In the current Jan.-Feb. 2010 issue of the Clearinghouse Review, you’ll find a new article written by LSNC managing attorney Bill Kennedy, staff attorney Colin Bailey, and former staff attorney Emily Fisher about communications framing, entitled “Framing in Race-Conscious, Antipoverty Advocacy: A Science-Based Guide to Delivering Your Most Persuasive Message”.  It is a comprehensive article that provides both the scientific background of communications framing, as well as how legal advocates can harness it to the benefit of their clients.  I encourage all REP blog readers to read the piece and give us feedback about your efforts to implement communications framing in your practice.

Disney’s The Princess and the Frog depicts the long awaited first African American princess in Disney’s mainstream filmmaking.  Many other racial groups have been represented thus far, there have been princesses of native american, asian, and even middle eastern descent throughout Disney’s history.   Reception of Princess and the Frog has been mixed, and the ongoing struggle with representing African Americans in mainstream media is obvious.  NPR explored this phenomenon and a controversial review written by Scott Foundas, entitled “Disney’s ‘Princess and the Frog’ Can’t Escape Ghetto.” Foundas says that “It seemed puzzling to me that after all of this pressure over many years from various groups to create an African-American princess, that when they finally got around to doing it they decided to put her in Jim Crow-era Louisiana, hardly a shining moment in the history of African-Americans in the U.S. in terms of their standing in society.”  Other comments reflect the disappointment in that Tiana is not actually a princess in the typical Disney manner, that her “prince” is very light-skinned, and that she seems to have straight hair.  But others, particularly African-American filmgoers, were delighted by this development and felt that it was the result of a long fought battle for representation in mainstream media for children.   A Disney store manager in Culver City teared up when the live version of “Princess Tiana” came to meet people and shake hands, saying “”I have worked for the Disney company for 16 years, and this is something that this community — and I can include myself — has been waiting on.”

There is no question that Disney and other mainstream film studios who market to children play a large role in the formation of our next generation’s ideals and values when it comes to race.    The Princess and the Frog is an important step toward broadening racial representation in children’s media, but still poses an important question about the manner in which African-Americans are depicted.

In an article published yesterday on SCOTUSblog.com, Professor Michael J. Klarman, from Harvard Law School, outlines the Supreme Court’s impact on race relations for the last fifty years, from Brown vs. Board of Education to Parents Involved.  It is an interesting historical account and well worth the read.

Professor Klarman reminds readers of the current conservative majority’s common ideology:  “That ideology embraces a narrow, formalist conception of what counts as race discrimination; abhors the use of racial preferences, whether benignly motivated or not; and deems this nation’s ugly history of white supremacy as something more to be repudiated than remedied.”  This is important for us, as advocates to remember.  By using the tools the Race Equity Project endorses, such as social cognition and framing, we can push back against this conservative ideology, to prevent further racially regressive results in our communities.

To date, commentators continue to push the notion that we are living in a “post-racial” nation, i.e., because the United States elected an African American President, racial injustice and inequity have been erased and no longer exist.  In response to this troubling and growing trend, the Opportunity Agenda has released Ten Lessons For Talking About Race Equity In The Age Of Obama.  These talking points offer carefully crafted frames for discussing race equity in ways that circumvent and combat the growing denial of racial inequality’s continuing impact.

In an odd commercial, some try to link health care reform to racism. According to the commercial, some on the Left claim it is racist to oppose health care reform. In the commercial a series of actors, who pretend to oppose health care reform, pose the question, “So, I Guess I’m a Racist?” 

So what is the point of this commercial and who is behind it? Does the ad advance mature discussions of race and health care reform? Or does the ad simply trivialize both issues?

MSNBC news show host Rachel Maddow discusses the commercial with Princeton University Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell.

Missouri State Representative Robert Schaff, Republican - Makes guest appearance in anti-health care commercial stating, "I guess I'm racist."

