Month: February 2014

This white boy is nuts:

Dave Bry examines how white people are making up an ever greater proportion of hip-hop’s stars and audiences:

In 2013, for the first time in the 55-year-history of the Billboard Hot 100, not one black artist lodged a number-one single. (Of the eleven songs that held the spot for some portion of the year, four were hip-hop, and four featured black singers or rappers in guest roles.) There’s been round, sustained clamor over Macklemore’s Grammy haul, which was all the more glaring because it came at the expense of fellow nominee Kendrick Lamar, a (frankly) far more talented artist, who is black. … Macklemore admits that white privilege is a factor in his success. “I benefit from that privilege,” he has said. “And I think that mainstream Pop culture has accepted me on a level that they might be reluctant to, in terms of a person of color.” But that doesn’t change the facts on the ground:

A new white hip-hop superstar has been anointed, one who does not live up to most rap critics’ definition of excellence. (Eminem is widely considered to be an extremely skilled rapper.) Some have even gone so far as to anoint Macklemore some sort of savior of hip-hop, a Great White Hope who will help the genre evolve into a more enlightened form. A recent Dallas Morning News headline sums up this perspective: “Macklemore shows hip-hop doesn’t need to be homophobic, violent in Dallas concert.”

Like Serch said, with so many more white people listening to rap than black, more and more white people will make it (and, it’s hard to deny that its easier to sell a white rap star to millions and millions of white consumers than it is a black one). So let’s imagine that, in 25 years, most of the people making it are white, and that, like rock, it’s thought of as a white form. Shouldn’t we expect black artists will be on to creating whatever next new form might challenge the status quo the way rap did, and the way rock n’ roll did before that? As rock became whiter over time, black artists forged new paths in R&B, in soul, in funk, in disco. (And many—Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, Prince, Bad Brains, Living Colour, Fishbone—stayed on and made an indelible impact in rock.)

Bry goes on to recognize a “new wave of [black] artists from Chicago and Atlanta have been pushing rap into aesthetic spaces it has never been before,” who often use Autotune “to warp their voices in ways traditional rappers never could, they bleed one word into the next, blurring the line between rapping and singing.” Exhibit A is ZMoney:

A Kansas lawmaker is concerned that parents and teachers aren’t hitting children hard enough:

Democratic Rep. Gail Finney has introduced a bill that would allow parents, teachers and caregivers to spank children hard enough to leave redness or bruising. Under current state law, spanking that does not leave marks is already permitted. … Finney’s bill would allow “up to 10 forceful applications in succession of a bare, open-hand palm against the clothed buttocks of a child and any such reasonable physical force on the child as may be necessary to hold, restrain or control the child in the course of maintaining authority over the child, acknowledging that redness or bruising may occur on the tender skin of a child as a result.”

The chairman of the House Corrections and Juvenile Justice committee says they won’t even consider the bill. Other states, however, have laws on the books that are even more spanking-friendly:

Yes, it’s all the usual suspects. As of 2013: kids are still getting paddled (yes, paddled) in Georgia, though that’s declining in Mississippi. Florida banned paddling elementary school students and then un-banned it. A city in Tennessee almost banned corporal punishment, then decided to do more research. In 2012, there was an uproar in Texas when two male assistant principles paddled two girls so hard they had bruises. Parents thought it was inappropriate for men to paddle girls without a same sex administrator in the room. As long as the paddler can prove they’re beating the paddlee for “discipline,” it’s all legal.

A short documentary profiles Victoria and Zoe Yin, sisters who are both art prodigies:

Scott Barry Kaufman describes research that “investigated the cognitive profiles of 18 prodigies,” a sample set consisting of eight music prodigies, five math prodigies, and five art prodigies:

In terms of total IQ score, math and music prodigies had a significantly higher total IQ score than the art prodigies:

Math Prodigies: Average IQ= 140; Range= 134-147
Music Prodigies: Average IQ=129; Range=108-142
Art Prodigies: Average IQ= 108; Range=100-116

The math and music prodigies scored higher than the art prodigies on tests of general cultural knowledge, vocabulary, quantitative reasoning, and visual spatial ability. Surprisingly, the art prodigies displayed below average visual spatial skills (average visual spatial IQ = 88; Range=82-94). This finding suggests that the kind of mental visualization skills tested on IQ tests does not adequately capture artistic talent.

