White people are more segregated than minorities.

When most white people talk about segregated communities, they think of communities with many black people or other racial minorities. Most white people believe that minorities have mostly same-race friends and that they need to be racially integrated with the rest of society. However, this is a false assumption based white people’s tendency to notice people’s race only when the people are not white. The typical white person notices race when passing through communities of colour, but she rarely thinks about race when she is surrounded by all white people. If the typical white person is in a group setting with mostly white people but one or two token non-white people, the typical white person perceives the group as “diverse”.

If the typical white person is interested in reality instead of her personal observations (which would be prone to her subconscious racial biases), she may discover that her worldview is distorted. Yet another study, Campus Diversity Important Predictor Of Interracial Friendships, shows that of all racial groups, whites are the most segregated:

A new study in the journal Social Science Quarterly found that campus racial and ethnic diversity is important in predicting friendship heterogeneity, and that minorities have higher predicted friendship diversity than whites.

[…]

As school diversity rises, predicted friendship diversity also increases, although whites still have lower predicted levels of friendship diversity than minorities. However, this relationship shifts as schools become more diverse, with whites having nearly as diverse friendship networks as minorities on the most diverse campuses.

These studies that show that whites are the most segregated are important, because white people often criticize minorities for living in so-called “ethnic enclaves”.

Common White Fallacies when Dealing with People of Colour

A white person needs to listen to the personal experiences of people of colour when they are under discussion. On the other hand, it is dangerous, and usually racist, to generalize from one or a handful of people of colour and make a general claim. These two statements do not contradict each other.

White people need to understand the basic structure behind first-order logic to avoid the errors of both (i) ignoring the voices of people of colour, and (ii) making generalizations about all people of colour based on the voices of some people of colour.

Errors in Making Generalizations about People of Colour

Fallacy: Confusing Existential Quantification for Universal Quantification (Interchangeable People of Colour)

The following reasoning is invalid:

A black person x thinks P.
Therefore, all black people think P.

This reasoning is invalid because black people are not interchangeable, and one (or any) black person is not the spokesperson for all black people. Just as with white people, black people are individuals and are diverse in thought, culture, appearance, and other properties.

Fallacy: Hasty Generalization

The following reasoning is invalid:

A black person x thinks P.
A black person y thinks P.
A black person z thinks P.
Therefore, all black people think P.

First of all, this argument is never deductively valid, no matter how large the sample size, unless the sample set is equivalent to the population set to which you want to generalize. Inductive reasoning is always deductively invalid. (Science and statistics use empirical observations to draw conclusions, but they are not making inductive arguments.*)

If, instead, the reasoner wants to make a statistical claim about the population of black people, then she may be committing a hasty generalization. The sample size may be too small, and even when the sample size is large enough, it may not be representative of the general population. For example, if you surveyed black people in certain areas of the Internet and found that most were gamers, it says nothing about black people in general.

Errors in Ignoring People of Colour

Fallacy: White is Right

The following reasoning is invalid:

A white person x thinks P.
A Chinese person y thinks not P.
Therefore, x is right and P is true.

This reasoning is invalid because a white person is not necessarily more rational than a Chinese person. Although Western culture identifies the West with rationality and logic, and the East with irrationality and superstition, this does not mean that it is true in reality. A white person is not necessarily correct when the opponent is a black person or any non-white person, either. If a person assumes that this is true, he has an implicit belief in “white supremacy”.

Fallacy: Appeal to White Belief

The following reasoning is invalid:

Most white people think P.
Most non-white people think not P.
There are more white people than non-white people (in the United States).
Therefore, P is true.

Appeal to White Belief is a racial form of the fallacious Appeal to Belief, which has the following form:

Most people believe that a claim, P, is true.
Therefore, P is true.

Appeal to White Belief and the more general Appeal to Belief are invalid because the fact that most people believe that something is true does not mean that is true. For example, if most white Americans believe that racism no longer exists in the United States, and most black Americans believe that racism still exists, then this does not mean that the whites are objective and the blacks have a persecution complex. Appeal to White Belief may appear together with the “White is Right” fallacy.