Here is an interesting NY Times Op-Ed piece titled the “Shades of Prejudice” which highlights many of the Race Equity Project’s topics of unconscious bias and framing.  The writer starts off with the recent controversial comments by Senate majority leader Harry Reid,  that President Obama had an edge over other Black politicians because he is of a lighter skin tone and does not have a distinct “negro dialect” and leads the reader to the idea that this is an example of an unconscious prejudice towards blackness itself.

“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.”

A 1988 essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” by Peggy McIntosh of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, is worth revisiting 20+ years later as ‘colorblindness’ theories of race continue to threaten meaningful efforts to achieve racial equity. As other writers have pointed out, the myth of colorblindness is itself a species or byproduct of white privilege:

While the idea of colour-blindness may seem altruistic to some, it’s really a byproduct of white privilege. The ability to see race as a “card” to be “played” is also a byproduct of white privilege. –Mike Barber, race-talk.org

McIntosh’s landmark essay begins from a women’s studies perspective, describing the difficulty she had in getting men to recognize their privileged status even while they were willing to acknowledge the disadvantaged status of women. Starting from the phenomenon of unrecognized male privilege, she considers the ‘interlocking’ phenomenon of unrecognized white privilege – her ‘invisible knapsack.’  She then undertakes a personal inventory of the knapsack’s contents – the generally unseen ‘daily effects of white privilege’ she experiences.  While many of the points may be familiar, reading her 50-item list is unsettling – a little like suddenly seeing that woman with the umbrella walk through the basketball game.

The Opportunity Agenda recently posted on its website Talking Points: African Americans and Immigration, a communications tool developed for outreach and dialogue with African-American groups and audiences on the issue of immigration policy. Several of the findings in the piece challenge the widely held perception of African Americans as anti-immigrant. The publication of this piece coincides with the introduction on December 15 of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity Act of 2009 (CIR ASAP). Other recent communications tools on immigration posted on the Opportunity Agenda website include Talking Points: A Winning Narrative on Immigration, and A Shared Narrative for Immigration.

This video from RaceWire, featuring Colorlines’ Tammy Johnson, is an excellent reframing of the healthcare debate. Check it out.

The San Francisco Chronicle provided an update in an article today on a case involving minority residents of Section 8 housing in Antioch, California, that was first written up by the Race Equity Project E-Newsletter a year ago.  The subject of E-Newsletter 3.6 was the intersection of criminal law, race, and poverty law practice.  The specific case was described in the article titled, “Targeted Enforcement of Section 8 Participants in Antioch.”  The case, brought by Bay Area Legal Aid and Public Advocates, Inc. on behalf of primarily African-American Section 8 tenants in the city of Antioch, alleged that the City’s special police enforcement division, called, the “Community Action Team” (CAT), had systematically targeted Section 8 tenants for police enforcement (“over-policing”) in an effort to drive those tenants out of Antioch and, in so doing, had violated those tenants’ civil rights.

The SF Chronicle reports that criminologist Barry Krisberg’s recent study confirmed that “Antioch’s police Community Action Team … has disproportionately concentrated on subsidized Section 8 housing for the poor, and even more so on black tenants.”

The CAT website says that the CAT’s goal is to protect the right it asserts Antioch residents have “to feel safe in their homes and neighborhoods…“  The purported right to be free from fear has yet to be codified in California law.  Based on what Social Cognition science tells us about how our mind’s implicit associations are primed to be unconsciously fearful of, especially, people of African descent by such things as watching the local evening news (see Jerry Kang’s article, “Trojan Horses of Race“), residents of Antioch, Section 8 tenants included, are likely caught in a vicious cycle of unfounded fears confirmed, in many of their minds, by the experience and reporting of targeted enforcement of low-income, African-American households.  Maybe what is needed, at least in part, is some anti-bias training for fearful residents of Antioch and its police officers in order to raise the impact of unconcious biases to the conscious level where they may be dealt with openly and Constitutionally.

