Posted: Tue 25 Jul 2006 15:38 Post subject: culturally-flawed research fuels divisive news articles
I have one major criticism of this research article and the unfortunately countless newspaper articles covering it at a superficial level.
Mexican immigrants as well as Mexican-Americans have historically been sensitive to wrongful deportations. For example, more than 2 million families of Mexican descent, including over 1.2 million U.S. citizens, were deported during the Hoover administration of the 1930's, particularly from California and Texas. Wrongful deportations continued to a lesser extend up to the present day. Most will even remember, a whole movie was made about wrongful deportation of a Mexican-American in "I was born in East L.A." by Cheech Marin. The movie is on the lighter side but underscores a real cultural perception about wrongful deportations and a general unease with authorities by the Mexican-American community and in particularly recent immigrants.
The research article in question explains that recent Mexican immigrants were identified for the study by looking for Hispanic surnames in the telephone book. The article also reports that many of these phone interviewees had trouble understanding English and had to be interviewed in Spanish. In fact, over 95% of this population chose to be interviewed in Spanish, instead of English. A footmark in the research article explains that this was done by outsourcing translation of the questionnaire to a company in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Now to put all this together:
What will the recent Mexican immigrant in the largely Black/White South perceive when he gets a cold call out of the blue by anonymous "authorities" from a research center asking him, in non-campesino Spanish, certain questions regarding specific ethnic minorities in relation to whites?
He/she might hear something like "does the brown brother esteem the black brother over the white brother"?
The test subjects will undoubtedly project over the phone what they think the presumed "white" authority figure wants to hear. For this reason I think the particular research set-up introduces a significant artefactual bias.
Posted: Tue 25 Jul 2006 15:56 Post subject: Re: culturally-flawed research fuels divisive news articles
NoraBG wrote:
The test subjects will undoubtedly project over the phone what they think the presumed "white" authority figure wants to hear. For this reason I think the particular research set-up introduces a significant artefactual bias.
Welcome aboard, Nora. My goodness, you do like starting out with a bang! That is an outstanding observation. It reminds me of a study I did of many WPA writer's project interviews with former slaves. Subjects interviewed by White writers expressed love for ol' Massa. Their anecdotes focused on the happy times they had singing and dancing in the slave quarters. Subjects interviewed by Black writers told horrific tales of brutalty, of families being torn apart, of even children being hung by their wrists and lashed until the blood ran down their legs and dripped onto the floor from their toes. There is no way to tell which interviews were more factually accurate.
Posted: Tue 25 Jul 2006 16:08 Post subject: Re: culturally-flawed research fuels divisive news articles
fwsweet wrote:
NoraBG wrote:
The test subjects will undoubtedly project over the phone what they think the presumed "white" authority figure wants to hear. For this reason I think the particular research set-up introduces a significant artefactual bias.
Welcome aboard, Nora. My goodness, you do like starting out with a bang! That is an outstanding observation. It reminds me of a study I did of many WPA writer's project interviews with former slaves. Subjects interviewed by White writers expressed love for ol' Massa. Their anecdotes focused on the happy times they had singing and dancing in the slave quarters. Subjects interviewed by Black writers told horrific tales of brutalty, of families being torn apart, of even children being hung by their wrists and lashed until the blood ran down their legs and dripped onto the floor from their toes. There is no way to tell which interviews were more factually accurate.
Thank you for the welcome! Your analogy is quite interesting and obviously sounds like this is a general phenomenon the researchers should have been aware of! Can you point me to some names or references for some of these studies you mention? I'm intrigued.
Posted: Tue 25 Jul 2006 17:28 Post subject: Re: culturally-flawed research fuels divisive news articles
NoraBG wrote:
Can you point me to some names or references for some of these studies you mention? I'm intrigued.
There are many book-length collections of selections from the "slave narratives" (that is what they were called). For a sampling of such collections, just Google the 2-part phrase: ["slave narratives" "federal writers' project"].
