“If a woman is merely perceived as having the intention to gain power … people are likely to make a wealth of inferences about her character, and judge her accordingly,“ write Tyler Okimoto and Victoria Brescoll of the Yale School of Management. “Specifically, the intention to gain power may signal to others that she is an aggressive and selfish woman who does not espouse prescribed feminine values of communality.“

That’s from ‘Power Hungry’ Females Less Likely to Get Votes on Miller McCune.

Historically, Mexican-Americans have generally been considered “white” in Texas; they served in white units of the segregated military, including the National Guard, and were allowed, during the Jim Crow years, to marry white (but not black) partners. In the early ’40s, the Texas Legislature even passed a “Caucasian Race Resolution,” which affirmed their status as white. Today the U.S. Census treats “Hispanic,” “Latino” and “Spanish origin” — terms that apply to anyone of Spanish-speaking background — as an ethnic category. Race is a separate category, with various options, including a nonspecific “some other race.” In 2000, about half of all Hispanics checked “white” for race. Castro told me that he was planning to check “some other race” in 2010. He is uncomfortable referring to himself as “brown,” and he doesn’t use the term “people of color” when he discusses Mexican-Americans.

From the May 9th New York Times Magazine piece profile on Julián Castro. Castro, 35, is the current mayor of San Antonio, Texas and a rising political star in the Democratic Party. A few observers think he has a good shot at being the first Hispanic — though the piece suggests he prefers ‘Latino’ — president of the United States.

Though the piece is about Castro, it’s also about Hispanic/Latino political influence, Chicano versus Hispanic/Latino identity, and assimilation (Castro doesn’t speak Spanish). Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants make up 60 percent of all Hispanics. Border and immigration issues often dominate the Hispanic agenda, even though Cuban-Americans largely arrive(d) here legally as defectors, and Puerto Ricans are American citizens. Plus race means that Afro-Latinos, Asian Latinos, and aboriginal Latin Americans may form different identity-based political alliances.

For Castro to win national office, he will have to be a bilingual Obama. Like Obama, he will need to reassure white voters that he is sufficiently American and doesn’t secretly hate white people. He will also need enough Chicano-ness to woo Mexican-American voters without alienating other Hispanic/Latino voters. And finally, he will need to woo black voters in places like Georgia and California where blacks and Latinos often compete for jobs and neighborhood presence.

Also see: Liza Sabater’s excellent 2007 post On why I hate Hispanic Heritage Month for an explanation of ‘Hispanic’ versus ‘Latino.’

Way tangential point, though related to Liza’s piece: even the “Latin American” label is problematic. It makes sense, I think, to group countries by language or colonial power. Grouping countries where Spanish is the official or predominant language is understandable. But ‘Latin America’ also includes Portuguese-speaking Brazil and French-speaking Haiti while excluding the English-speaking South American country Guyana. It includes the French departments Martinique and Guadeloupe, but excludes English-speaking Dominica, which lies between the islands. It includes Puerto Rico and Haiti, but not Jamaica. And yet, the region as a whole shares a history of colonialization, subjugation or extermination of aboriginal Americans, and varying degrees of participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So how useful is it to draw those linguistic boundaries, and where should we draw them?

But what galls me? This shit right here:

One of the most contentious parts of the law was the creation of a Web site whereby any woman who had had an abortion would have been required to provide personal details pertaining to her choice, including her relationships, financial situation and motivation for seeking an abortion.

Because all women who seek abortions are careless sluts, right? They’re not, after all, women who are be in committed relationships with men who are having trouble finding steady, living-wage employment. Or women who may be in an abusive relationship. Or women whose health may be at risk. Or women whose contraception failed. Or women who miscalculated her menstrual cycle and now finds herself in a position where she can’t afford, and isn’t really sure she wants to have a child.

That’s the kind of shit that just causes women to, for example, drive 8 hours to a neighboring state to get an abortion. Like it or not, whether you want to admit it or not, when a woman is pregnant and doesn’t want to be, there is very little she won’t do or try in order to terminate her pregnancy.

Don’t believe me? In Mexico, where abortion is illegal almost everywhere, an estimated 845,000 abortions (out of roughly 28 million women aged 15-49) still take place.

The question should not be “Should abortion be legal?” The questions should be “Do we believe that women should be required to risk death or injury if they do not wish to carry a pregnancy to term?” and “Do we believe that women who conceive should be forced to risk their health and safety to give birth?”

I will end with this point from a 2009 Guttmacher Institute study:

Of the approximately 42 million abortions that do occur worldwide, almost half are performed by unskilled individuals, in environments that do not meet minimum medical standards or both. Virtually all of these unsafe abortions take place in the developing world, where the unmet need for contraception remains high and very restrictive abortion laws often are the norm.

