She called and said, I kid you not:

They only just deliberated today and I was a unanimous vote!!!

She said no fewer than three times that she was so "deeply proud" of my ideas, big so what, the need to continue to be relevent and connect with community

proudly represents her department in welcoming me

will send a formal email and letter

be thinking about who you want as your advisor/work that out later though/supported about the department/unanimous

call on her personal cell anytime to talk about things

she volunteered to call me and left the deliberating meeting to do so because she wanted to be the one to tell me!!!

congratulate me; i'm outstanding; wherever you go you will be an amazing scholar; proud of how you represented yourself and we look forward to having you

ETA: and sorry for the grammar and such; i was shaking and talking an typing and these were the notes to remind me of what was said!

I know, I know, my musical tastes are all over the map, but I dug Craig David back in the day and somehow the idea of him covering Motown classics with that tricky garage trip hop sits right with me.

Plus, he's cute. LOL

That's the conclusion I'm running towards, head-first.

Black history month has come early to the press with several stories of note.

Stolen from brittdreams via NYT:

NYT: "Shades of Prejudice"

This isn’t racism, per se: it’s colorism, an unconscious prejudice that isn’t focused on a single group like blacks so much as on blackness itself. Our brains, shaped by culture and history, create intricate caste hierarchies that privilege those who are physically and culturally whiter and punish those who are darker.
...
If colorism lives underground, its effects are very real. Darker-skinned African-American defendants are more than twice as likely to receive the death penalty as lighter-skinned African-American defendants for crimes of equivalent seriousness involving white victims. This was proven in rigorous, peer-reviewed research into hundreds of capital punishment-worthy cases by the Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt.

It would seem I beat every odd, being what I call "distinctly black" and not in jail for murder or something. However, the older I get the more I seem to encounter this prejudice. I didn't have much experience with it growing up -- three cheers for isolationism! -- but I get it often now. And every time someone comments on my being dark-skinned I'm confused. I only know three colors: white, brown and blue black. If you are not at the extreme then you are just a shade of brown to me.

NYT: "Blacks in Retreat"

Jobs and freedom. In America, you can’t have one without the other. Democrats are in deep trouble right now — just a year after their giddy celebration of Barack Obama’s ascendance to the presidency — because so many millions of Americans are out of work, unable to find the gainful employment that would unlock the door to a stable future for themselves and their families.
...
For example, without a dramatic new intervention by the federal government, the poverty rate for African-American children could eventually approach a heart-stopping 50 percent, according to analysts at the Economic Policy Institute. Already more than a third of black children are living in poverty.
Present trends are not good. Communities of color are being crushed economically and the national news media have not fully focused on the carnage. The official unemployment rate for blacks is 16.2 percent and could well pass 17 percent before the year is out. The real jobless rate is far more ghastly. The Boston-based group United for a Fair Economy noted that even “college-educated black men are nearly twice as likely to be unemployed as their white, college-educated counterparts.”

And from the Sun magazine (which, if you're not reading this regularly you are missing something good in life, SRSLY) was an article from awhile back from a local Duke psychologist that discussed how white people, when under any kind of stress, i.e. life, literally cannot see people of a different race as, well, people:

Winter: A graduate student of yours from the University of Michigan spearheaded a study of race bias and positive emotions.

Fredrickson: Yes, that finding is huge. Kareem Johnson was the student. He's now on the faculty at Temple University. He was interested in how we perceive other people's faces. It's well-known that we perceive objects by looking at their features. If we see a coffee mug, for example, we might notice that it's blue and narrow at the top. But we perceive faces as a whole. We don't think, I've seen these eyes before, or, I've seen that nose before. In fact, we have this holistic perception of anything with which we're expertly familiar. Expert bird-watchers perceive birds as a whole, for example, whereas novice bird-watchers notice individual features. In a way we're all experts at human faces.

Johnson thought that since positive emotions make people think broadly or holistically, people should be better at recognizing faces when they're in a positive emotional state. So he showed research participants a set of faces on two occasions to see how many they could remember. When his results came back inconclusive, we were all frustrated. An effect was there, but it wasn't large or reliable. So we broke the data down in different ways. We separated men and women, and, noticing that he'd used both Asian faces and white faces in the study, we broke it down by race. And that's when we found something unexpected: positive emotions had no effect whatsoever on the ability of white participants to recognize white faces, but there was an effect on their ability to recognize Asian faces. We found that positive emotions increased the ability to recognize cross-race faces only ,that is, the Asian faces for white participants. In later studies we replicated the finding with whites' ability to recognize black faces.

And the positive emotional state didn't just make it a little bit easier for participants to recognize cross-race faces. It made it no different than recognizing faces of the participants' own race. It was as if race was gone from people's minds -- at least, in terms of face recognition. Scientists had earlier determined that when people look at cross-race faces, they look at individual features: a nose, an eyebrow . . .

Winter: They're objectifying.