This brief video by Terry Keleher at the Applied Research Center explains how claims of  “reverse racism” misdirect the public’s attention away from systemic racism by confusing personal prejudices or biases, that can go in any direction and exist to some degree in just about all of us, with the systemic inequalities that put people at a disadvantage “from birth until death.” can only be addressed through broader policy and legal solutions.  Racewire’s Channing Kennedy discusses the resurgence of the “reverse racism” frame in light of the Sotomayor hearings.  [On a related note, don't miss Stephen Colbert's "Report" on reverse racism and the "reverse civil rights" movement.]

Our friends at the Opportunity Agenda have provided a framing piece with talking points on today’s Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DeStefano. By a 5-4 majority the Supreme Court overruled the decision of  City of New Haven elected officials to set aside the results of a test required  to qualify for promotions in the City Fire Department.  City officials made a finding that the test was likely discriminatory since no African Americans and only one Latino received passing scores.

Writing for the Majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy, imposed a new and additional  burden upon the City and all employers to determine  exactly why the test resulted in a disparate impact.  The decision was otherwise narrowly written.

The court did not criticize the 2nd District Court of Appeal three judge  panel from which this case was appealed that included President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor.

We’ve been developing our training on how to use the communication strategy of framing to advance race equity advocacy for about year now. In March of 2009 the Race Equity Project provided a MCLE training on the effective use of frames in race equity advocacy. The two presenters from that training recently recorded narration to go along with the slides so that you can learn all about this exciting advocacy tool from the comfort of you desk. Enjoy!

On March 20, 2009, the Race Equity Project conducted a two hour training on the use of framing in race equity advocacy. The training was approved for MCLE credit by the State Bar of California. The slides used in that training are provided below.

If you have questions about these slides please contact us.

Take a look at the REP’s “Framing Dos and Don’ts.”

Take a look at the framing excercises the participants worked on during the interactive section of the training.

Finding legitimate parallels between different minority groups’ struggle for civil rights is one thing; attempting to co-opt another group’s struggle is entirely another.   Recently on Racewire, Ron Buckmire of the Bayard Rustin Project discusses the problematic effort by some advocates (pun intended) in the gay community to frame the LGBT civil rights movement in the context of Black experience.

While acknowledging significant parallels between the two groups’ experiences, Buckmire says that to suggest discrimination against gay people is the same as discrimination against Black people  “is such a thoughtless exaggeration that it enrages Blacks and increases the divide between the two groups, causing people like [himself] who are both Black and gay to become even more invisible.”

We may like to think that some of the older, uglier rationalizations for various forms of racial inequity  and injustice have died and gone away (to wherever one might imagine such things go after death).  That the old “nature frame,” used to justify slavery and oppression on grounds that black people were somehow less than human, has practically disappeared in America. Unfortunately, it keeps popping up.  This New York Times editorial highlights the long history in the U.S. of attempting to ‘dehumanize’ black people by depicting them as primates, from writings of Thomas Jefferson, to rampant “ape propaganda” in the 1950s, to the spread of tee shirts during the last presidential campaign depicting Barack Obama as a monkey.  A Vogue cover last year featuring basketball star LeBron James snarling and clutching a Fay Wray-esque supermodel was criticized for its obvious “King Kong” reference.

A recent New York Post cartoon satirized the story of a chimpanzee shot to death by the police after attacking a friend of its owner, implying that the dead chimp had written the federal stimulus package that President Obama had just signed into law. 

Post Chairman Rupert Murdoch issued a statement of apology for the cartoon.

In the wake of September 11, the U.S. Federal government went through a systematic deportation of many Cambodian Americans.  Most of them came to the United States as refugees when they were young children.  They had lived almost their entire life in the United States.  Many had never been to Cambodia or even spoke the language. They were by all accounts American, except by law.  Many of their parents unaware of the immigration consequences never got their children naturalized.

The following is an excerpt of a story of one such young man who has had to start a new life for himself in a country he only knew through pictures and stories.