In the developed and developing world alike, antiabortion advocates and policymakers refuse to acknowledge the facts that abortion’s legal status has much less to do with how often it occurs than with whether or not it is safe, and that the surest way to actually reduce the incidence of abortion is to reduce the incidence of unintended pregnancy. While they debate, obfuscate and insist on legal prohibitions, the consequences for women, their families and society as a whole continue to be severe and undeniable.

• Related: An Overview Of Abortion In The United States

This is certainly a more powerful threat to democracy than terrorism. It may well be a more powerful threat to democracy than was the fatally-flawed Soviet Union. Because to the extent to which politicians depend on donations to remain in power, they are inevitably influenced by those who have the most money. Not surprisingly, corporate entities, representing many people and often vast economic enterprises, have vastly more financial resources than individuals. Arguing, as American right wingers do, that campaign donations are form of free speech and thus cannot be constrained, ignores the reality that by equating money with free speech we effectively say that those with more money have more free speech, are entitled to greater influence within our society.

From David Rothkopf’s America’s credibility takes another blow from Foreign Policy.

America! First World consumption, Third World politics.

And sophomores and juniors with high social dominance orientation and system justification scores became more politically conservative as seniors. In other words, there was a process in which threats and anxieties led students to adopt particular political beliefs that helped them to deal with those threats and anxieties.

From Can Threats and Living in a State of Anxiety Push People to Conservatism? by Lee Drutman.

Fifth and finally, al-Qaeda is covetously seeking recruits from non-Muslim countries who can be easily deployed for attacks in the West. The group’s leaders see people like these — especially converts to Islam whose appearances and names would not arouse the same scrutiny that persons from Islamic countries might — as the ultimate fifth column. Citizens of countries that participate in the U.S. visa-waiver program are especially prized because they can move freely between Western countries and blend easily into these societies.

Or: as soon someone knows what you’re looking for, your enemies know how to defeat you.

But let’s say that we did decide to profile all Muslims. We still have the basic problem of “What does a Muslim look like?” Muslim and Arab are not the same thing. Names can be misleading, as we saw with Richard Reid.

As I said in a recent Friendfeed thread (improper capitalization due to laziness and typing on my phone):

here’s the thing: how do you determine who is muslim and therefore should be screened? By name? The name richard reid doesn’t set off alarm bells. And what about christian arabs, or south asians who are hindu or parsi but have an arabic first name? By appearance? Can you discern between a pakistani, bangladeshi, indian, and a guyanese-indian-american christian? What about between an indonesian (muslim country) and a thai (buddhist one)? Or a black american convert to islam from any other black american? Or a gabonian parisian from a black american? A kosovar from a croatian?

Not only would anti-Muslim profiling be a logistical nightmare, but it actually makes us less secure because we only scrutinize those who we think need to be scrutinized.

But perhaps he doesn’t need one. In 1859, John Brown sought not only to free slaves in Virginia but to terrorize the South and incite a broad conflict. In this he triumphed: panicked whites soon mobilized, militarized and marched double-quick toward secession. Brown’s raid didn’t cause the Civil War, but it was certainly a catalyst.

It may be too early to say if 9/11 bred a similar overreaction. But last night President Obama vowed to increase our efforts in Afghanistan — one of two wars that, eight years on, have killed nearly twice as many Americans as the hijacked planes. The nation, beset by the wars’ burden, will continue to find its domestic and foreign policy options hobbled.

Show trial or no trial, terrorists sometimes win.

In India, where food production depends on the vagaries of the weather, GM foods are a hot button for not just debate over bio-safety but also the power of multinationals to influence food choices.

The GM eggplant strain has been developed by American agrichemical giant Monsanto with its Indian partner Mahyco. The crop, its promoters claim, can double yields and reduce pesticide use by nearly half.

Environmentalism meets human hunger needs in Saritha Rai’s GlobalPost piece, Eggplant of doom?

These folks are about to make me start believing in a deity, because after witnessing the rank stupidity on full view in this video, I don’t know what else to do.

But the knee jerk reaction of blaming Islam and Muslims, in general, or looking for delusional links to “al Qaeda,” for the horrific murders at Fort Hood points to something far more fundamental, overdue, and urgent — namely something of a psychological barrier for Americans to accept the Islamic component of their own society, culture, and history.

Muslim American Hamid Dabashi in his CNN opinion piece, U.S. Muslims are Americans too. Case and point: Malcolm X and the American Civil Rights Movement.

I think Malcolm X — (justifiably) angry, fiery, don’t-start-none-won’t-be-none-but-if-you-want-it-we-got-it Malcolm X — is a big part of why most (non-urban, non-Black) Americans fear Islam. Americans are particularly good at poking people in the eye and getting upset and afraid when they threaten to poke back. And Malcolm said, without apology, and with good reason: We will poke back.

