By Akilah Monifa
December 18, 2001
With Christmas right around the corner, many children have video games on their wish lists. The violence of these games bothers me, as do their representations of people of color and women.
A recently released report by Children Now's Children & the Media Program analyzes race and ethnicity, violence and gender in video games and finds some surprising numbers.
While the percentage of African-Americans characters in video games is greater than the percentage of African Americans in the population, black characters played stereotypical roles. Only 4 percent of African-American characters appeared as heroes, compared with 87 percent of white characters.
The study shows that 83 percent of African-American males were portrayed as competitors in sports games, while 86 percent of African-American females were non-action and non-competitor characters.
African-American female characters were also more likely than any other group to be victims of violence. Their victimization rate was 86 percent, compared to white females who were at 45 percent. In general, female characters were more likely than males to scream and to wear revealing clothing.
African-American characters were also the most verbally aggressive, screaming, taunting and insulting in many of the games.Latinos don't fare well, either. Only 2 percent of the characters were non-white Latinos, and none were Latina. Every one of the Latino characters was in sports games, usually baseball. What's more, 83 percent of the Latinos were shown exhibiting physical harm and pain after an injury, such as colliding into a wall while trying to catch a pop fly.
Children's exposure to violent media, including video games, could lead to future aggressive behavior and desensitization to violence, according to a recent study by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Children who play video games are being sent negative messages about violence, gender and race.
As many children find video games under the tree this Christmas, they should be made aware that these depictions of people of color are far from reality.
Akilah Monifa is a free-lance writer living in Oakland, Calif. She can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.
Tuesday, December 18, 2001
Wednesday, October 31, 2001
Lesbian Review of Books
Fall 2001
Canada Takes the Lead
BYLINE: Monifa, Akilah
SECTION: Vol. VIII, No. 1; Pg. 6; ISSN: 1077-5684LENGTH: 974 words
HIGHLIGHT:Canada: Has made great strides in legal treatment of gays and lesbians books discuss social movements and laws affecting their statusby Akilah Monifa
Are We "Persons" Yet?: Law and Sexuality in Canada By Kathleen A. Lahey. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, 474 pp., $80.00 cloth, ISBN 0-8020-4205-8. $24.95 paper, ISBN 0-8020-8062-6.
Lesbian and Gay Rights in Canada: Social Movements and Equality-Seeking 1971-1995 By Miriam Smith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, 211 pp., $50.00 cloth, ISBN 0-8020-4391-7. $17.95 paper, ISBN 0-8020-8197-5.
We all recall what it is like literally to be less than human, less than a person. The United States of America has a history with slavery and human beings in various instances being divided and counted as less than the whole person they were. Our neighbors to the north, Canada, have in many ways made remarkable strides in the legal treatment of gays and lesbians. These volumes remind us of where they have been, how far they have come, and that there is still much work to be done.
The concept of Are We "Persons" Yet? derives from the notion that before 1929 women were not considered person. In that year, The Privy Council of Canada declared that women were "persons" under the British North America Act. There has yet to be a similar anointment of personhood on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and transgendered people in the country. Of course, as in the United States and other countries, progress has been made toward more rights for LGBT communities, but that is not the same as equality. Queers are of course a minority of the population women, although a literal majority, certainly have not been major political power brokers in Canada or elsewhere.
Lahey, a professor and Queen's National Scholar, Faculty of Law, also has a cross-appointment at the Institute of Women's Studies at Queen's University. She chronicles first the manner "in which basic legal rights and human rights were initially denied to sexual minorities in Canada" (xiii). She made the decision to begin there because although there was a general human and civil rights movement, it excluded queers until recently. Queers in Canada relied solely on human rights codes for protection. But even with these "protections," no human rights complaint brought forth was ever resolved in favor of the queer complainant.
Then along came the Charter of Rights and subsequent lawsuits to determine whether sexual minorities were included in the charter. The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that lesbians and gay men were included in the charter and there could be no discrimination based on sexual orientation. But of course bisexuals, transsexuals, and transgendered folk were not included in the Supreme Court ruling.
Lahey makes an interesting race-based analogy with discrimination and denial of personage of another group in Canada, the Aboriginal peoples, who are governed by the Indian Act and are also not afforded full and equal person status. The link between race/civil rights and overall human rights with queers is land some scholars have feared to tread. Lahey goes there, and with success. For the reality is that the legal arguments are the same.
