information addict

I wish I could find YouTube of this fuckery

I just saw a Bud Light commercial, one of those Too Light/Too Heavy things, and I didn’t catch the whole thing because the tv was on mute so I wasn’t really paying attention. But what I think I saw was: an airport security agent, waving a Middle Eastern-looking man through the gates when the alarms go off = Too Light. The same guy giving a rectal exam to a white man = Too Heavy. Am I the only one who sees something wrong with this picture? Darker skin = obvious terrorist, lighter skin = obvious innocent?

October 10

Ledasha, legends and race: part one

I am not saying that telling the story of Le-a, or Lemonjello and Oranjello, or Male and Female (that’s MAH-lay and feh-MAH-lay, of course) makes you a racist. People of every color and background repeat the stories because they’re clever and amusing. What I am saying is that as a group, the legend names have a context and meaning we shouldn’t ignore. Or to put it another way, I haven’t mentioned a word about Ledasha’s race, but didn’t you draw assumptions about it? And aren’t those assumptions a key part of the story?

October 8

Where African-Americans in the ’60s adopted a ”natural” look, they now feel free to coif their heads any way they want. That’s cultural power.

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Good Hair | Movie Review | Entertainment Weekly

Uh… I think you completely missed the point of your own review, Owen Gleiberman. You talk about $1,000 weaves and toxic relaxers, but then conclude that these must be freely-made choices with no cultural pressure whatsoever? Yeah… no.

October 4

There is one additional item of note about this legend: its undercurrent of racism. While tellings generally lack overt mention of the drug seeker’s color, the use of language brands that individual as African-American via the ‘r’ dropped from the ‘mor-’ syllable of the narcotic he’s after. His forged script never requests “Morfeen,” “Morpheen,” or “Morfine,” misspellings that would leave entirely up in the air the question of race; instead, the elided ‘r’ points the dialectal finger directly at a black person.

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snopes.com: One Pound of Mofeen

September 30

“Political Correctness” is a reactionary term against the loss of privilege.

Laurence Berg, Canada Research Chair for Human Rights, Diversity and Identity, disagrees with the idea that PC language and policies are oppressive. Why? Because he doesn’t really believe that PC policies existed in the first place.

“What [they]’re calling the ‘PC movement’ I would call a social movement by marginalised people and the people who support them,” he said. “[A movement] to use language that’s more correct—not ‘politically correct’—that more accurately represents reality.”

September 26

stuff white people do: have an aversion to non-white names

I was at a party recently, talking to a young woman of Korean descent named Hae Sook. We’d just met, and as we were talking, a middle-aged white woman I knew approached us. Since Hae Sook didn’t know her, it was up to me to introduce them.

“Hae Sook, I said, “This is Margaret. Margaret, Hae Sook.”

As I told them a little more about each other, they smiled and shook hands, said “nice to meet you,” and so on.

Then Margaret said, “Your name is really hard to catch! How about if I just call you Helen.”

I didn’t write a question mark at the end of Margaret’s question, because her tone implied that she wasn’t really asking a question. It was more like an announcement, a statement about something that she was going to do from now on.

September 25

But sadly, any time a racist criticizes the president, someone cries racism.

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Stephen Colbert (via chuckmore) (via robot-heart-politics) (via igather) (via amandaw)

September 23

A lot of Americans, when Germany is mentioned, express disbelief that a people could live with a history like the holocaust. But Americans do live with a history like the holocaust, we just like to pretend it never happened. While Germany is processing its participation in a human rights tragedy, the U.S. is denying its own; while Germany is confronting its own ugly history for the betterment of the world, we are busy preserving the myth of U.S. moral superiority.

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Remembering National Tragedies: The U.S. vs. Germany » Sociological Images

September 22

Racial Attitudes and Health Care

amandaw: abbyjean:

As evidence of the link between health care and racial attitudes, we analyzed survey data gathered in late 2008. The survey asked people whether they favored a government run health insurance plan, a system like we have now, or something in between. It also asked four questions about how people feel about blacks.

Taken together the four items form a measure of what scholars call racial resentment. We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.

Among whites with above average racial resentment, only 19 percent favored fundamental health care reforms and 57 percent favored the present system. Among those who have below average racial resentment, more than twice as many (45 percent) favored government run health care and less than half as many (25 percent) favored the status quo. No such relationship between racial attitudes and opinions on health care existed in the mid-1990s during the Clinton effort.

August 24

“You know full well that no one is talking about wanting to go back to the days of segregation.”

Well, no, I don’t know it. I don’t know that at all, seeing as how so many of the tea-bag set and anti-health care folks make “taking their country back” one of the most prominent lines of their vocalized outrage. What does that mean, coming from people in their 60s and 70s, for whom the America of their youth was indeed a white supremacist place? […]

“But that’s not what we’re talking about when we say we want our country back,” another writer intoned, also angered by my televised comments: “We aren’t talking about the racism part. We mean the rest of it.” How fascinating. That it is factually impossible to separate out the “racism part” from the rest of it is something many white folks seem not to understand […]

This second writer sought to explain herself further however, just so as not to be misunderstood. When people like her claim they want to return to “what our forefathers started,” she continued, they simply mean the part about being dependent on God, rather than government. […]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the founders actually did foster quite a lot of government dependence: enshrining slavery was about government protecting white people from the competition of free black labor, and white folks becoming quite dependent on that protection. Stealing native land and then redistributing it to white people was about dependence on government-imposed violence. And later, yet still in the supposedly “good old days,” government dependence was at the heart of segregation—which artificially subsidized white people in the job, school and housing markets—and was at the heart of the FHA and VA loans that white families used (and from which black families were all but completely blocked) in the 40s and 50s, which literally built the white middle class.

