Leave it to CNN to find a new and charming tidbit on the single piece of summer Ivy League news everyone is already sick of hearing about. Apparently, Henry Louis Gates sent a bouquet of roses to neighbor Lucia Whalen as an “expression of gratitude” for calling the police, albeit mistakenly. Perhaps Gates felt a little guilty for all the racial and political brouhaha he and the Cambridge Police stirred up. After the incident, Whalen was accused by the media of racism and received multiple threats to her personal safety. At the recent press conference she held on July 29 to clarify what had been written in the police report, she defended herself by saying that she did not assume the two men in front of Gates’ house were black before she dialed 911. Cambridge Police spokesman Frank Pasquarello lauded Whalen for her actions:

She did the right thing. I applaud her. She did what we tell people to do: call when you see something suspicious. She did her civic duty.

Obama himself felt a little remorseful about the entire stupid situation, so–as everyone on and below Earth is aware of by now–he invited Gates and his arresting officer James Crowley to a beer summit at the White House last Thursday to promote better race relations. But perhaps in another poor act of judgment, Whalen remained the only person in the controversy uninvited to the reconciliation picnic hosted by the Commander-in-Chief. After being asked about the gathering, which has the entire American beer industry questioning its legitimacy/promoting their products, Whalen’s lawyer Wendy Murphy responded that her client “doesn’t like beer anyways.”

Is a gender discrimination debate heating up to add to the racial profiling fire?

In the news conference that preempted Wipeout last night, the Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times asked President Obama about Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s arrest and what it says about race relations in America. Here is his response (in text here):

Two minutes later, fat people were getting knocked around by giant bouncy balls. Read the rest of this entry »

And they say Boston is a racist city. Via The Globe:

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation’s pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling.

Police arrived at Gates’s Ware Street home near Harvard Square at 12:44 p.m. to question him. Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, had trouble unlocking his door after it became jammed.

…

Friends of Gates said he was already in his home when police arrived. He showed his driver’s license and Harvard identification card, but was handcuffed and taken into police custody for several hours last Thursday, they said.

Courtesy of the Washington City Paper‘s Sexist blog (yes, that’s its name) comes this look back at life in Cambridge at the turn of last century. A New York Times article from July 1900 titled “The Cubans at Harvard” is not about the school’s new smoking club, but a large group of Cuban girls spending the summer in Boston in order to learn English. And like most articles from the time, it’s absolutely ridiculous.

Blog author Amanda Hess does a good job ripping the unnamed Industrialization-era Times writer so we won’t run through the entire article. Here’s our favorite part:

The traditional beauty of the Cuban women has not been exaggerated by travelers. In the party now in Cambridge are numerous types of pure beauty; indeed most of them are above the average in looks. Among them is at least one girl with red hair, although the prevailing complexion is brunette.

It’s comforting to know that even back in 1900, the most important news on campus was, “Did you see the new hot chicks?” The article also stated that the showering of attention upon the young women was due in part to “their ignorance of our language”. That’s the same reason Valley Girls were so popular.

Sure this article is sexist and it’s slightly embarrassing for Harvard. But is it any more sexist or embarrassing than Larry Summers? You need to put these things in perspective.

Mixed Company of Yale, who’ve been busting out “exceptional a cappella since 1981,” recently released a music video called “Single Asians.” This cheeky rendition of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” starts out with some nice references to how much Asian girls like to study for their pre-med classes and engages increasingly stereotypical imitations of Asian women.  Aside from the geisha comment and the fairly shocking subtitled final verse, here’s the best phrase:

At the restaurant
I’ll taste your sauce
And you can slurp my sushi.
I like it raw,
So bring it on,
And me love you long time.

Readers have stuffed our inbox with pretty angry reactions about the video’s racist undertones and how it actually manages to be more misogynistic than Beyonce’s original version. One would think that the recent Dartmouth racist email extravaganza might have postponed any racy releases at least until next month. But given that all of the girls singing the song appear to be Asian, it’s no big deal, right?

We tried getting in touch with Mixed Company but they’re apparently cool with letting the video speak for itself. Read the song’s lyrics in full and post reactions after the jump.

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Tommy Brothers, Dartmouth ’11, came forward as the author of the incendiary email about President Jim Yong Kim in an email (kid loves to email) sent to the student body Friday afternoon. Brothers states:

I hope you can all understand that my intent was never one of malice against the Asian community, but an extremely crass attempt at hyperbolic satire. I was initially trying to criticize what I perceived to be surprise among many at the naming of an Asian-American President-Elect, Dr. Kim.