This article hit a chord with me because it is a subject close to my own personal history.  It is also important to re-frame the public perception of deported individuals as only criminals who deserved to be removed.  This was a young man who did make mistakes in life, but has turned his life around and is now a positive influence for many young street children in Cambodia.

“It may the only place in Cambodia where the children are nicknamed Homey, Frog, Floater, Fresh, Bugs and Diamond.

And there are not many places like this small courtyard, thumping with the beat of a boom box, where dozens of boys in big T-shirts are spinning on their heads and doing one-hand hops, elbow tracks, flairs, halos, air tracks and windmills. And, of course, krumping.

It is a little slice of Long Beach, Calif., brought here by a former gang member by way of a federal prison, an immigration jail and then expulsion four years ago from his homeland, the United States, to the homeland of his parents, Cambodia.”

This article was originally published on Nov. 29, 2008 in the New York Times.

Eva Paterson, the president of the Equal Justice Society, and Dorothy Cotton give their view of how the civil rights movement might take shape during  the Obama era.   Eva challenges us all to take a broad view of civil rights adopting the strategy of Martin Luther King’s aide Baird Ruston.  A broad movement should include a challenge to inequity based upon race and ethnicity, but also, gender, sexual preference and religious beliefs.  Listen to her comments provided on NPR’s News & Notes segment on January 22, 2009.

Framing is a tool long used by advertisers and political consultants to persuade those who would listen and achieve outcomes for their constituents. We, as legal services advocates, should use those same framing techniques, consciously and strategically, to achieve outcomes for our clients. How, you ask?

Today, The National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights, in partnership with New York Lawyers in the Public Interest, sponsored a discussion on the shifting public debate on the role of race in American society and politics. Guest speakers, Eva Paterson (blog), President of the Equal Justice Society (EJS), and Alan Jenkins, Executive Director of The Opportunity Agenda, took up the question of how best do we, as racial justice advocates, keep the dialogue on racial justice alive in the new national political discourse following Barack Obama’s election as the first African-American President of the United States of America?

[For a discussion and samples of the various ways in which race was framed in the 2008 Presidential campaign, see the UCLA Critical Race Studies Program's presentation of "Identity Politics and Political Identities: Race to the White House 2008", especially the section on media materials.]

Keith Kamisugi, EJS’s Director of Communications, provides detailed notes and reviews the take-away lessons from today’s discussion on framing race in his excellent blog entry, titled, “Talking About Race In The Obama Era.”

Alan Jenkin’s lessons for effective framing on race issues are:

1. Lead with shared values instead of dry facts, policies, and rhetoric.
2. Frame issues thematically rather than episodically, showing the systemic barriers to opportunity rather than just the impact to individuals.
3. Present solutions early on.
4. Over-document the negative impact of bias and the benefits of equal opportunity.
5. Appeal to subconscious attitudes about race.
6. Combine participatory and disciplined messaging.
7. Acknowledge our progress and connect history of discrimination to the future.
8. Media matters: use new channels of communication.
9. Connect racial justice messages and solutions to a broader agenda (“break out of your silo”).
10. Repeat, repeat, repeat your message over and over and over again.

Legal Services of Northern California has used these framing techniques in the context of its race-based advocacy through the Race Equity Project. At the NLADA’s recent Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., LSNC Staff Attorneys, Emily Fisher and Colin Bailey, presented lessons learned from the field and current examples of framing in race-based legal advocacy. Take a look at the Power Point slides from Emily and Colin’s presentation “Framing in Race-Based Advocacy.”

If you have comments, suggestions for improvement, or would like to share your use of framing in your work, please use the comment function below. We’re always looking for ways to learn from each other and share the best of what legal services advocacy has to offer.

The REP recently attended the National Convening on Subprime Lending, Foreclosure and Race hosted by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. We would like to share a few resources that we picked-up with our readers.