But I’m guessing that when she uses a phrase like “dependence on government” she isn’t thinking about the white folks who were given 270 million acres of essentially free land under the Homestead Act. Or the 15 million or so white families who got those racially preferential home loans, with government underwriting and guarantees, thanks to programs implemented by liberals and thanks to pressure from the left. I’m thinking she isn’t talking about the white soldiers (but typically not the black ones) who were able to return from World War II and make use of the GI Bill to go to college, or get job training. And the fact that she likely doesn’t think of those kinds of things and those kinds of people as being dependent on government is, of course, precisely the problem, and the point I was trying to make.

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Tim Wise, Racism, Right Wing Rage and the Politics of White Nostalgia

I have a self-policy of never clicking on a DailyKos link but I was baited into this one. Turns out to be Tim Wise speaking truth to power. I’ll just cover my eyes and pass it on and urge you to do the same.

(via amandaw)

August 12

Racist Messages, Attacks Infect Health Care Debate

notthatkindagay:

First, there were the protesters attempting to inject chaos into town hall meetings about the president’s proposed health care overhaul. Then came the false rumors that the health care bill encourages seniors to end their lives early. And now, racist messages and acts of vandalism have infected the debate.

Democratic Congressman David Scott of Georgia told NPR that one of his district offices had been vandalized with a four-foot swastika. It was spray painted on the door of his office in Smyrna, Ga., on Tuesday.

The act of vandalism came 10 days after Scott engaged in a verbal confrontation with protesters at a town hall debate where President Obama’s health care overhaul plan was discussed. Scott, who is black, says race has become the undertone of the health care debate.

“Racism, unfortunately, is part of the fabric of America’s society,” Scott said.

Scott has received racist messages via fax. In one missive, a picture of Obama was painted to make him like the Joker from Batman. It was accompanied by a caption reading, “Death to all Marxists! Foreign and Domestic!” The message goes on to address Scott with a racist epithet.

Scott is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and was told in a separate fax that he is “racist because whites are denied membership” to the caucus. The fax also says that Scott will lose re-election next year and “any of [his] color constituents ain’t gonna stop it. The folks are not going to stand for Obama’s socialized medicine even though most negroes refuse to stand on their own two-feet.”

“Race plays so much in everything we do,” Scott said. But he believes that a nation that just elected its first African-American president is capable of having a civil discussion about revamping health care.

“We must make a commitment not to allow racism or swastikas or any of this stuff that is coming in this debate to win,” Scott said.

August 7

looking at class as wealth rather than income

abbyjean:

The idea of viewing economic progress through the lens of wealth rather than income emerged in the mid-1980s. It allows researchers to calculate what’s been called the “asset poverty line”—or being able to maintain a standard of living above the federal poverty level for at least three months without income. When you lose a job or get hit with a huge hospital bill or, well, get socked by a foreclosure, can you cushion the blow while getting a fresh start? Do you have strong enough bootstraps to pull yourself back up, as it were?

The answers are sobering. One in five families that were middle class in 2004 couldn’t make it three months on assets alone, according to a Corporation for Economic Development analysis of Census data. In other words, when you look at wealth, the income-based poverty rate doubles. And that was before the housing bubble burst.

If you then apply a racial lens to these asset-based measures, the disparities are awesome. Roughly 40 percent of both blacks and Latinos lived below the asset poverty line in 2004. As pioneering sociologist Thomas Shapiro sums it up in a 2006 paper, “Two families with similar incomes but widely disparate wealth most likely do not share similar life trajectories.” (prospect)

August 6

When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, he was said to have remarked to an aide as he put down his pen, “We have lost the South for a generation.” Alas, LBJ actually underestimated the backlash from his fellow Southern whites. The South, which had been solidly Democratic, quickly became solidly Republican. Almost two generations later, it still is. That solid block of Southern electoral votes has been the key to Republican power since Nixon adopted his “Southern Strategy” in 1968. To put it bluntly, Republican success over the past forty has been largely a function of its appeal to Southern whites alienated from the Democratic Party over racial issues.

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daggatt (via azspot) (via robot-heart-politics) (via apsies)

August 3

That’s because the America you grew up in… was segregated.

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JON STEWART, responding to Sean Hannity saying that President Obama is “literally ripping apart the foundation of the America we knew and grew up in”, on The Daily Show (via inothernews) (via aodouls) (via explorers) (via kayrutledge) (via brighteryellow) (via stephasaurusss) (via gchoate17) (via robot-heart-politics)

July 24

A Henry Louis Gates Jr. Explainer roundup. - By Brian Palmer - Slate Magazine

squashed:

jeffmiller:

Worth a read by everyone who’s been talking about Gatesgate.

I will second that. While yelling at a police officer may not be prudent, it is very much legal.

Apparently the definition of “disorderly conduct” is “behavior that may cause a riot.” I’m sure Gates was about to cause a riot… on his front porch… with nobody else around.