Fallacy: My Black Friend Agrees With Me

The following reasoning is invalid:

A black person w agrees with me.
A black person x agrees with me.
A black person y disagrees with me.
A black person z disagrees with me.
Therefore, y and z are wrong and stupid.

Sometimes the number of black people who disagree with the white person in question is larger than the number of black people who agree with him, and the white person still thinks that those who disagree with him do not count because they disagree. This reasoning is fallacious, because the fact that one or some black people agree with the white person does not entail that those are the “good blacks” and the rest are the “bad blacks” who are wrong and stupid. The blacks who agree with the white person may agree with him because they are different demographically from those who disagree, or their social position may hinge on being agreeable to whites.

For an example of demographic differences, Oprah Winfrey may think that any black person from the ghetto can become rich if she tried, but Oprah is of the demographic of black billionaires who started off poor, which is not representative of the general black demographic.

It is more difficult to give a concrete example of the fragile social position situation, because it posits that the agreeable blacks have or are influenced by an ulterior motive. However, this sometimes happens, as being outwardly agreeable towards authority figures is not uncommon for humans in general. (For example, you may outwardly ‘agree’ with your boss about something and your boss may believe that you truly agree with her, but your desire for job security may or may not have influenced your behaviour.) Whether or not this is true for a given situation depends on the individual situation.

In any case, the truth or falsity of your belief is not determined by the fact that some black people agree with you, or the number of people who agree with you, even if more black people agree with you than disagree. This is a variation of the “Appeal to Belief” discussed above. In the “My Black Friend Agrees With Me” fallacy, the fact that the blacks who agree with the white person are favoured over those who disagree may be influenced by the “White is Right” fallacy as well.

This reasoning is fallacious even when you substitute any non-white racial group for ‘black’. Whites should not ignore or dismiss non-white voices just because they disagree. Any criticism should be considered and evaluated seriously.

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* Karl Popper‘s account of falsification is a more accurate picture of how the scientific method works, although Thomas Kuhn’s picture is more accurate than Popper’s, and others have criticized Kuhn, etc. A full explanation is much too complicated and is irrelevant to this post. The point here is that claiming that inductive logic is invalid is not the same as a criticism of science, statistics, or empiricism in general. Science, statistics, and empirical methods are very good ways of gathering knowledge.

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Oriental sex is white man’s fantasy.

The origin of white men’s sexualization of Asian women can be traced back to the 1800s, at the latest. The assumption of white supremacy combined with cultural sexual repression led white Western European men to hope and believe that sexual freedom was possible and promised in what they called the “Orient”.

Europe identified itself with masculinity, rationality, civilization, and superiority, in contrast with the perceived femininity, emotionality, primitivism, and inferiority of the Orient. As white Western European men both felt and thought themselves restrained compared to the more “primitive” Other, they reasoned that the Orient was, in comparison, both sexually liberating and sexually unrestrained.

In Orientalism, literary critic and post-colonial theorist Edward Said explains (p.190) this literary tradition that became ubiquitous starting from the 1800s in writings on the Orient by Europeans:

