Each month the group will take on a subject such as 1. The structure of a frame; 2. The use of Metaphor; 3. Mythology and framing; 4. Word choice – powerful words/toxic words; 5. How to frame community values to develop a deeper understanding of the use of cognitive framing in advocacy.

The group will engage in framing techniques using hypothetical fact situations drawn from local equity issues.  Currently being considered are homelessness, food deserts, transportation equity, environmental justice campaigns.

Darnell Hunt, the Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, writes about trying to make sense out of the events of 1992.  He notes that “we continue to confront a reality in which news stories . . . are routinely told ‘from the standpoint of a white man’s world.’ [This perspective has had little to offer more recently about the connections between racial politics in America and what happened in Los Angeles in 1992.”  This perspective is “invested in focusing on symptoms and overlooking underlying causes.”

Twenty years later, how do we frame Sa-I-Gu?  Hunt notes that the corporate news coverage of 1992 used tools of denial of race and inequality, included reversal, justification and mitigation.  He notes that the media might have done more to frame the issue as one where a largely ignored sector of the country rose up to assert itself, or to illuminate the issues of the haves vs. the have-nots (much like how media coverage of the Occupy Movement (pdf) might be seen).  Hunt is guest editing a special issue of Amerasia Journal, a publication of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center; the issue features new research on the effects of Sa-I-Gu as well as the experiences of journalists who covered the uprising.

As the Occupy Movement’s impact gets discussed and dissected, it should be interesting to see which frames prevail in 20 years.

Its findings include:

• African-American students represent 18% of students in the CRDC sample, but 35% of students suspended once, 46% of those suspended more than once, and 39% of students expelled.
• Over 70% of students involved in school-related arrests or referred to law enforcement are Hispanic or African-American.
• Students with disabilities (under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA) are over twice as likely as other students to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions.
• Students with disabilities (under the IDEA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 statutes) represent 12% of students in the sample, but nearly 70% of the students who are physically restrained by adults in their schools.
• African-American students represent 21% of students with disabilities (under the IDEA), but 44% of students with disabilities who are subject to mechanical restraint.
• Hispanic students represent 24% of students without disabilities, but 42% of students without disabilities who are subject to seclusion.
• Only 29% of high-minority high schools offered Calculus, compared to 55% of schools with the lowest black and Hispanic enrollment.
• Teachers in high-minority schools were paid $2,251 less per year than their colleagues in teaching in low-minority schools in the same district.

This .pdf has a summary of the findings and details the methodology. While the 2009-10 CRDC contains information on about 7,000 school districts and over 72,000 schools in those districts, the CRDC does not include data from all school and districts in the nation. Those districts not included in the data may be those that are the least populous.

The REP blog has highlighted some of these issues before in the post Racial Disparities in School Suspensions. Also, a past newsletter covered Race and Education. The article “Complexities Aside, Race is Still a Factor: How Racially Disparate Discipline is Discussed” is particularly pertinent to this discussion.

The FrameWorks Institute believes that more effective storytelling about social problems can serve to expand public discourse and, eventually, create positive change. To that end, they work to build the nonprofit sector’s capacity for framing the public discourse about social problems with the latest communications research. They use an approach called “strategic frame analysis” to field test and analyze communications campaigns on social issues. These issues currently include mental health, education, budget and taxes, early childhood development, child nutrition, children’s oral health, and other children’s issues. In 2011, they added 34 reports to their online library, had nearly 4,000 visitors to their website each month, and their videos were viewed almost 52,000 times. They produce reports, webinars, toolkits, videos, and a blog.

The Opportunity Agenda believes that society must work to eliminate obstacles that prevent everyone from achieving their full potential. They work toward helping the nation recognize and address these barriers through the use of media and communications storytelling, public opinion research, legal, policy, and communications research and analysis, and more. Their issue areas include immigration, reproductive justice, economic justice, health and health care, education, human rights, and racial justice. They have a range of a range of communications, legal, advocacy and research tools.

Its findings include:

• American cities are more integrated now than they have been since 1910.
• Completely all-white neighborhoods are, for the most part, extinct.
• Ghettos persist but are on the decline.

The title, which is fairly sensationalist, was picked up by the headlines. In many ways, the report is not so much factually incorrect as heavily politicized. Below is a brief summary of my thoughts on the report.

• The study uses the similarity index and isolation index, with the two relevant groups being defined as black and not-black, to find that, as of 2010, “the separation of blacks from individuals of other races declined in all 85 of the nation’s 85 largest metropolitan areas” (at 1). This ignores the dominant racist paradigm of the United States, which has always categorized in terms of white and not-white (although not-white has at times included non-Protestant whites). This obviously skews the findings.
• There is a problem with the isolation index used. Black residents living in one neighborhood in a city that has 98% whites where the other neighborhood in the city has 100% whites are “not isolated” (at 3).
• A major finding is glossed over. “As of 2010, dissimilarity had declined to its lowest level in a century and isolation to its lowest level in 90 years. This shift does not mean that segregation has disappeared: the typical urban African-American lives in a housing market where more than half the black population would need to move in order to achieve complete integration. The average African-American lives in a neighborhood where the share of population that is black exceeds the metropolitan average by roughly 30 percentage points.” (at 4)
• The source of the headline is misleading. There are very few census tracts with no black residents, compared with 20% in 1960 (at 7). This phenomenon resulted not from gentrification or immigration, but blacks moving into areas that previously had few or no black residents (at 10). So long as there is one black resident in a census tract, segregation as the authors define it declines.
• The conclusion of the study is downplayed. “Residential segregation has declined pervasively, as ghettos depopulate and the nation’s population center shifts toward the less segregated Sun Belt. At the same time, there has been only limited progress in closing achievement and employment gaps between blacks and whites. The difficult lesson of these decades is that society is complicated and single solutions rarely solve everything. While the decline in segregation remains good news, far too many Americans still lack the opportunity to achieve meaningful success.” (at 10)

If you would like to learn more, “Racial segregation continues, and even intensifies” is an excellent rebuttal to the report by The Economic Policy Institute.

Jezebel highlights the issue here.   While reading, we develop a picture of what we think the characters in the book look like.  Some Hunger Games readers pictured all of the characters as white even though the author described some characters as individuals with “dark skin.”  The outrage was captured on twitter feeds:  “Call me racist, but when I found out Rue was black her death wasn’t as sad.”  Another tweet inquired why the movie-makers “made all the good characters black.”

Many people may not say what is on their minds either because they are unwilling or unable to do so.  People may be unwilling because they think their beliefs are private or are conscious that their views might not be well-received.  Alternatively, they might be unable to vocalize thoughts and feelings because they just don’t realize they have them.  Implicit Association Tests (IATs) can expose those hidden, or automatic, stereotypes and prejudices that circumvent conscious control.  Project Implicit, a research effort between Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and University of Washington offers dozens of these tests.

Twitter is great for capturing fleeting thoughts and first impressions.  Once learned, stereotypes resist change, even when evidence points to the contrary.  Disappointed fans expressed surprise and anger when they were presented with visual images contrary to the pictures they developed in their minds.  These individuals announced this previously hidden bias, although many of them deleted their tweets after the story went viral. What impact does popular culture have on reinforcing these stereotypes?

A complete character guide by race can be found here.