First, the Kirwan Institute commissioned several papers on the current credit crisis These papers are available online. We found the article by Rick Cohen, A Structural Racism Lens on Subprime Foreclosures and Vacant Properties, particularly interesting.

Second, several community organizations have developed interesting and innovative responses to foreclosures in their communities. The efforts of ESOP, an Ohio-based community organization, really stood out. Since 2006, ESOP has saved over 2,500 home from foreclosure. In addition to direct action campaigns, ESOP “uses a Hot Spot Card process, through which homeowners complete documentation and provide financial information relevant to their case, and have the opportunity to make suggestions to the lender for a resolution. ESOP foreclosure prevention advocates use the information obtained from the homeowner to negotiate with the lender for an affordable modification to the loan. Unlike most housing counseling agencies, ESOP has direct points of contact and formal agreements with many lending companies, which produces results in a quick and efficient manner.” ESOP currently has working partnerships with the following lenders and servicers: Ameriquest/Argent, Charter One/CCO Mortgage, Citifinancial, Citimortgage, CitiResidential, Countrywide Home Loans, Homecomings Financial/GMAC, JP Morgan Chase, Litton Loan Servicing, Ocwen Financial Services, Option One/AHMS Inc., Select Portfolio Servicing/Fairbanks, Third Federal Savings and Loan, Wells Fargo/ASC, and Wilshire Credit Corporation.

Lastly, the Kirwan Institute will be making video recordings of the plenary sessions and transcriptions of the break-out sessions available online over the coming weeks. Take a look at their website.

In a courageous piece of advocacy, the Alameda County Homeless Action Center, argued that proposed cuts in the general assistance program would have a disparate impact upon African Americans in Alameda County. In support of their contention staff attorney, John Engstrom, crafted a Racial Impact Statement clearly demonstrating how the cuts would fall most heavily upon those in the African American community. He also challenged the “exemption process” that classified most unemployed African Americans as employable by describing the societal structures that prevented these recipients from accessing job opportunities. Kudos to Pattie Wall, John Engstrom and the clients of the Homeless Action Center for so effectively putting race on the table in their advocacy.

We made a few new additions to our resources today that we think you should take a look at:

The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity

• Site Summary: The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’s “ultimate goal is to stimulate and facilitate transformative change to bring about a society that is fair and just for all people.” It approaches this goal “with the understanding that all communities of people are interconnected and that by fostering positive relationships through research, scholarship and collaboration, we will deepen the possibility for change.” The Kirwan Institute is a true pioneer in the fight to achieve equitable results for communities of color and its research and advocacy, particularly around opportunity mapping, represents some of the most innovative and effective advocacy currently being undertaken by advocates for race equity. The Institute also posts all of their PowerPoint presentations on their site. Available presentations cover topics ranging from GIS to framing to structural racism.

HealthyCity

• Site Summary: HealthyCity offers perhaps the most comprehensive access to community resources, demographic/health data, and cutting edge online GIS mapping technology that the REP has ever seen. For the time being, the site only offers geographic coverage for Los Angeles county. We hope that HealthyCity will be going statewide soon but until that time we will have to stew in our jealousy of the wonderful online mapping and data analysis tools that residents of the city of angels have access to.

• Suggested Uses: If you have any mapping or data analysis needs related to Los Angeles county and you are not adverse to free, powerful, user-friendly online mapping and data analysis tools than HealthyCity is for you.

The Frameworks Institute recently completed a five year survey of default frames used by the public to understand matters of race in America. These dominant frames rise from deeply held American values but they are also reinforced/primed by the limited analytical framework used by the media. The FrameWorks staff thoughtfully suggest ways in which our advocacy can apply reframing principles to move the public towards more equitable policies on race in America. The FrameWorks message brief, Framing Race, summarizes their research on framing and provides practical pointers for facilitating transformative discussions of race in our communities. The full report, The Architecture of a New Racial Discourse, is also worth reading as it provides fascinating insight into the reactions of focus groups held throughout the United States on which frames work and which don’t.