As a possible explanation, [psychologist Joanne] Ruthsatz and colleagues discuss research suggesting the key role of attention in the development of artistic talent. Artistically talented children tend to actively focus on the forms, shapes, and detailed surface features of their environments. As a result, the visual information around them is better and more selectively encoded, and they are able to remember those details while drawing. This skill may be at odds with the visual spatial skills tested on IQ tests, which highlight categories, concepts, and holistic perception at the expense of detailed-oriented perception. Consistent with this account, one of the art prodigies explained to the researchers that she uses her extraordinary memory to conjure images in her mind while painting. She remembers such details as how shadows fall on an object and is able to paint the entire scene from memory building up from those details.

In a lengthy, detailed investigation, Kiera Feldman interviews victims of sexual assault at Patrick Henry College, the bastion of evangelical elites, and describes how the college’s fundamentalism makes it hard for them to get justice:

Last September, the school chose Dr. Stephen Baskerville, a professor of government, to deliver a speech that the entire student body was required to attend. He argued that feminism and liberalism have transformed the government into “a matriarchal leviathan.” The result, he said, according to a copy of the speech, was a society plagued by politically motivated “witch hunts” against men—while “the seductress who lures men into a ‘honeytrap’ ” was really to blame. “Recreational sex in the evening turns into accusations of ‘rape’ in the morning, even when it was entirely consensual,” Baskerville explained. “This is especially rampant on college campuses.” (In a statement, PHC said Baskerville’s speech was “an exercise in academic freedom” and not “endorsed by the administration.”)

“When you have a culture of license where you can’t tell the difference between what’s full rape or fake rape and what’s real rape,” PHC journalism professor Les Sillars added during the post-speech Q&A, “it makes dealing with real rape really, really hard.”

Researchers estimate that one in five American women is sexually assaulted in college, and Patrick Henry College’s unique campus culture has not insulated the school from sexual violence. In fact, it puts female students, like Claire Spear, in a particular bind: How do you report sexual assault at a place where authorities seem skeptical that such a thing even exists?

Hanna Rosin, who wrote the book on PHC, comments:

A Patrick Henry statement says the expected things: that they don’t “elevate one gender above the other” and that they don’t view women who experience sexual abuse as “deserving of their fate.” But the problem is baked into their philosophy. An “innocent” woman in their context is one who never ever breaks the rules, which would mean never getting in a car or sitting on a bed with a boy. That’s where Patrick Henry shares borders with Andrea Dworkin: all sex is at some level a violation of women. But that line, whether it comes from an evangelical or a feminist, is unlikely to foster a situation where college kids or their administration can make reasonable decisions about what constitutes sexual assault.

Dreher passes along an e-mail from a recent PHC alumna, disputing Feldman’s characterization of the school’s culture:

The TNR piece said women interested in government or leadership are viewed as “unmarriageable.” Nothing could be further from the truth—my smartest, most politically savvy, strong-willed female friends are either dating, engaged, or married (with a couple exceptions, and those women have turned down multiple requests). The meek, frightened, abused woman in the TNR  piece just doesn’t exist: at least not at the fault of the school. There may be larger, familial issues there, but it’s not an issue of institutional patriarchalism.

And Leah Libresco puts Feldman’s report in the context of sexual assault on college campuses in general:

Patrick Henry’s Christian ethos informs the tone in which these students were brushed off (you’d be unlikely to hear concerns about purity at a public or secular private school), but the alleged underlying betrayal is more attributable to being a university than a Christian one in particular.

Treating Patrick Henry’s crisis as unique because of its singular status as a private, Christian school (one of only four private colleges in the country that decline federal funds and, thus, aren’t regulated under Title IX) masks a broader problem with administrations’ treatment of students in crisis, one that isn’t limited to sexual assault.