Lahey notes that "private consensual adult gay sex was decriminalized in 1929" (26), so queers do not have to worry about the onus of criminal prosecution and incarceration. But of course this still leaves the larger civil problems around equality, immigration law, inheritance law, and same-sex marriage, as well as the widespread exclusion of queers from government censuses and other statistical surveys.
Lahey ends her well-researched and documented tome with a comparison to the laws of Canada's southern neighbor, the United States of America. Lahey is historical without being academic or dry. Her greatest gift is the clear connection and analysis of discrimination based on sexual orientation and/or other queer status and that based on race, sex, sexuality, and/or marital status. If one is seeking a template for analyzing and deconstructing queer discrimination, Are We "Persons" Yet? would be an excellent guidebook. Canada is similar to many industrial countries in its schizophrenic treatment of queers and other minorities. And until we are all "persons," our legal, social, economic, and political freedom is limited.
Whereas Persons focuses on the legal arena with a nod to social movements, as its title implies, Lesbian and Gay Rights in Canada: Social Movements and Equality-Seeking, 1971-1995 focuses on actual social movements: Although Smith begins in 1971, the book focuses on "the ways in which the 1982 entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the constitution has influenced the political directions of the movement" (ix). The primary question is, how does legislation impact a social movement?
The movement was fledgling in 1971, but by the book's documented endpoint of 1995 external signs blossomed: organizing around AIDS and HIV, Pride celebrations in major cities, and the proliferation of lesbian and gay media. Smith compares the lesbian and gay rights movements against other social rights movements such as the women's movement and the disability rights movements. Clearly a key component to all movements in their quest for equality is to show their inherent humanness, their sameness yet acceptable differences. Smith concludes that laws like the Charter set the framework for social movements and allow "discourse, values, and self-understandings of movement actors" (156).
These two books work well in tandem to summarize, explain, and inform both the laws and social movements in Canada that lead to where the queer movement is today.
Akilah Monifa is a media trainer/public relations strategist at the SPIN Project in San Francisco, CA. She is also a freelance writer and a former law professor at New College School of Law.
Copyright 2001 The Lesbian Review of Books
Fall 2001
Canada Takes the Lead
BYLINE: Monifa, Akilah
SECTION: Vol. VIII, No. 1; Pg. 6; ISSN: 1077-5684LENGTH: 974 words
HIGHLIGHT:Canada: Has made great strides in legal treatment of gays and lesbians books discuss social movements and laws affecting their statusby Akilah Monifa
Are We "Persons" Yet?: Law and Sexuality in Canada By Kathleen A. Lahey. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, 474 pp., $80.00 cloth, ISBN 0-8020-4205-8. $24.95 paper, ISBN 0-8020-8062-6.
Lesbian and Gay Rights in Canada: Social Movements and Equality-Seeking 1971-1995 By Miriam Smith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, 211 pp., $50.00 cloth, ISBN 0-8020-4391-7. $17.95 paper, ISBN 0-8020-8197-5.
We all recall what it is like literally to be less than human, less than a person. The United States of America has a history with slavery and human beings in various instances being divided and counted as less than the whole person they were. Our neighbors to the north, Canada, have in many ways made remarkable strides in the legal treatment of gays and lesbians. These volumes remind us of where they have been, how far they have come, and that there is still much work to be done.
The concept of Are We "Persons" Yet? derives from the notion that before 1929 women were not considered person. In that year, The Privy Council of Canada declared that women were "persons" under the British North America Act. There has yet to be a similar anointment of personhood on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and transgendered people in the country. Of course, as in the United States and other countries, progress has been made toward more rights for LGBT communities, but that is not the same as equality. Queers are of course a minority of the population women, although a literal majority, certainly have not been major political power brokers in Canada or elsewhere.
Lahey, a professor and Queen's National Scholar, Faculty of Law, also has a cross-appointment at the Institute of Women's Studies at Queen's University. She chronicles first the manner "in which basic legal rights and human rights were initially denied to sexual minorities in Canada" (xiii). She made the decision to begin there because although there was a general human and civil rights movement, it excluded queers until recently. Queers in Canada relied solely on human rights codes for protection. But even with these "protections," no human rights complaint brought forth was ever resolved in favor of the queer complainant.