Brothers goes on to discuss all the ways people will make a big deal out of this for weeks to come:

I have started, along with the rest of the GGMM staff, to try to find ways that the whole community can learn from this experience. We are meeting with OPAL and the Pan-Asian Council to try to find a constructive strategy moving forward.

After the jump, Brothers promises to meet with you and help you heal, but only after finals. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday morning, Generic Good Morning Message (GGMM), a popular email update at Dartmouth commented on the selection of President Jim Yong Kim. The comments were racist as hell, and consequently made a lot of people very angry.  GGMM managed to pull out just about every Asian-directed xenophobic comment in the book.  Including saying of Dr. Kim’s election:

It was a complete supplies.

Oh yeah you can totally tell from Dr. Kim’s resume and his mission trips to Uganda that he definitely a super villain. Let’s not leave out the part where everyone in Asia—except the kids from Slumdog Millionaire, they will always live in the slums if the press have any say—works in a Chinese restaurant and steals jobs from white people with hands:

Unless “Jim Yong Kim” means “I love Freedom” in Chinese, I don’t want anything to do with him. Dartmouth is America, not Panda Garden Rice Village Restaurant.

Y’all get ready for an Asianification under the guise of diversity under the actual Malaysian-invasion leadership instituted under the guise of diversity. It’s a slippery slope we are on. I for one want Democracy and apple pie, not Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen.

Read the email’s full text along with an “explanation” offered by Dartmouth’s Office of Pluralism and Leadership—cough, sucks at their jobs, cough—after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like the rest of us, I used to sleep easy knowing that while racism pervades American society, it has never been a factor in the affairs of Ivy League universities. But then Harvard had to go ruin it for everyone. Last week, Harvard President Drew Faust announced the establishment of a committee to review allegations of racial profiling leveled against the Harvard University Police Department. The department has been accused of “unfairly stopping African-Americans students, professors and other members of the community.”

According to The Harvard Crimson, this review was formed in response to an incident where university police stopped a young African-American man using tools to remove a lock from a bicycle. After a conversation “laced with obscenities,” the police learned the young man was the owner of the bike and a Boston area high school student working at Harvard for the summer.

Discussing the review, Faust writes:

The review will include consideration of HUPD’s diversity training, community outreach, and recruitment efforts, as well as the ways in which Harvard’s past experience as well as best practices elsewhere can help inform our future practice.

After the jump, we’ll look at some of Harvard’s past experiences.

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Madonna Constantine is having a pretty bad semester. First someone hangs a noose on her doorknob, then she gets in trouble for plagiarism, then she suspects the whole thing is part of some university-wide institutionally racist conspiracy. And now a grand jury has authorized investigation into whether Constantine hung the noose herself or maybe with a li’l help from her friends. This is because symbolic nooses are basically Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards, the “quack quack seat back” of intellectual crime. I’m surprised James Frey hasn’t tried it, yet! The New York Post reports:

The revelation that Constantine had been under university review provides a possible motive for a sympathetic friend to consider placing a noose on her door – thinking it could whip up support for her, sources said.

“Sympathetic friend”? Hmm… does Anthony Kelley have an alibi?

Remember Columbia / Teachers Colllege Professor Madonna Constantine, she of the noose-hanging fame and plagiarism charges? Well, did she really do it? As for the noose, we’re not so sure. But what about the plagiarism? Yes, yes, yes she did! According to an outside report, Constantine stole work from no less than three different people in the past five years and did so in “numerous instances.”

Not so fast, says a truly insane column in today’s Spectator. According to a certain Anthony Kelley we can never really be sure:

No one aside from Teachers College Professor Madonna Constantine will ever know whether or not she actually committed plagiarism.The ultimate truth of a situation cannot be attained through investigations, especially when they are clouded with accusations of bias and prejudice.”

But can we ever even know that your name is Anthony Kelley, Anthony Kelley? What is truth, after all? 

Kelley is “drawn to” the view that “these allegations of plagiarism… are continuations of the historical devaluation of black womanhood and should be recognized as such.”

Still, we’ve got to give Kelley some credit here. He is so academically open-minded that he’s willing to play devil’s advocate:

Let us assume for a moment that Professor Constantine plagiarized the work of others. Instead of punishing (or “sanctioning”) her, we should be making special efforts to extend compassion to her and those who feel wounded as a result of her actions. We should be having community dialogues to emphasize the importance of academic honesty.”

In this perfect world Kelley imagines, you can steal your friends’ academic work so long as you’re willing to sit around a campfire and “talk” about it at some later point.

After the jump: more insanity.

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