The original primary source is Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. It is seventeen volumes and, I believe, is now available only on microfilm. The Library of Congress is a good place to start if you want to pursue the primary source. This link will take you to online lectures and explanations of the project, as well as to many selected slave narratives with photos, that are searchable and readable online.
My own research on the slippery objectivity of the slave narratives was never published. It was just one of those projects that never seem to jell. I still have my notes, though and I will be happy to make them available here when we get back home. (Mary Lee and I are babysitting our latest grandson in Ft. Lauderdale this week but we will be back home next Tuesday--a week from today.)
Incidentally, several of the impoverished Black writers hired by the WPA to record the slave narratives later became famous members of the Harlem Rennaisance, including Zora Neal Hurston.
Posted: Sat 29 Jul 2006 01:49 Post subject: Another thing.
The authors never released the actual wording of their questionnaire in Spanish as it was asked to these new immigrants. I wrote to them but still have not heard back. This is critical data necessary for interpreting the results.
It's sad how the press coverage focused on creating sensational headlines. I'd like to know more about the scholarship behind this study.
PPP: This is not about slave narratives but does touch on the difference in approach/findings of White/Black researchers...good book
Lost Delta Found
by John Morthland
In 1941 — just four years after the last of Robert Johnson's two sessions and three years after his death — a researcher from Fisk University in Nashville surveyed jukeboxes at the five black bars in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the heart of the Delta. The only artists appearing on all five were Count Basie, Fats Waller, Louis Jordan, Lil Green and Walter Davis. The closest thing to a down-home bluesman among the five is Davis, a lackluster St. Louis pianist whose saving grace was a doom-laden voice.
That's just one of the eye-openers in Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-42, in which editors Robert Gordon (author of Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters) and Bruce Nemerov (of the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University) exhume the long-lost writings of African-American scholars Lewis Wade Jones (a Fisk sociologist), Samuel C. Adams Jr. (then a grad student there) and especially John W. Work III (composer, musicologist, director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers). The book is a major addition to blues scholarship — to the study of blues scholarship, even — due especially to Work's contributions. For the two trips to Clarksdale that produced the study were the same ones during which legendary folklorist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress made his fabled field recordings of Muddy Waters, Son House, Willie Brown and Honeyboy Edwards, among others, and which ultimately formed the basis for Lomax's 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning The Land Where the Blues Began.
Ah, but there's some catches. This project to study urbanizing effects on Delta blacks was initiated by the Fisk scholars in response to a 1942 dancehall fire in Natchez that killed some 200 African-Americans, years later inspiring songs by Howlin' Wolf ("Natchez Burnin'") and John Lee Hooker ("Natchez Fire"). Work believed that studying Natchez and the Delta one year later would yield insight into the contemporary social context, performing styles and songwriting of music that was no longer necessarily traditional in nature (and he did find several Natchez songs by anonymous locals that predated the commercial tributes by Wolf and Hook). But the project was more or less commandeered by Lomax, whose accounts describe the Fisk trio primarily as the black faces he needed to help him gain access to a closely-knit community no longer bound to the plantations. And when he finally got around to writing his book on the subject a half-century later, he committed such academic sins as combining the two trips into one and making some rather dubious generalizations.
The study was supposed to yield a book, to be written by Work and edited jointly by Fisk and the Library of Congress; the musicologist submitted that book in the mid '40s, only to have it misplaced by the Library. It was found and lost again, and at some point Work apparently gave up on the whole idea. Finally, here it is. And what's most striking about the contrast between Work's writings and Lomax's is each man’s approach and tone. Though Lomax spoke some to the purported theme of urbanization changing black music — he's especially appalled by the gospel quartets then replacing the church's spirituals choirs — he seeks again and again to find the most primitive blues, and to speak to the oldest people with the most agrarian lifestyles. Work talks to the educated and uneducated alike, describing a socially diverse Delta. In short, Lomax wants to freeze the traditional, while Work wants to inspect what it's slowly evolving into. Where Lomax's observations are conversational, subjective and often romanticized, Work's are more cultural and sociological, based on hard data and scrupulous interviewing. They thus ring truer, even though Work, with much less reference material available at the time with which to double-check his findings, made more errors in terms of song titles (and even origins), name spellings and the like.
