESPN published an article entitled "Chink in the Armor."  As Bell showed a screen shot of the article, the crowd fell silent.  The context of the title was not appropriate and that was clear to everyone.

Bell emphasized that today's racism is completely different than racism of the 1950s and 1960s.  He told the crowd that he considered the stories of his mother's experiences with racism were "awesome."  He jokingly compared it to an action movie.  However, he contrasted, today's racism is more covert than overt.  People say things that are meant to be encouraging but come off as offensive.  As with the case of Jeremy Lin, a native of California.  Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream created a favor that attempted to celebrate the milestone that was Jeremy Lin with their "Taste the Lin-sanity" flavor.  It had fortune cookies in it.

Bell also went into detail about how the media created the term "post-racial."  It's a made up term, just like race is an invented notion.  Since Barack Obama became president, we have heard this "post-racial" term a lot.  America, Bell said, is in a post-racial era according to the media.  But is it?  Bell pointed out examples of sports teams and their logos: The Washington Redskins, the Atlanta Braves, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Cleveland Indians.  Bell commented that when asked about their team name, the Washington Redskins defended it by saying they had 81 years of tradition.  "Tradition?" Bell questioned, "Pretty sure the Indians were in American before 81 years ago."

Bell brought up other great points as well that really opened my eyes and reminded me of the things I learned in the ISCORE session I attended.  It brought both Social Media Week, especially with the Kansas game Twitter incident, and ISCORE together in a good way.

For anyone who wants to follow W. Kamau Bell on Twitter, his handle is: @wkamaubell.

Katie