It was the most successful form of colonialism: the colonized mind identified completely with the colonizer. The Javanese had held out for centuries, but finally they had lost. Their idea of there being many paths to God, none better than the other, had broken under the weight of the orthodox Arab injunction about the one true faith. The Javanese now skulked like criminals where their president had meditated just twenty years earlier.

Indonesian native Sadanand Dhume on the rise of an Arab-looking — rather than a localized, Indonesian-looking form of Islam — that has taken root in the country in the last 30 or so years. From this month’s Guernica piece, The Colonized Mind.

On a slightly related note: is it useful to think about jihadism and Islamism and the rhetoric from them as a form of global, anti-neo-colonialist liberation theology rather than a literal call to arms?

Also: Check out Irshad Manji’s book The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. Read a bit about the Islamic tradition of ijtihad, and check out Marc Lynch’s Foreign Policy blog post Ft. Hood and the Clash of Civilizations: Security vs political correctness revisited.

I voted for Obama. I celebrated his victory and I might just take the day off (or at least work from home) on Inauguration Day. But it took me a while to become comfortable with his campaign, in part because of the reasons Debra Dickerson articulated nearly a year ago.

I can’t and won’t revoke his membership in the American Society of Black Folks, of course. But I do think his heritage that is both black immigrant and Midwestern white gives him a perspective on life and on blackness that most black Americans — that is, those of us descended from Africans enslaved in the United states — don’t necessarily enjoy.

Barack Obama is “Black by Choice.” He is the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, which makes him racially black, though not culturally so. He was also raised by white folks from Kansas with stints in Indonesia and Hawaii. Have you checked the percentage of black Americans in Hawaii lately? That black Americans are almost non-existent in Indonesia doesn’t need to be stated.

Now Obeezy could easily have cultivated a distinctly bi-racial identity as so many bi-racial and bi-cultural children do. He easily could have cultivated an incidentally or accidentally black identity because of the demographics of the cities in which he was raised.

And yet, he chose to return to his African first name rather than be known as the far less foreign, far more familiar-sounding “Barry.” He chose to work as a community organizer on Chicago’s south side. He chose to attend a predominantly black church with a sort of crazy preacher. And he chose to marry a black woman from the south side of Chicago no less.

Because it was a matter of choice and not upbringing, Obama also had the freedom to choose which portions of black identity he wanted to claim. If I had to guess, I would say being black in mostly-white environment lead to some cognitive dissonance that allowed him to adopt some portions of a black American cultural identity (collectivism, social justice, and bou(r)gie Negro code-speak, for example) while eschewing the negative stereotypes of blackness.

And by crafting his own black identity and becoming president of the United States, perhaps Obama has — as so many other black immigrants and bi-racial blacks have — expanded our collective conceptions of what black is.

Related posts here

• Dear cousin Chris
• Dear Black Entrepreneurs (especially the ones behind Blackbird):
• In defense (um, sort of) of Geraldine Ferraro

Related content elsewhere

• The End of White America? from The Atlantic
• Black immigrants of the Caribbean: an invisible and forgotten community from Adult Learning on AccessMyLibrary.com
• Lisa D. McGill. Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation from African American Review on FindArticles.com

I don’t remember why the subject came up. But I do remember that you, with your 8-year-old earnestness, asked “Will there ever be a black president?” Do you remember that?

I remember we took a while to answer you. We were all trying to decide whether to tell you what we really thought, or tell you what you should tell an eight year old about his own possibility for greatness.

Your grandmother and my dad (his aunt) grew up in the segregated South. They remembered “colored” signs on rest rooms and water fountains. They remembered packing food on road trips to New York and Baltimore because they wouldn’t be able to find a restaurant that served Negroes until they got north of Virginia. My dad remembers being called a ‘nigger’ on more than one occasion both in South Carolina and Long Island, New York. Their cynicism was deeply shaped by lived experience.

I, on the other hand, had just finished four years of college. What little lefty, wide-eyed idealism I had was beat out of me by all of those electives I took about “intersecting oppressions,” “structural racism” and “cultural imperialism.” I had never been called a nigger to my face — though some of my black friends who grew up in white, northeastern neighborhoods had — but I was starting to feel and notice the impact of racism as a cultural belief. My cynicism was young, but still there.

So when you asked the question, we all thought about how to answer. Do we give you the answer that’s drenched in some unhealthy mix of cynicism and pragmatism? Or do we give you the answer that you should give an 8-year-old who is still able to dream big?

After what seemed like an eternity, your grandmother finally said, “Yes Chris. There will be a black president someday. It probably won’t happen in my life time. But it will in yours.”

I’m not sure any of us fully believed her answer at the time. And, no, she didn’t live to see it. But she was right about us seeing it.

Amazing isn’t it?

Love, Tiffany

By Canadian illustrator Marc Johns