I just read “Some Arizona University Programs Threatened by Proposed Ban on Affirmative Action” by Peter Schmidt (author of Color and Money), and it reminded me of a few questions I asked of a few Black and Hispanic lawyers during a recent meeting. Here are paraphrased versions of the questions I asked.
1) Why would a [...]
Here’s another lengthy comment I submitted to the discussion thread for Cobb’s “The First 22 Rules” and that I thought was good enough to share here as a blog post.
I’m not a huge fan of Theodore Roosevelt for several reasons, but I find myself returning to his writings, especially his famous speeches “The Strenuous Life” [...]
One of the best bloggers on my blogroll published the thought-provoking “Whites Need to Take Responsibility for Their Racism” this morning. Below is a copy of the comment I left in the post’s discussion thread.
I certainly agree that Euro-Americans should be more critical towards themselves, as a group, for their racist thoughts (aversive racism), behaviors [...]
Like most Americans, my body is a beneficiary of admixture and my psyche has been heavily influenced by cultural syncretism. My mother, a descendant of 19th Century U.S. immigrants, is a Euro-American from the Midwest. My father, a descendant of Africans who were forcibly transported to North America, is an African American from the South. [...]
The handy Oxford American Dictionary application on my Mac defines ’successful’ as “accomplishing an aim or purpose,” “having achieved popularity, profit, or distinction.” I won’t write about the etymology of the word; it’s a bit boring.
What does the word ’successful’ really mean to most people? The most common way people attempt to define successful [...]
We may study ethics in comfortable university classrooms and persuade ourselves that deontological systems are superior to consequentialist systems or vice versa. Some of us may believe that virtue ethics offers us a more robust ethical toolkit than its two main competitors because it might enable us to escape some of the tricky problems that [...]
Poverty is defined as living in a family of four on less than $19,784 per year.1 The burdens of living in low income families are not distributed equally across all ethnic groups in the U.S.2 And Black Americans “had the lowest median income in 2005, $30,858, which was 61 percent of the median for non-Hispanic [...]
I like to read aphorisms, poems, personal essays, and short stories more than lengthy novels, religious works, or masterpieces of social science and natural science. And How Much Land Does a Man Need?, by Leo Tolstoy, is my favorite short story. You gotta love my man Tolstoy. He knows how to get his point across, [...]
Physical attractiveness1 is a form of capital. Attractive people are favored over plain or unattractive people.2 And, there is substantial agreement across cultures concerning what is physically attractive.
While we inherit many unalterable bodily attributes from our parents, our levels of physical attractiveness, given the genetic cards we were dealt, are alterable. Some alterations, such as [...]
If you have taken a few psychology courses or read a psychology textbook, then you probably know about Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment. Many believe the findings from this experiment help explain what happens to good people when they are acculturated in bad social environments. Ordinary people are good at justifying their unjust [...]