In all of his novels, Flaubert associates the Orient with the escapism of sexual fantasy. Emma Bovary and Frédéric Moreau pine for what in their drab (or harried) bourgeois lives they do not have, and what they realize they want comes easily to their daydreams packed inside Oriental clichés: harems, princesses, princes, slaves, veils, dancing girls and boys, sherbets, ointments, and so on. The repertoire is familiar, not so much because it reminds us of Flaubert’s own voyages in and obsession with the Orient, but because, once again, the association is made between the Orient and the freedom of licentious sex. We may as well recognize that for nineteenth-century Europe, with its increasing embourgeoisement, sex had been institutionalized to a very considerable degree. On the one hand, there was no such thing as “free” sex, and on the other, sex in society entailed a web of legal, moral, even political and economic obligations of a detailed and certainly encumbering sort. Just as the various colonial possessions—quite apart from their economic benefit to metropolitan Europe—were useful as places to send wayward sons, superfluous populations of delinquents, poor people, and other undesirables, so the Orient was a place where one could look for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe. Virtually no European writer who wrote on or traveled to the Orient in the period after 1800 exempted himself or herself from this quest: Flaubert, Nerval, “Dirty Dick” Burton, and Lane are only the most notable. In the twentieth century one thinks of Gide, Conrad, Maugham, and dozens of others. What they looked for often—correctly , I think—was a different type of sexuality, perhaps more libertine and less guilt-ridden; but even that quest, if repeated by enough people, could (and did) become as regulated and uniform as learning itself. In time “Oriental sex” was as standard a commodity as any other available in the mass culture, with the result that readers and writers could have it if they wished without necessarily going to the Orient.

Asia is not the promised land of sexual liberation, although wealthy white men who travel there may find what they are looking for by exploiting the vulnerable.

References:

• Said, Edward W. 1994. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books

What Your Web Branding Suggests About Your Politics

Here are four political websites I came across many times before I realized that they weren’t what I initially thought they were. I usually surf the web quickly looking for specific information, and I am not actively trying to find websites to add to my feed reader. However, after third or fourth chance encounters, I ended up delving deeper and finding out that I was wrong about Feministing, Feministe, Asian-Nation, and ModelMinority.com. These websites weren’t actually exclusionary; they just looked that way.

Feministing.com (logo)

Feministing’s logo is a reappropriation of the mudflap girl icon but which is “flipping the bird” or giving the finger. While the mudflap girl is only in silhouette, the silhouette looks like that of a Caucasian woman. If the woman is black, she is a black woman with a wig, relaxed hair, or Caucasian hair genes. If she is an East Asian, she is an exceptionally buxom East Asian woman. In any case, the mudflap girl image that was designed for male truckers in the 70s was probably not of a woman of colour.

First impression: White feminism
Perceived audience: White women
People who may be turned off: Women of colour who don’t want to deal with white feminists who cry “fuck the patriarchy” without acknowledging the white supremacy in society.
Reality: Surprisingly, feminists of colour are well-represented in the comments, and at least one of the staff is a feminist of colour.

Feministe.us (logo)

Feministe’s logo appears to be a reappropriation of a retro image of a little, blonde, white girl, except she’s holding some kind of long gun.

First impression: White feminism
Perceived audience: White women
People who may be turned off: Women of colour who are tired of a white female representing the face of feminism; people who are at risk of being shot; people who are wary of gun-toting white people from the 50s wearing overalls.
Reality: Although this logo is blatantly whiter than Feministing’s logo, Feministe has great posts analyzing racism and had blogged about the disappearance of brownfemipower from the web and its related issues four days before Feministing. (Fortunately, brownfemipower is back online.)

Asian-Nation.org (domain name)

Asian-Nation.org’s domain name was chosen by the owner at the spur of the moment and “generally represents the contributions that Asians have made to the history and culture of American society.” However, the name “Asian Nation” is too visually similar to “Asian Nationalism” and the idea of an Asian nation suggests an “Asian invasion”.

First Impression: Asian Nationalism
Perceived audience: Asian nationalists or Asian supremacists
People who may be turned off: Asians who don’t want to be perceived as taking over the nation and being an invasion.
Reality: Asian-Nation is actually authored by a sociology professor that likes to study demographic data related to Asian Americans and hates stereotypes about Asian Americans. I like this informational site enough to link to it on my side bar, but it’s linked as “Asian Americans 101” because I cannot bring myself to put a link called “Asian-Nation” on my blogroll.

ModelMinority.com (domain name)

Ironically, one of the recurring themes at ModelMinority.com is dispelling the model minority myth. It’s as if the site’s author registered the domain name, started reading up on the concept of the “model minority” because of it, and then suddenly found out that it was a dangerous myth created by Republicans to silence People of Colour, but by then it was already too late.

