Imagine this: “You are hereby notified that your right to vote has been challenged by a qualified elector…” Writing for the New Yorker (10/29/12), Jane Meyer tells about the man behind the myth that American elections are threatened by fraudulent voters. Many election experts say that Hans von Spakovsky, a conservative Republican lawyer who served [...]
Tag archives for national identity
When words matter (always)
I have my students in ES101 do an assignment in which they follow coverage of national debate/popular issue for instance in which race, class, and/or ethnicity come up in overt or covert ways. The purpose of the assignment is to get them to think about how the words we use shade the ideas we have [...]
category: Things Rhetorical
“Nonthreatning novelty,” or, you know, people
Tom Jacobs over at Salon.com takes note of the rise in roles for South East Asians on film and T.V. Why now? For the answer, Jacobs goes to Shilpa Davé, an assistant prof. of American Studies. She explains it this way: …demography, technology, global politics, and, of course, commerce. She notes that producers and directors are [...]
category: Things Critical, Things Rhetorical
This is what Arizona’s non-racial profiling law looks like
Arizona’s former governor Castro stopped for a third time by law enforcement to question him about his legal status.
category: Things Critical
Racist chants at high school basketball tournament
This, here, is what I am talking about. According to the story, the cheering coming from the Alamo Heights High School (a predominately white school in an affluent part of Houston) took a decidedly racist tone as the boys’s basketball team secured its win over over San Antonio’s Edison High School boys’ basketball team. Edison High School is a predominantly [...]
category: Things General
Pilgrims’s (near)Progress
White people love to talk about politics around the dinner table, which might explain the continuing popularity of the Thanksgiving holiday. More than any other day or time on the American calendar or schedule (which are typically governed by all manner of rules and directives about “polite company” and social taboos), Thanksgiving is the day when white [...]
category: Things Critical
American Identity on Display
Hillbilly Handfishin’ Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on Animal Planet. Check your local listings. In which Two locals named Skipper and Trent lead city folk and solid suburbanites on fishing trips and, all in all, offer a redneck safari experience. There is very much wading, plashing, ploshing, and galumphing through water that, legend has it, [...]
category: Things General
tags: national identity, television
on Talking Back via Identity Politics
Deedee Garcia Blase (R-AZ) forms the National Tequila Party in the hopes of motivating would-be Latino voters to get out to the polls in 2012 in response to the anti-immigration rhetoric of the Tea Party. Note that Garcia Blase is Republican, and note that National Tequila Party doesn’t overtly identify with either the Left or [...]
category: Things General, Things Rhetorical
tags: civil rights, class, discourse, ethnicity, history, immigration, latino/a, national identity, race
Industriousness + Productivity = The American Way!
Linton’s Week’s long-ish article on NPR, “Lazy In America: An Incomplete Social History” (1 July 2011), does a nice job of demonstrating how the tension between being productive and industrious versus having leisure time (or how one spends his/her leisure time) has continuously been used to promulgate the idea of one type of American over [...]
category: Things Critical
tags: history, national identity
Have “American Dream,” Will Travel
Julia Felsenthal’s brief but illuminating discussion of the uniqueness of the idea of the “American Dream” on Slate.com (10 June 2011), “The not-American Dream: Do other countries have national catchphrases?” stops a beat short when she aptly writes that “a central tenet of the “American Dream,” home ownership, may no longer be within reach,” because [...]
category: Things Critical
tags: national identity