Tiger Mothers and the Mommy Wars

We talked today about Amy Chua's piece, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior", that ignited such a firestorm of debate when it appeared in the Wall Street Journal. While Chua tries in this piece to detach literal ethnicity from her parenting practices, she still manages to highlight some very important cultural differences in how we raise our children.

This piece touches on so many very, very sensitive issues in our ongoing debate about who we are as culture, where we're going, and with whom we compete. Some things to think about when reading this piece might be:

• The degree to which we invest our children with our own needs and goals for the future of our culture, as opposed to their own ideas;
• Our mythologies about childhood as a general concept;
• Our anxiety about the rise of powers other than the United States in the global marketplace;
• How we define achievement and success.

The Last Acceptable Racism

There has been a standing debate on the use of indigenous people's as sports mascots for as long as there have been sports mascots. Defenders often make the claim that they are "honoring" the people in question by using certain images and terms. In the linked article, David Kimelberg makes the argument that the treatment of Native Americans in media and pop culture would be disgusting and abhorrent if committed against any other race or ethnic group. Kimelberg argues that the perpetuation of overt racism towards Native Americans is partly due to the fact that the legacy of cultural genocide has largely convinced non-Natives that American Indians aren't part of the modern world anymore, but mere characters in stories, history books, and the USA's legendary past.

The Last Acceptable Racism: Native Americans | Indian Country Today Media Network.com

A Bump in the Silk Road?

Here is an article from the Washington Post about an archaeological find that has implications for current ethnic and racial tensions in western China. Because of Chinese national security concerns about the Uighurs in Xinjiang province, this mummy may have been pulled from an exhibit on Silk Road artifacts.

... hundreds of mummies that have been discovered in China's Xinjiang province have long caused controversy, because their Caucasian features point to European origin - a simple archaeological fact that has had political and potentially explosive ramifications since they were discovered in this region of occasionally violent ethnic clashes.

The mummy that was supposed to go on display this weekend has Caucasoid features that are almost perfectly preserved - fair skin, auburn hair and round eyes. The woman's body, dubbed the Beauty of Xiaohe, is so intact that many have described her as looking as though she is simply taking a nap.

To read the article, please click here.

Race Remixed in the US

Race and ethnicity are important ideas in society and in anthropology. This article explores how complex the issue of identity and labeling is in the US. Categories and labels can provide ways to include and exclude people; and they can also set limitations in the number of categories to choose from. More and more individuals are becoming increasingly aware of their diversity in America and are selecting more categories to describe their ethnicity. (See Here)

Poles in Lithuania want their 'w' back

Here is an interesting article about the intersection of language and identity. Though Lithuania is a small country the size of West Virginia, it has always been ethnically diverse and parts of it were previously under Polish rule. Under Lithuanian law people must use the Lithuanian alphabet to write their names and street names can only be in Lithuania. This is a problem for the Polish minority that uses letters such as "w" that don't exist in the Lithuanian language. Combine that with tension over an oil and gas refinery and you have the makings of ethnic tensions.

To read more about this, CLICK HERE