Then along came the Charter of Rights and subsequent lawsuits to determine whether sexual minorities were included in the charter. The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that lesbians and gay men were included in the charter and there could be no discrimination based on sexual orientation. But of course bisexuals, transsexuals, and transgendered folk were not included in the Supreme Court ruling.
Lahey makes an interesting race-based analogy with discrimination and denial of personage of another group in Canada, the Aboriginal peoples, who are governed by the Indian Act and are also not afforded full and equal person status. The link between race/civil rights and overall human rights with queers is land some scholars have feared to tread. Lahey goes there, and with success. For the reality is that the legal arguments are the same.
Lahey notes that "private consensual adult gay sex was decriminalized in 1929" (26), so queers do not have to worry about the onus of criminal prosecution and incarceration. But of course this still leaves the larger civil problems around equality, immigration law, inheritance law, and same-sex marriage, as well as the widespread exclusion of queers from government censuses and other statistical surveys.
Lahey ends her well-researched and documented tome with a comparison to the laws of Canada's southern neighbor, the United States of America. Lahey is historical without being academic or dry. Her greatest gift is the clear connection and analysis of discrimination based on sexual orientation and/or other queer status and that based on race, sex, sexuality, and/or marital status. If one is seeking a template for analyzing and deconstructing queer discrimination, Are We "Persons" Yet? would be an excellent guidebook. Canada is similar to many industrial countries in its schizophrenic treatment of queers and other minorities. And until we are all "persons," our legal, social, economic, and political freedom is limited.
Whereas Persons focuses on the legal arena with a nod to social movements, as its title implies, Lesbian and Gay Rights in Canada: Social Movements and Equality-Seeking, 1971-1995 focuses on actual social movements: Although Smith begins in 1971, the book focuses on "the ways in which the 1982 entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the constitution has influenced the political directions of the movement" (ix). The primary question is, how does legislation impact a social movement?
The movement was fledgling in 1971, but by the book's documented endpoint of 1995 external signs blossomed: organizing around AIDS and HIV, Pride celebrations in major cities, and the proliferation of lesbian and gay media. Smith compares the lesbian and gay rights movements against other social rights movements such as the women's movement and the disability rights movements. Clearly a key component to all movements in their quest for equality is to show their inherent humanness, their sameness yet acceptable differences. Smith concludes that laws like the Charter set the framework for social movements and allow "discourse, values, and self-understandings of movement actors" (156).
These two books work well in tandem to summarize, explain, and inform both the laws and social movements in Canada that lead to where the queer movement is today.
Akilah Monifa is a media trainer/public relations strategist at the SPIN Project in San Francisco, CA. She is also a freelance writer and a former law professor at New College School of Law.
Copyright 2001 The Lesbian Review of Books
Tuesday, March 20, 2001
Tim Wise: A White Man Speaking Black Truths
Tim Wise, thank you for first, pulling your head out of your ass, and then assisting others in doing so.
The e-mail and internet culture is amazing. Although I often receive the same tired joke on different days or the latest urban legend a few times in a week, rarely if ever do I receive the same post from several different sources on the same day. That all changed on Friday, March 16 when I received the same article from five different friends. And it continues to circulate among my African-American friends and other communities of color; over the weekend my 60-year-old stepmother from Pfleugerville, Texas (someone who has only used the internet and e-mail for one year) sent it to me again.
The article, written by Tim Wise and called "School Shootings and White Denial," was originally published on AlterNet.org. In the wake of Santee High's recent shooting, it argued that white Americans should not ignore the dysfunction and violence in their own communities. What those who sent it to me didn't realize is that I had read the article even before receiving the internet buzz, since my employer, the SPIN Project, shares an office and a parent organization with AlterNet.
Though Tim Wise is a white man, the piece was redistributed largely by people of color. Our reactions to it were universal: we couldn't believe that a white man was writing something that most of us had been quietly thinking and surreptitiously discussing for years. We questioned if Mr. Wise was in fact white or even a real person. Perhaps this was some sort of internet hoax, or maybe a person of color had written it anonymously, pretending to be white? After all, in this digital age anyone with access to an email address or a chat room can pretend to be someone they are not.