Yes, Work writes in an academic language that's not as much fun to read as Lomax's, but if you want a verite account of that world at that time, and the music it produced, trust Work. He's the true scholar; at the time, Lomax mainly recorded songs.
In showing a changing Delta, Work allows us to see how a region now associated with Johnson, House, Charley Patton and John Hurt was in fact quick to throw such artists over in favor of Basie and jazzy urban songstress Green. But this book also helps set the record straight on the very nature of blues scholarship. For example, it was Work who conducted the first two of the four Waters interviews that became a touchstone to blues historians; he'd presumably have done the others had Lomax not forced him out, and surely the information Lomax did get on his own came easier as a result of the foundation Work laid. It's a travesty that the man is only now getting the credit due him as a pioneering student of black music and the complicated social and cultural context that spawned it.
Since his death in 2002, Lomax's shining image as the white knight of traditional music has been tarnished repeatedly by critics who regard him more as a patronizing exploiter and manipulator of the naïve and dispossessed. Though still a minority viewpoint, the backlash is so harsh that sometimes it's possible to feel some sympathy for him. The web site for his archives, alan-lomax.com, carries impassioned defenses, some quite credible, against charges by Nemerov and Gordon. But overall, there's little doubt that the way Lomax treated Work and the Fisk scholars is enough to give all three of them the blues.
Posted: Mon 02 Feb 2009 18:44 Post subject: Re: culturally-flawed research fuels divisive news articles
NoraBG wrote:
fwsweet wrote:
NoraBG wrote:
The test subjects will undoubtedly project over the phone what they think the presumed "white" authority figure wants to hear. For this reason I think the particular research set-up introduces a significant artefactual bias.
Welcome aboard, Nora. My goodness, you do like starting out with a bang! That is an outstanding observation. It reminds me of a study I did of many WPA writer's project interviews with former slaves. Subjects interviewed by White writers expressed love for ol' Massa. Their anecdotes focused on the happy times they had singing and dancing in the slave quarters. Subjects interviewed by Black writers told horrific tales of brutalty, of families being torn apart, of even children being hung by their wrists and lashed until the blood ran down their legs and dripped onto the floor from their toes. There is no way to tell which interviews were more factually accurate.
Thank you for the welcome! Your analogy is quite interesting and obviously sounds like this is a general phenomenon the researchers should have been aware of! Can you point me to some names or references for some of these studies you mention? I'm intrigued. -Nora
Okay. I finally found the material in an old manila folder destined for the trash. The place to start is in James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (New York: Knopf, 1982). Try to find the book in a library, rather than buying it, because Chapter Seven, �The View From the Bottom Rail,� pp. 148-77 is the important one. The authors give some examples of conflicting slave narratives, and the chapter's endnotes tell where to find those examples and more. The rest of my notes are merely an annotated bibliography of several of the narratives.
The interviews with Susan Hamlin (or Hamilton) are the ones I mentioned above. When interviewed by a White researcher (who wrote her surname one way) she tells how much the slaves loved the master and how she never heard of any cruelty. When interviewed by the Black researcher (who recorded her with the other surname) she tells the horrific stories of whippings.
Last edited by fwsweet on Tue 31 Mar 2009 15:35; edited 1 time in total
if I elaborate , would you care?, your just going to ask me to elaborate on what I just elaborated on. All I know is people do these things to make others look bad. But in reality, everyone is doing it. Are you honestly going to tell me they dont do bad stuff anymore? wow.
Joined: 02 May 2006 {Posts: 443 } Location: Île-de-France
Posted: Sun 19 Apr 2009 19:31 Post subject:
Quote:
if I elaborate , would you care?, your just going to ask me to elaborate on what I just elaborated on. All I know is people do these things to make others look bad. But in reality, everyone is doing it. Are you honestly going to tell me they dont do bad stuff anymore? wow.
