Whiteness Around the World: Skin Lightening Products Invade Britain
 
U. S. residents are familiar with the history of skin lightening products marketed to African Americans. They may not know that such products are also popular around the world, with the latest controversy coming over the advertisements for "Fair and Handsome," as recounted in this article from the BBC website. Its another reminder that white supremacist attitudes and the "internal colonization" they produce are still pervasive across the globe as well as in the U.S. (To download the article in Adobe PDF format, click here.)
 New Book Documents "Whites Only" Policies for Whole Towns
When Signs Said 'Get Out'
In 'Sundown Towns': Racism in the Rearview Mirror
By Peter Carlson
Read the article...
The New York Times reports that
Top Jobs in College Sports Still Go to White Males, Study Finds White men continue to hold the vast majority of the most powerful jobs in college sports, according to a report released on Wednesday by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, at the University of Central Florida.
The report, "The Buck Stops Here: Assessing Diversity Among Campus and Conference Leaders for Division I-A Schools in 2006," was based on a study that found that while slightly more members of minority groups were hired as presidents, athletics directors, and head football coaches of colleges in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I-A during 2005, nearly 90 percent of all of those positions were still held by white men and women.
The 11 conference commissioners in Division I-A, who control the purse strings to the Bowl Championship Series in college football, are all white men. Read the article by Brad Wolverton... or go to the complete report. For a related story, see the article in The Nation about Anthony Prior's new book, The Slave Side of Sunday, that exposes the racist structure of white supremacy in the control of professional football.
Wilmington White Supremacy Uprising Documented in New Report
http://www.nytimes.com/ By JOHN DeSANTIS
WILMINGTON, N.C., Dec. 18 - Beneath canopies of moss-draped oaks, on sleepy streets graced by antebellum mansions, tour guides here spin stories of Cape Fear pirates and Civil War blockade-runners for eager tourists.
Only scant mention is made, however, of the bloody rioting more than a century ago during which black residents were killed and survivors banished by white supremacists, who seized control of the city government in what historians say is the only successful overthrow of a local government in United States history.
But last week, Wilmington revisited that painful history with the release of a draft of a 500-page report ordered by the state legislature that not only tells the story of the Nov. 10, 1898, upheaval, but also presents an analysis of its effects on black families that persist to this day. Read the article...
Visit the web site of the Wilmington Race Riot Commission
Is "King Kong" A Racist Film?
  
This question has been asked ever since the release of the original King Kong film in 1933, and has been posed again with the release of the 2005 blockbuster directed by Peter Jackson. Peter Edelstein writes in his Slate.com review: "Jackson doesn't deal with the implicit racism of King Kong—the implication that Kong stands for the black man brought in chains from a dark island (full of murderous primitive pagans) and with a penchant for skinny white blondes. But the director has supplied a fatherly black man (Evan Parke) on the crew to look after a teenage misfit (Jamie Bell): See, blacks aren't all out of place in civilization! Some even take care of whites! " Read James Pinkerton's column on the question. Or David Rosen's essay on racial issues in the historical context of the original film. Or Kwame McKenzie's reflections on the film's depiction of "black hyper-sexuality and colonial hysteria."
Hurricane Katrina and White Supremacy
 
Margaret Bourke-White's famous 1937 photo "At the Time of the Louisville Flood" seems to sadly forecast what we would see in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina exposed, again, America's shameful system of racial oppression. It would be impossible to reference all the hundreds of articles on this topic, but here's one excellent example, by Jean Hardesty:
"Why were so many white Americans shocked to see the reality of New Orleans? I believe that, in large part, the message put out by the "New Republicans" - that a colorblind approach to public policy is moral and just - is powerful because so many White people want to hear and believe it, not because it can't be easily refuted. Until those of us who benefit from white privilege have to confront the consequences of that privilege, it is possible for us to believe the white supremacist line that people of color are victims of their own moral failings, not of government and private policies. In order to maintain this myth, it is imperative to keep those consequences out of sight." Read the rest of her article "HURRICANE KATRINA AND STRUCTURAL RACISM: A LETTER TO WHITE PEOPLE"
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Whiteness Studies: Deconstructing (the) Race 
"White Privilege" discussed on TV
"Focus
on Diversity," a weekly interview show, featured this
site's author along with Milwaukee Community Journal editor
Mikel Holt (pictured at left) in a lively discussion on
"White Privilege: Myth or Fact." A lengthy clip
from the show can be viewed via their web site:
"Whiteness
and the Multicultural Literature Classroom"
Jane Elliott's "Blue-Eyed/Brown-Eyed" Series. Considered by many to be America's foremost diversity educator, Jane Elliott's career began with her controversial "blue-eyed/brown-eyed" exercise, in which school children were divided by eye color to learn first-hand the effects of discrimination. A variety of documentaries and workshop tapes demonstrate the dynamics of white privilege and other forms of bias. Highly recommended for use in classrooms and in provoking discussion in diversity training workshops.
The Color of Fear. The Color of Fear is an insightful, groundbreaking film about the state of race relations in America as seen through the eyes of eight North American men of Asian, European, Latino and African descent. In a series of intelligent, emotional and dramatic confrontations the men reveal the pain and scars that racism has caused them. What emerges is a deeper sense of understanding and trust. This is the dialogue most of us fear, but hope will happen sometime in our lifetime.
What Does It Mean To Be White? Derald Wing Sue, Professor of Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, presents a series of interviews with White Folks and People of Color. The variety of reactions are both provocative and powerful as they reveal how unaware and uncomfortable many White folks are in answering the question. Why do many White folks rather not think about their whiteness? Why are they uncomfortable with the question? Why do they deny its importance in affecting their lives? Answering these questions requires "making the invisible visible" by deconstructing white privilege. Dr. Sue defines white privilege and uses examples to indicate how white privilege serves to keep Whites relatively oblivious to how it has the opposite effect on persons of color: harms, intimidates, oppresses and alienates.