We were also shocked that the article was published. We believed that if someone of color said what Wise said he would be soundly criticized and accused of playing the race card in some fashion.
Of course what Mr. Wise did was in fact startling, for in my and the collective experiences of my friends, white people don't talk about race -- and when they do, they certainly don't self-critique.
Wise has received more than 5,300 e-mails in response to his article. Half of those responding self-identified as people of color. Of those, 95 percent were overwhelming positive, thanking Wise for telling the truth, even if some questioned the authenticity of his whiteness (so many, in fact, that Wise has an automated email response with a link to his photo). About one quarter of the email correspondence came from folks who self-identified as white. And 25 percent of the folks failed to self-identify racially, although from the tone and tenor, Wise believes most in this group to be white. Overall, most of the email was positive.
This flood of responses somewhat perplexed Wise, since he has written numerous articles on the same subject in the past. However, none of the previous articles had such an immediate news hook, and certainly none generated the buzz that this piece received. The LA Times wrote an article about the buzz, and numerous radio stations, the BBC, and television's Nightline have all been in contact with Wise about the article. It has brought more traffic than any previous article to AlterNet.org, has been posted on more than 300 listserves, and some folks report that they have received up to fifty copies of the piece.
Wise is also saddened that so many folks find his article refreshing. Despite the response from editors who rejected the piece, either because they disagreed with his premise or felt that it had been said before, the folks writing to him -- myself included -- had not seen this analysis in the mass media before.
The range of folk responding to the article was extraordinary, Wise says: "From nine-year-old children of color thanking me for removing the stigma of violence that has for so long been solely associated with them; from teachers, parents, folk from Santee, people in the suburbs even, thanking me for telling the truth about their community and possibly saving their kids lives; from 15-year-old black kids thanking me for taking the stigma off of them for once, and letting them know they aren't crazy; from ministers who say they are going to read the piece in the pulpit; even from a guy on the Columbine SWAT team who said the reason they were slow off the mark there was precisely because the commanding officers had no clue how to deal with a situation like this (with white kids whose parents had money)...the implication being that had this been a poor community of color, they would have moved more quickly."
Many of the correspondents are very personal and Wise is moved by the degree to which it has opened up dialogue around race and violence.
What this all shows me is that we do need to talk about race, all of us. And we people of color should not necessarily bear the burden of initiating that discussion. It seems that with all of the access to mass media and the internet, folks feel falsely comfortable with race relations. Even if we don't personally interact with people from other races, or don't have them integrally involved in our lives, TV, films and the internet give us a false notion of knowing one another. We can be virtual culture vultures through the media without any true understanding of the culture we are imitating.
Wise is right: "white people do live in an utter state of self-delusion." For example, most white folks know not to say n***er in mixed company, and they seem to understand the political ramifications of that. But in the last few weeks I have heard several white people say "nappy" when describing the texture of my hair and the hair of my 8-week-old daughter. Just because one has heard that word -- a word that in some contexts is an insult -- doesn't mean that it's appropriate to utter it to someone of African descent. White people don't understand the cultural context of the word and the nuances of the meaning.
Not only should we question the role of violence in our societies and how race does or does not get discussed around that, but we should also be discussing why most of us live largely segregated lives, and why when white people do interact with people of color, although they may not use a racial epithet, they frequently say something inappropriate about race. For if we could realize that differences are acceptable and despite what we may have learned about each other from mass media, we do not truly know each other and couple that with a real examination of ourselves, our societies would surely prosper. It is not the dialogue and critique that we should fear, but rather the dysfunctional silence.
The e-mail and internet culture is amazing. Although I often receive the same tired joke on different days or the latest urban legend a few times in a week, rarely if ever do I receive the same post from several different sources on the same day. That all changed on Friday, March 16 when I received the same article from five different friends. And it continues to circulate among my African-American friends and other communities of color; over the weekend my 60-year-old stepmother from Pfleugerville, Texas (someone who has only used the internet and e-mail for one year) sent it to me again.