Fredrickson: Exactly. They use the same process they use to recognize objects, which suggests there's some dehumanization going on. The implications of that are heart wrenching. But what we're finding is that, under the influence of positive emotions, people use the same holistic process for cross-race faces that they use for faces of their own race. It's as if people, when they're feeling good, are better able to see the full humanity of people of a different race.*

BTW, yet another reason I take issue with the death penalty in all but the most extreme Dahmer-esque situations. People, in general, cannot recognize people and white people REALLY cannot see a person a color. The joke about how we all look alike to them? Many a truth said in jest.

Ay-yi-yi. The whole damn world needs a visit to the shrink.

*I, of course, would have lots of questions about how happy a white person has to be and for how long for this to be true. Also, if just the presence of a non-white person is enough to incite enough exigence to compromise their positivity and, thus, engage their inability to distinguish non-white people from a can of wife-raping paint. But, you know me and my questions.

Thanks to fa_ikaika .

Road Warrior [Essay]

by Guest Contributor Scott Bear Don’t Walk, originally published at The Rhodes Project

“Weren’t you the Indian Rhodes Scholar?” she said, as I shivered in her doorway holding my pizza delivery bag, wearing my “Red Pies Over Montana” polyester shirt and ball cap. She handed me 20 dollars for driving a Sausage Lover’s Special through the snow-drifted streets of the reservation border town of Missoula—for a one-dollar tip.

A month before, I had been sitting next to a well-known British novelist at a Rhodes House dinner in Oxford, which involved multiple courses and sparkling conversation over after-dinner sherry. I had been wearing a jacket and tie, not a tux, but near. The writer asked, “Aren’t you the red-Indian Rhodes Scholar?”

They say the Rhodes is one of the few things a person can do at 20 years of age that will be mentioned at 40, that and joining the Marines—but I didn’t go to Parris Island. I went to Oxford, England.

Read the rest here.

Well, I've certainly thought of this. So far I have been brilliantly lucky*** and I know it. Dr. Superstar and Dr. Sistergirl are black and latina, respectively. My summer research experience was an immersion in scholarship...with other black scholars. It's possible that I have been sold on an illusion where I will be respected and validated. I get that. And it wouldn't be the first time.

I'm still willing to take that chance if only because I've lived long enough to honestly assess my talents, interests, gifts, abilities and shortcomings. Academia is a good match for all of them. But it is not the only match and I keep that in mind.

This essay brought to mind the idea of the "imposter syndrome"** that so plagues women and POC in academia. How sad is that? What a glaring living legacy to the horrors of racism, slavery and misogyny in this culture. That people would feel unworthy enough to be incapable, psychologically, of internalizing their worth!!! My God.

This is why I'll fight to the death the notion that all of the -isms are issues of resources, wealth allocation, access, etc. Those things are important but the more I become a "scholar" and the more I read and write and internalize the more I am convinced that we cannot address any of these disparities without addressing the very real psychological and mental illness they have caused.

I know it will be hard - presuming I even get into grad school -- to manage this. I'm an idealist. I know this, no matter how ashamed of it I am. But the thing few know about me until it is too late is that I'm also a HUGE competitor. I'm vicious. I'm cold and calculating and once the rules of engagement have been set I have no compunction about slaying people...metaphorically of course. LOL Here's hoping that and some self-awareness and knowledge, and yes meds if it comes to that, are enough to get me through this process.

And I still want to go through it. Idealist, again. ding, ding, ding. I also have delusions of grandeur. I really think I can make a difference and, for now, this is the way I've chosen to do that.

Cheers to all my soldiers in the struggle.


**Imposter syndrome can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in face of information that indicates that the opposite is true. It is experienced internally as chronic self-doubt, and feelings of intellectual fraudulence.

*** and, yes, I'm aware that I have it. I'm working on it

A Jamaican sister on HGTV just told the white lady who redesigned her room on Color Splash that she "put her foot in this!" Y'all know that poor Canadian woman has no idea what the hell that means. LOL

White folks at HuffPo are going batshit over these. They say fat the way I think they wish they could say nigger. I never knew it was so deep for them.

God only knows that if they find that thigh up there offensive what they would think of my chunky monkey legs! LOL  But if you think I wouldn't put on some spare hair and rock that sweater like that chick is in the first one? Then you don't know me!

Dating site for beautiful people expels 'fatties' after holiday weight gain

(CNN) -- A dating site that markets itself as an elite community for beautiful people with a "strict ban on ugly people" has axed about 5,000 members for packing on the pounds during the holiday season.
The international site BeautifulPeople.com threw out members after they posted photos "revealing that they have let themselves go," according to a company statement.
"As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld," said Robert Hintze, founder of BeautifulPeople.com. "Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded."
The site describes itself as an "elite online club, where every member works the door" -- that is, users can join only after enough members vote them "beautiful" during the 48 hours after their profile is uploaded.
And apparently, enough beautiful people were angry that some members had enjoyed a bit too many treats during the holiday season.
 
( Read more... )

I am in a couple of LJ comms about grad school.

Awhile back ago I changed my icon. When I did one did not know that I am black or a woman. With that icon I noticed an uptick in responses to my comments and posts in said comms.

However, when I changed it back to a pic of myself the volume of responses are drastically lower.

I think people may have some blocks against accepting advice from someone who looks like me.