Please read the rules. Then, if you need to continue, elaborate clearly on what dispute you have with the article. You are violating the following rules:
1.2 Either Teach or learn
1.4 Do not get offended
3.6 State your thesis
4.7 Never defy a moderator.
This is a warning. If you respond in violation of any rules, you risk suspension.
if I elaborate , would you care?, your just going to ask me to elaborate on what I just elaborated on. All I know is people do these things to make others look bad. But in reality, everyone is doing it. Are you honestly going to tell me they dont do bad stuff anymore? wow.
My request for elaboration was a response to this statement:
Quote:
lol this is another liard up article trying to cover up all the garbage that white people do to blacks in the south, pure garbage
I should have been more specific. What I wanted to know was what evidence you had that the article's authors were lying and attempting to cover up all the garbage white people do to blacks in the south by publishing the article.
if I elaborate , would you care?, your just going to ask me to elaborate on what I just elaborated on. All I know is people do these things to make others look bad. But in reality, everyone is doing it. Are you honestly going to tell me they dont do bad stuff anymore? wow.
My request for elaboration was a response to this statement:
Quote:
lol this is another liard up article trying to cover up all the garbage that white people do to blacks in the south, pure garbage
I should have been more specific. What I wanted to know was what evidence you had that the article's authors were lying and attempting to cover up all the garbage white people do to blacks in the south by publishing the article.
no evidence at all, just the facts, racism still goes on in the south between whites and blacks just like it did in the 60s. Do you think Jena 6 is the only kind of case? Jena 6 was that kind of case that got onto the news. It's called diverting attention to the real problems.
if I elaborate , would you care?, your just going to ask me to elaborate on what I just elaborated on. All I know is people do these things to make others look bad. But in reality, everyone is doing it. Are you honestly going to tell me they dont do bad stuff anymore? wow.
My request for elaboration was a response to this statement:
Quote:
lol this is another liard up article trying to cover up all the garbage that white people do to blacks in the south, pure garbage
I should have been more specific. What I wanted to know was what evidence you had that the article's authors were lying and attempting to cover up all the garbage white people do to blacks in the south by publishing the article.
no evidence at all, just the facts, racism still goes on in the south between whites and blacks just like it did in the 60s. Do you think Jena 6 is the only kind of case? Jena 6 was that kind of case that got onto the news. It's called diverting attention to the real problems.
The fact that racism between whites and blacks exists in the south isn't proof that the article is some kind of diversion from real problems.
With respect to the Jena 6 case are you suggesting that the unprovoked beating of the white student as pay back for the hanging of a noose from a tree and the protests in support of those guilty of that behavior are examples of black on white racism? Just asking.
if I elaborate , would you care?, your just going to ask me to elaborate on what I just elaborated on. All I know is people do these things to make others look bad. But in reality, everyone is doing it. Are you honestly going to tell me they dont do bad stuff anymore? wow.
My request for elaboration was a response to this statement:
Quote:
lol this is another liard up article trying to cover up all the garbage that white people do to blacks in the south, pure garbage
I should have been more specific. What I wanted to know was what evidence you had that the article's authors were lying and attempting to cover up all the garbage white people do to blacks in the south by publishing the article.
no evidence at all, just the facts, racism still goes on in the south between whites and blacks just like it did in the 60s. Do you think Jena 6 is the only kind of case? Jena 6 was that kind of case that got onto the news. It's called diverting attention to the real problems.
The fact that racism between whites and blacks exists in the south isn't proof that the article is some kind of diversion from real problems.
With respect to the Jena 6 case are you suggesting that the unprovoked beating of the white student as pay back for the hanging of a noose from a tree and the protests in support of those guilty of that behavior are examples of black on white racism? Just asking.
