NEW S
BY CA M I L L A M O R T E N S E N
DOG-WHISTLE RACISM
Lecturer to speak on race and politics at UO
R
acism is a permanent, entrenched feature of
American life. That was the thrust of a course
taught by Derrick Bell, one of founders of critical
race theory, while Ian Haney-López was a student
at Harvard.
But Haney-López didn’t fi nish out the term,
he says. He butted heads with Bell over an allegorical story
called “The Space Traders” in which aliens come to Earth.
The story deals with the idea of entrenched racism by asking
the question of whether the U.S. would trade African-Amer-
icans for gold to pay off the nation’s debt, pollution-cleaning
chemicals and clean, safe power — essentially selling them
into slavery again. “The idea that racism was permanent
struck me as excessively simplistic and in some ways more
of a political pose than a studied analysis,” Haney-López
says.
Haney-López didn’t come
back to Bell’s class; however,
he will be giving the Univer-
sity of Oregon’s inaugural
Derrick Bell Lecture at 7 pm
Feb. 7, in the Erb Memorial
Ballroom on the UO campus.
The UO Gospel Choir will
perform at 6:45 pm.
“I am a strange person, in a sense, to honor Bell be-
cause I was what Bell would describe as a diffi cult student,”
Haney-López says.
Bell himself was no stranger to controversy — he left
Harvard in 1990, shortly after Haney-López took his course.
Bell was protesting the lack of women of color on the law
school faculty. Bell, who was later a visiting NYU law pro-
fessor, had also been a UO law school dean. He left UO
when the law school didn’t hire an Asian-American woman,
who was one of the top three candidates in the search, after
the two white male candidates turned the job down, accord-
ing to his NYU law school faculty profi le.
A video of President Obama as a law student in 1991
speaking at a Harvard rally for Bell was unsuccessfully used
by the right to try to discredit Obama as “radical” on the is-
sue of race in the 2012 election.
Before Bell died in 2011, Haney-López was invited to
give NYU’s Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American So-
ciety. Though the two had repaired their once-strained rela-
tionship at that point, he says he wanted to use the lecture to
explain how “over the course of my career I came to under-
stand what he was saying.” Bell passed away two months
before the lecture.
“I had really come to understand racism was not perma-
nent in the sense of fi xed, but permanent in the sense it was
deeply entrenched and adapts,” Haney-López says. Haney-
López is now a professor at UC Berkley writing on issues of
race and constitutional law.
By way of example, Haney-
López points to an often-cited
statistic that by 2045 whites
will be a minority, but he
says if the defi nition of white
changes to include “Hispanic
I A N H A N E Y LÓ P E Z
whites” (Latinos who identify
themselves as racially white on
the census) then whites will remain a majority. The Irish, the
Jewish and Eastern Europeans are among the many groups
who were once seen as non-white and later became white,
he says.
The title of Haney-López’s lecture, “Dog Whistle Rac-
ism: Race and Politics in 2012” refers to when someone is
using racism that is barely hidden but is trading on racial
stereotypes, Haney-López says, such as when Ronald Rea-
gan spoke of “welfare queens” — he didn’t describe them
as black but used a coded racial appeal. When the person
using the racist language is called out, he can then say he
wasn’t racist because the racism, while there, was not ex-
plicit — there’s no Klansman or skinhead yelling an epithet
BY RAFAEL ALDAVE
Aſt er sending an embarrassing
proposal to the county
commissioners, their director
of human resources got back a
memo, I’m guessing, that read
something like this:
“Your proposal to give a double-
digit salary increase to the county
administrator and to the county
counsel — which was reported in
the paper just as we were about
to hold public hearings on the
need for a tax increase — is not
helpful. Get on the team, Madilyn.
You’re not working for Karl Rove
… are you?”
HAPPENING PEOPLE
lighten
up
BY PAUL NEEVEL
‘Race is deeply connected to the
conservative attack on liberalism.’
IAN HANEYLÓPEZ
as he wields a baseball bat. He points to other examples from
the election such as John Sununu calling Obama “lazy” and
Sarah Palin referring to Obama’s “shuck and jive.”
Haney-López says while in the 1960s racism was seen as
widespread, these days people have diffi culty seeing or ad-
mitting to the existence of racism, let alone talking about it.
The Republican Party has made race central to the way it
appeals to voters, Haney-López says. “Race is deeply con-
nected to the conservative attack on liberalism.” He says that
in the last election nine out of 10 people who voted for Rom-
ney were white, and 98 percent of state-level Republican
elected offi cials were white. “That’s virtually an all-white
party. That’s diffi cult to achieve.”
He adds, “We have a black president despite the fact he
didn’t come close to winning the majority of white votes.” ■
SISTER MARGARET GRAZIANO
(revisited)
May 1996: Although she works 40 hours a
week as a counselor at Willamette Family
Treatment Services, 79-year-old Sister Margaret
Graziano finds time to volunteer at the Lane
County Jail, continuing a prison ministry she
began in the early 1970s. A former school teacher
and Catholic chaplain, Sister Margaret conducts
classes in art and “leisure wellness,” helping
prisoners find a healthy balance of work and play
to reduce dependence on drugs and alcohol once
they leave jail. Besides teaching, she attends to
simple, but vital, needs of inmates, such as
picking up mail, cashing checks or arranging
emergency housing for family members. Drug-
dependent males at Lane County Corrections’
Passages residential treatment program are
familiar with her gentle ways, as are children at
Rainbows Unlimited, a program she developed for
youngsters in chemical-dependent families.
2013 update: After 37 years of counseling and
classes at the jail, Sister Margaret leaves in
February for her new assignment at Mary’s Woods
at Marylhurst, a retirement community in Lake
Oswego. At age 95, she recently served on the
selection jury for Visions from Within, an exhibit of
art by inmates, to be seen in February and March
at the library, the airport and DIVA. Her brand new
book, Memoirs of Sister Margaret Graziano, is
available for online viewing at blurb.com
eugeneweekly.com • January 31, 2013
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