Eclectic Grounds

I was in Glasgow recently. When we were about to see a movie and I suggested a cinema a but further out from were I stayed, I was quite surprised to hear that the cinema was in a part of the city that I should absolutely avoid at night. Upon seeing me raise my eyebrows, my friends showed me this video:

Find the video here

Several thousand youths who take part in gang violence in Glasgow. The average life expectancy for a man in the poorest parts of Glasgow: 54 years – as compared to 76 years UK-wide. It’s a rough place.

What’s also interesting though is that the video shows how white kids participate in gang violence. Glasgow, the “knife capital of Europe”, “public health hazard”, is way worse an environment that the “banlieues” around Paris or German “migrant ghettos” . This shows again the idiocy of assuming that the problem of youth violence in European cities can be pinned down to (Arab) ethnicity, (non-white) race or (Muslim) religion. And it confirms what I have mentioned here earlier: that youth violence is a problem created by social class and communal neglect rather than race or culture.

I wonder though how much media exposure gang violence in Glasgow would get if the kids in the video were Muslim immigrants from the Maghreb or Turkey…

Golam Khiabany writes in Race & Class about the current British media discourse on Muslim women and the veil as one of “new othodoxy.” 

From the abstract:

The increased visibility of veiled bodies in Britain today has stirred a response that draws on long-standing orientalist oppositions and reworks them in the current climate of the `war on terror’, connecting them to parallel racist discourses about `threats’ to British culture. Sections of the British media have homogenised the variety of Muslim veiling practices and have presented the veil as an obstacle to meaningful `communication’; an example of Islamic `refusal’ to embrace `modernity’. Veiled women are considered to be ungrateful subjects who have failed to assimilate and are deemed to threaten the `British’ way of life. 

Via Context Discoveries

According to a recent article by Tanja Brøndsted Sejersen in the International Migration Review, dual citizenship has been on the rise over the last 20 years. While in 1990, only 20% of states had legislation providing for dual citizenship, today it is more than 50% of the world’s countries.

This is for two reasons: an increasing focus on individual rights in state legislation, and the social challenge of inclusion and exclusion that many countries experience. While many countries have been opposed to the concept of dual citizenship for a long time as they feared for loss of national cohesion, Sejersen argues the world is seeing a change in attitude:

Dual citizenship highlights specific problems with the citizenship concept, especially the foreigner–citizen dichotomy and the assumed congruence between the demos, the nation, and the state. Many states exist with a multitude of nations living within them, but the democratic incorporation of citizens, denizens, foreign residents, and citizens abroad poses new questions when faced with the reality of dual citizenship. The move toward acceptance of dual citizenship highlights the blurred foundation for national identity as a tool of exclusion. [...] A more relative understanding of the state and the citizenry may be necessary for allowing dual citizenship.

Via Contexts Discoveries

Several experiments in social psychology have tried to find out about the effects that arbitrary stereotyping and discrimination or privilege and power has on individuals. The most famous of these were the Zimbardo experiments.

Another one of those experience was conducted in a primary school by teacher with herclass of third-graders. To make the kids understand racial discrimination, the teacher split them up according to blue and brown eye colour. One group was defined as superior, the other as inferior.

I recently saw a Frontline documentary about the case filmed 14 years later, in which the former pupils describe the profound effects that the experience had on them. Quite ordinary, white people from a provincial town in the US state Iowa describe the humiliation, anger, demoralisation and hatred they felt at their own personal discrimination – and the feeling of (unfounded) power they got when they were in the dominant group.. 

“A Class Divided” – find the documentary here.

It’s quite intense to see the distress and violence that the participants describe, which resulted from entirely arbitrary faultlines. Experiments like those certainly help us understand the impact of ethnic, religious or any other out-group stereotyping. When talking about “blacks”, “Turks”, “Muslim” or “women” in a discrimatory manner, we usually internalise our role – discimated and disciminators alike. Documenations like the one here can shake us up a little about our everyday behaviour.

Thanks Nayano for digging it up!

I came across the wonderful website www.theory.org.uk today that I think everyone interested in social theory and media studies should check out. It has resources on general social theory, gender, media effects. It has creative stuff on Web 2.0, tipps for media students, an art lab and lots of other stuff. My favourite: social theory trading cards.