I knew you would try to get politically correct, lets not talk about how one of the whites approached a black student after the case (WITH A GUN), and when the black students friends came in to protect the black guy they all got arrested. Let's not talk about that. We can go on and on, the fact of the matter is, that white on black racism, is the most prevalent in the south, what the heck is a latino going to do. I doubt it. 'Unprovoked', whats so unprovoked, about hanging a noose on a tree where blacks sit?
Okay, people. It is time either to end this discussion or move it to "Improving U.S. Society". The Latin America forum is not meant for discussion of White-on-Black racism nor for discussion of Black-on-White racism in the U.S. South. It is for threads about Latin America. Also, idealogical advocacy is also not allowed here. Since gs56ca was already warned once by the forum moderator, this may be considered a second warning.
I knew you would try to get politically correct, lets not talk about how one of the whites approached a black student after the case (WITH A GUN), and when the black students friends came in to protect the black guy they all got arrested.
Let's not talk about that. We can go on and on, the fact of the matter is, that white on black racism, is the most prevalent in the south, what the heck is a latino going to do. I doubt it. 'Unprovoked', whats so unprovoked, about hanging a noose on a tree where blacks sit?
They were arrested for beating a white student. The hanging of the noose was what provoked them to attack any radom white person. They felt justified in doing so because some other white people hung a noose from a tree.
Back to the topic at hand....As I asked before, what evidence can you muster that the study about Latino racial attitudes is some kind of diversion from what you call real problems-i.e., racism between blacks and whites?
Joined: 26 May 2007 {Posts: 425 } Location: San Antonio, Texas
Posted: Sun 26 Apr 2009 04:46 Post subject:
So whites hold a higher view of blacks than Latinos do - in the South. Not shocking at all. This is what I call "The Middle Bully Syndrome" (though I'm sure that there's proper terminology for it).
Think about it: You're in third grade. You take a bunch of crap from bullies. You know they look down on you. But, you see another kid getting bullied by the same bullies. You perceive him to be weaker than you. You start picking on this kid, hoping that it will take away the flack that the bullies are giving you.
In really, whites in the south don't "need" to look down on blacks, because it's not necessary for them to get ahead - they're already at the forefront. It IS, however, necessary for other non-black minority groups to look down on blacks in order to get ahead.
I knew you would try to get politically correct, lets not talk about how one of the whites approached a black student after the case (WITH A GUN), and when the black students friends came in to protect the black guy they all got arrested.
Let's not talk about that. We can go on and on, the fact of the matter is, that white on black racism, is the most prevalent in the south, what the heck is a latino going to do. I doubt it. 'Unprovoked', whats so unprovoked, about hanging a noose on a tree where blacks sit?
They were arrested for beating a white student. The hanging of the noose was what provoked them to attack any radom white person. They felt justified in doing so because some other white people hung a noose from a tree.
Back to the topic at hand....As I asked before, what evidence can you muster that the study about Latino racial attitudes is some kind of diversion from what you call real problems-i.e., racism between blacks and whites?
you know what your so totally right it was 'unprovoked'. Idiot. And the beat a random white kid, sure. lol. Anyways, and I will say this again, RACISM STILL EXISTS IN THE SOUTH AND WHITE PEOPLE ARE THE MAIN PROGENITORS OF IT. So, this article is a diversion from the main issue. If you can't see that, thats your problem.
Joined: 26 May 2007 {Posts: 425 } Location: San Antonio, Texas
Posted: Sun 26 Apr 2009 20:29 Post subject:
gs56ca wrote:
you know what your so totally right it was 'unprovoked'. Idiot. And the beat a random white kid, sure. lol. Anyways, and I will say this again, RACISM STILL EXISTS IN THE SOUTH AND WHITE PEOPLE ARE THE MAIN PROGENITORS OF IT. So, this article is a diversion from the main issue. If you can't see that, thats your problem.
Not the case. I live in San Antonio, and from my own observations, what they say about Latinos having more issues with blacks than whites do is true.
This isn't the case, however, in New York where most of the Latinos are Puerto Rican.
A black person in San Antonio is many times more likely to be called a "mayete" than a "nigger."
'
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