First Impression: Asian Supremacism
Perceived audience: Asian supremacists who believe that they are intellectually superior and that blacks and Latinos are intellectually inferior
People who may be turned off: Asians who hate the model minority stereotype; Asians who are not Asian supremacists; antiracist Asians; Asians who self-identify as People of Colour.
Reality: ModelMinority.com is an informative site that includes academic research news about Asian Americans, but the majority of the readership seems to fit the profile of the “Perceived audience” described above. Adding yet another layer of irony is the fact that many of the commenters appear to lack the intelligence to read and comprehend the article they are commenting on, and continue to maintain the belief that they are of superior intelligence. I cannot add this link to my side bar because of these problems. Notamodelminority.com, on the other hand, would be a great domain name.

South Asians in Canada: Ethnic Origin and Country of Birth

South Asians were the largest visible minority group in Canada according to the 2006 Census. However, South Asians are a very diverse group with respect to both ethnic origin and country of birth.

Ethnic origin of South Asians in Canada

Ethnic origin (also known as ethnic ancestry) refers to the ethnic or cultural origins of the respondent’s ancestors. An ancestor is someone from whom a person is descended and is usually more distant than a grandparent. Ethnic origin should not be confused with language, place of birth or citizenship. For example, a person of Haitian origin may speak French, be born in Canada and have Canadian citizenship. Since 1981, when respondents were first permitted to report more than one ethnic origin in the census, a distinction has been made between single response, multiple responses and total responses. […] Most of the data that are reported in this document refers to the total response count for each ethnic group, unless otherwise indicated.

13.1% of South Asians reported multiple ethnic origins. The “ethnic origins” or “ancestral backgrounds” of South Asians are shown in the bar graph below. (As a person can have more than one ethnic origin, these ethnic categories are not mutually exclusive.) Most South Asians (69.0%) were of East Indian ethnic origin.

Since there were 1,262,900 South Asians in Canada according to the 2006 Census, the number of East Indians in Canada was about 871,000. (For individuals who want to compare the size of the largest South Asian subgroup with the size of the Chinese “visible minority” group, the number of East Indians in Canada (871,000) was lower than the number of Chinese (1,216,600).)

Country of birth of South Asians in Canada

29.3% of South Asians were Canadian-born, while 70.7% were foreign-born.

A majority of the foreign-born South Asians came from countries in the Indian subcontinent, such as India (48.8%), Pakistan (14.6%), Sri Lanka (11.7%) and Bangladesh (3.6%). The other leading source countries of birth among the foreign-born South Asian visible minorities were Guyana (4.2%), Trinidad and Tobago (2.5%), Fiji (2.4%), the United Republic of Tanzania (1.9%), Kenya (1.8%) and the United Kingdom (1.6%).

Applying these foreign-country percentages to the percentage of South Asians that were foreign-born (70.7%), and adding in the percentage of South Asians that were Canadian-born (29.3%), we can extrapolate a more integrated overview of South Asians’ countries of birth.

Country of birth	Percentage
Canada	29.3
India	34.5
Pakistan	10.3
Sri Lanka	8.3
Guyana	3.0
Bangladesh	2.5
Trinidad and Tobago	1.8
Fiji	1.7
United Republic of Tanzania	1.3
Kenya	1.3
United Kingdom	1.1
Other	4.9

The pie chart below was generated from the above data:

Sources:

• Statistics Canada. 2008. Canada’s Ethnocultural Mosaic, 2006 Census. 2006 Census. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 97-562-X. Ottawa. Released April 2, 2008.
• Statistics Canada. 2007. 2006 Community Profiles. 2006 Census. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 92-591-XWE. Ottawa. Released March 13 2007.

Related posts:

• Visible Minorities in Canada 2006 by Restructure!
• Most Japanese Canadians are Canadian-born. by Restructure!