The article, written by Tim Wise and called "School Shootings and White Denial," was originally published on AlterNet.org. In the wake of Santee High's recent shooting, it argued that white Americans should not ignore the dysfunction and violence in their own communities. What those who sent it to me didn't realize is that I had read the article even before receiving the internet buzz, since my employer, the SPIN Project, shares an office and a parent organization with AlterNet.
Though Tim Wise is a white man, the piece was redistributed largely by people of color. Our reactions to it were universal: we couldn't believe that a white man was writing something that most of us had been quietly thinking and surreptitiously discussing for years. We questioned if Mr. Wise was in fact white or even a real person. Perhaps this was some sort of internet hoax, or maybe a person of color had written it anonymously, pretending to be white? After all, in this digital age anyone with access to an email address or a chat room can pretend to be someone they are not.
We were also shocked that the article was published. We believed that if someone of color said what Wise said he would be soundly criticized and accused of playing the race card in some fashion.
Of course what Mr. Wise did was in fact startling, for in my and the collective experiences of my friends, white people don't talk about race -- and when they do, they certainly don't self-critique.
Wise has received more than 5,300 e-mails in response to his article. Half of those responding self-identified as people of color. Of those, 95 percent were overwhelming positive, thanking Wise for telling the truth, even if some questioned the authenticity of his whiteness (so many, in fact, that Wise has an automated email response with a link to his photo). About one quarter of the email correspondence came from folks who self-identified as white. And 25 percent of the folks failed to self-identify racially, although from the tone and tenor, Wise believes most in this group to be white. Overall, most of the email was positive.
This flood of responses somewhat perplexed Wise, since he has written numerous articles on the same subject in the past. However, none of the previous articles had such an immediate news hook, and certainly none generated the buzz that this piece received. The LA Times wrote an article about the buzz, and numerous radio stations, the BBC, and television's Nightline have all been in contact with Wise about the article. It has brought more traffic than any previous article to AlterNet.org, has been posted on more than 300 listserves, and some folks report that they have received up to fifty copies of the piece.
Wise is also saddened that so many folks find his article refreshing. Despite the response from editors who rejected the piece, either because they disagreed with his premise or felt that it had been said before, the folks writing to him -- myself included -- had not seen this analysis in the mass media before.
The range of folk responding to the article was extraordinary, Wise says: "From nine-year-old children of color thanking me for removing the stigma of violence that has for so long been solely associated with them; from teachers, parents, folk from Santee, people in the suburbs even, thanking me for telling the truth about their community and possibly saving their kids lives; from 15-year-old black kids thanking me for taking the stigma off of them for once, and letting them know they aren't crazy; from ministers who say they are going to read the piece in the pulpit; even from a guy on the Columbine SWAT team who said the reason they were slow off the mark there was precisely because the commanding officers had no clue how to deal with a situation like this (with white kids whose parents had money)...the implication being that had this been a poor community of color, they would have moved more quickly."
Many of the correspondents are very personal and Wise is moved by the degree to which it has opened up dialogue around race and violence.
What this all shows me is that we do need to talk about race, all of us. And we people of color should not necessarily bear the burden of initiating that discussion. It seems that with all of the access to mass media and the internet, folks feel falsely comfortable with race relations. Even if we don't personally interact with people from other races, or don't have them integrally involved in our lives, TV, films and the internet give us a false notion of knowing one another. We can be virtual culture vultures through the media without any true understanding of the culture we are imitating.
Wise is right: "white people do live in an utter state of self-delusion." For example, most white folks know not to say n***er in mixed company, and they seem to understand the political ramifications of that. But in the last few weeks I have heard several white people say "nappy" when describing the texture of my hair and the hair of my 8-week-old daughter. Just because one has heard that word -- a word that in some contexts is an insult -- doesn't mean that it's appropriate to utter it to someone of African descent. White people don't understand the cultural context of the word and the nuances of the meaning.
Not only should we question the role of violence in our societies and how race does or does not get discussed around that, but we should also be discussing why most of us live largely segregated lives, and why when white people do interact with people of color, although they may not use a racial epithet, they frequently say something inappropriate about race. For if we could realize that differences are acceptable and despite what we may have learned about each other from mass media, we do not truly know each other and couple that with a real examination of ourselves, our societies would surely prosper. It is not the dialogue and critique that we should fear, but rather the dysfunctional silence.
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