http://www.readthehook.com/stories/2007/03/01/BRAZEN-annoyingWhitey.rtf.aspx

THE BRAZEN CAREERIST- Are you racist?: Reconsider comments at work

Published March 1, 2007 in issue 0609 of the HooK.

[color="red"]By PENELOPE TRUNK

PENELOPE@PENELOPETRUNK.COM

One of the most dangerous ideas in the workplace today is that racism is gone. It's not.

Princeton econ prof Jesse Rothstein
http://www.princeton.edu/~jrothst/

[color="Red"]Jesse Rothstein (Economics and Woodrow Wilson School), Stephanie McCurry (History), Christine Boyer (Architecture), [color="Red"]Craig Arnold (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering), [color="red"]Larry Rosen (Anthropology), [color="red"]
Trudy Schupbach (Molecular Biology), John Burgess (Philosophy)

http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:qw17EwsZA8EJ:www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpd/DeanOfFaculty/person_FILES/Jesse.Rothstein.html+Jesse+Rothstein&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=15

acknowledges racist thinking, even today. "Some people think racial discrimination ended in 1972," he says, "and that segregation persists because minorities cannot afford nicer neighborhoods."

In fact, Rothstein found that there's a threshold for the percentage of minorities living in a city, and
[color="Blue"]once a city crosses that threshold, white people start leaving. In terms of white flight, Rothstein says, "There's a real difference between a school with 5 percent minorities and a school with 6 percent."

These are the people you work with: white people who leave a school district if it isn't white enough. No one wears a percentage sign on their shirt to let you know where they fall on the continuum of racist thinking, but we all fall somewhere.

I've written before about subtle discrimination. There's cultural agreement that it's not okay to be racist in an overt way, which means that the racism goes to places that are hard to pinpoint. It persists in under-the-radar ways. Here are some other examples.

A University of Chicago study found we judge people who might be African American more harshly than others.

A Vanderbilt study found that immigrants who had lighter skin make more money than those with darker skin.

The advertising industry is so suspect in its hiring practices that the New York City Commission on Human Rights recently issued subpoenas in an investigation of systemic discrimination against African Americans.
(Not yet enough niggers on your TV ads?)

What can a white person do to improve the situation? Start with herself, of course. The more you understand your racial prejudices, the less they'll show up at work. In the meantime, here are a some annoying things that white people say that African Americans wish they wouldn't.

1. Don't praise someone as articulate, as if you're surprised. There's been a lot of dicusssion about U.S. Senator Joe Biden calling his colleague Barak Obama articulate. My friend says he has experienced this problem many times in his life, but would never come out an say anything because he'd be labeled "too sensitive." He quotes Penn professor Michael Dyson: "Historically, articulate was meant to signal the exceptional Negro. The implication is that most black people do not have the capacity to engage in articulate speech, when white people are automatically assumed to be articulate."

2. Don't discuss politics. It's a minefield of offensive and inappropriate comments. The number of political subjects that have underlying race issues makes politics too risky to contend with at work. Talking about politics is healthy for society, sure, but it doesn't mean it's the right thing to do at work.

3. Don't make racial jokes or comments against any race. Often whites think it's okay to joke with a black coworker about Asian, Latinos, etc. This makes most people of color uncomfortable and also think "If whites joke with me about Asians and Latinos, what are they doing when they're with them?"

4. Don't say "you people" when referring to people of another ethnicity. It creates a division between you and the other person.

And finally, here's a story that illustrates how careless white people are at the office: "I recently changed positions within the same organization and willingly took a job in an office in a predominately black neighborhood. Whenever we have joint office meetings or are in the main office, only my white counterparts ask, 'How are things going over there (code for 'I wouldn't be caught dead over there, do you feel safe, has your car been stolen?')?' This question comes from people who never spoke to me before, and it was an every-meeting type question. In one meeting I responded with, 'I don't have a problem working around or with black people.'" No one has asked since.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05297/594198.stm

Economist's study on school competition stirs debate
Monday, October 24, 2005

By [color="red"]Jon E. Hilsenrath, The Wall Street Journal

Five years ago Harvard's Caroline Hoxby,

a rising star in economics, wrote a paper that reached an unusual conclusion: Cities with more streams tended to have schools with higher test scores.

Today her work is a widely cited landmark in the fierce national debate over free-market competition in public schools. And it's at the center of a bitter dispute with another economist that is riveting social scientists across the country.

Her adversary is Jesse Rothstein, a young professor at Princeton, who says her study is full of flaws. In a rebuttal to her critic, Dr. Hoxby wrote of his work: "Every claim is wrong." She has also accused him of ideological bias. Dr. Rothstein, in turn, says she resorts to "name-calling" and "ad hominem attacks" on him.

The unusual spat has put a prominent economist in the awkward position of having to defend one of her most influential studies. Along the way, it has spotlighted the challenges economists face as they study possible solutions to one of the nation's most pressing problems: the poor performance of some public schools. Despite a vast array of statistical tools, economists have had a very hard time coming up with clear answers.

...Although her father, Steven Minter, was an official in the Carter administration Education Department,
Looks like a jew nigger mix.

He also spent over 15 years in governmental positions: Under Secretary for the United States Department of Education during President Carter's administration; Commissioner of Public Welfare for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from 1970-1975; between 1960 - 1970 rose through the ranks from caseworker to Director of the Cuyahoga County Welfare (1969).
He holds a master's degree in social administration from the Mandel School at Case Western Reserve University and a B. A. in education from Baldwin-Wallace College. (Pretty good, eh Whitey? A B.A. in education and they make you Undersecretary of Education!)

she has become a favorite in Republican circles for producing statistical evidence that competition improves schools. "This is a person who is smart, who is logical, who is committed and who is dedicated," says Rod Paige, President Bush's first Secretary of Education. Dr. Hoxby also is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, the right-leaning research center affiliated with Stanford.

Dr. Rothstein, 31, is the son of Richard Rothstein, a former textile-union organizer who's now a lecturer at Columbia. Father and son have both worked closely with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The son got interested in the streams paper while studying for his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley.

...The rejoinder irked his defenders. "Her nasty, vicious response is really about shutting down debate," said [color="Red"]
Lawrence Mishel,

president of the Economic Policy Institute. The group has sparred with her before. A book co-written by Dr. Mishel and Richard Rothstein, Jesse's father, dedicates a section to challenging her work on charter schools.