Rolling 2014 Thread on Race

So this year I figured, let's not include 'racism' in the thread title

This thread is intended for discussing, as DJP puts it, modern issues about race in society

Racist incidents are of course a part of that. But I'm hoping to sidestep some of the more garden-variety, unremarkable racism that does nothing more than to remind us that yes, there are still bona fide racists out there. If you're reading this thread I think you're well aware of that.

Mostly just tired of something interesting getting posted in this thread, only to have it ignored in favor of something Obviously Racist that's not really interesting at all

Starting off the thread by reposting this excellent piece wrapping up last year

http://gawker.com/the-year-in-racial-amnesia-1475833936

Will drop this here too

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/10187051/view/full/rembert-browne-year-end-bracket

2013 was incredible, because it played out exactly how I hoped it would. Week in and week out, I would cycle between being insulted, impressed, shocked, dumbfounded, and enlightened by either someone's behavior or someone's critique of said behavior. And, ultimately, I loved it. I can't think of a messier year in my lifetime, in the sense that people were existing with an almost reckless abandon, with discussions previously too taboo to breach exploding everywhere.

The idea of cultural appropriation can mean myriad things, but the rocket fuel behind its rise in 2013 was the question of how we talk about and react to race (and other oft-polarizing issues) in mixed settings. Cultural appropriation has been occurring forever, but it has been long addressed in homogenous silos. In 2013, that changed. We all saw Miley's transformation in 2013 and felt required to talk about it. Kanye West forced discussions of race on everyone, and in turn became the most relevant, polarizing, and discussed artist of his generation. And Macklemore's existence alone made it seem like you had to take a stance on Macklemore's existence — and almost always in ways that had nothing to do with his music or who he was as a person.

But what really stood out in 2013 was the extent to which it was impossible to escape the dialogue itself. It's easy to see much of what happened in 2013 in a negative light. But if you look at the way these explosions of distress were processed by the culture, it didn't always break down along the lines you'd expect. The year helped shine a light on two groups of people, "people who get it" versus "people who don't." And "get it" doesn't just mean the people who don't wear blackface on Halloween. It's the people who truly understand why you shouldn't wear blackface on Halloween. And go out of their way to express why it's inexcusable. And actually feel emotions, like shame and embarrassment, when it takes place.

Through all the mess, that's what stands out about cultural appropriation in 2013. The fact that, through a newfound ability to talk about things, there was a discourse redistricting. And, like it or not, it wouldn't have happened had Miley not become the ambassador for twerking and an assortment of other things that have been labeled as "minstrelsy," had Lorde not written lyrics for "Royals" that could have been misconstrued as racially insensitive, had the Washington http://images.chron.com/blogs/askacat/hatcat.JPG not continued to remain the Washington http://images.chron.com/blogs/askacat/hatcat.JPG, had Macklemore not struck gold with "Thrift Shop" and "Same Love," had the Harlem Shake been titled something different from a dance popularized a decade earlier, and had Kanye not made songs called "New Slaves" and "Black Skinhead" and then produced apparel decorated with Confederate flags.

A ton of uncomfortable things happened in 2013. But we finally began talking about them together. Declaring cultural appropriation as the winner of 2013 signifies that, for 12 months, we all kind of lost. But I'll take a short-term mess in exchange for long-term progress any day.

Here's to hoping that's exactly what 2013 was. Not the year we wanted, but the year we needed.

And with that, the bracket is over. Now get me the hell out of 2013.

Excellent

Kanye West forced discussions of race on everyone, and in turn became the most relevant, polarizing, and discussed artist of his generation.

*yawn*

Great insight. Excellent observation

Fair enough.

To the writer's credit, "relevant, polarizing, and discussed" don't necessarily imply the fawning that I usually get from too many writers on Kanye (the very thing that I quickly assumed was taking place here), but the failure of many critics to engage with the fact of what an ugly (and I don't mean sonically) piece of work Yeezus is--or to bring up certain troubling aspects of the work before quickly sweeping them under the rug, citing them as evidence of his "brilliance"--was one of the more annoying things about following music and popular culture in 2013.

two types of ppl

xp +1
my main method of coping with the post-pop approach of kanye's fashion politics or politics of fashion or whatever the hell you want to call the ill-considered fame-and-money-based ethos of oversimplification that walks alongside the swift decline of his music has been just to stop paying attention to him once i've listened to the product enough to determine it ain't me babe
bound is nice tho'

To the writer's credit, "relevant, polarizing, and discussed" don't necessarily imply the fawning that I usually get from too many writers on Kanye (the very thing that I quickly assumed was taking place here), but the failure of many critics to engage with the fact of what an ugly (and I don't mean sonically) piece of work Yeezus is--or to bring up certain troubling aspects of the work before quickly sweeping them under the rug, citing them as evidence of his "brilliance"--was one of the more annoying things about following music and popular culture in 2013.

― Inside Lewellyn Sinclair (cryptosicko), Wednesday, January 1, 2014 8:07 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

Okay but there are probably other threads to bring this to? Like afaict you just want to discuss Kanye As An Artist which there are already like a million threads devoted to. But if you want to turn the thread for serious discussion of issues about race into another ILM critfest circlejerk then feel free to go right on ahead

"and that's true too"

xpost

Not particularly, no, and you're right--ILX doesn't need another thread about, or being taken over by, Kanye. But the quote (referenced in a thread I bookmarked because I wanted to read/participate in serious discussions about race) mentioned it in a summation of how racial issues played out in the media in 2013, so I assumed it was fair game. Still, there was a lot more going on there and I highlighted the brief mention of Kanye with my (non-)comment, and I apologize. Let's talk about other things.

is this the thread where we rank the-dream albums?

it's not like i come in to troll this thread on a regular basis or am against what it's about

― k3vin k., Friday, 20 December 2013 22:51 (1 week ago) Permalink

oh you

look can we just agree that whole paragraph is embarrassing but isn't really worth wasting the race thread on

did any mainstream media even acknowledge the cultural appropriation critique wrt miley? everything i saw was either about it being too sexy or her tongue

I think there were some segments in mainstream media outlets (maybe just cable) on the Harlem Shake but I don't recall any with Miley

how is espn not mainstream media???

Well please refresh our memory, balls

Or do you mean Grantland-via-ESPN

yes

Grantland is a boutique media outlet. It's artisanal. Like Wing Street to ESPN's Pizza Hut

so you're using the palin definition for mainstream media

Yes. Lamestream trash

http://i.imgur.com/OpqQbwn.png

http://i.imgur.com/infgMay.png

I dunno, man. Make of that what you will

in that case you're correct, diane sawyer did not suddenly stop in the middle of the evening news and talk about miley and cultural appropriation

I mean I assume that's what flopson was talking about. Obviously it was all over Salon/Atlantic/Slate/Gawker/Grantland etc.

nor did brian williams or someone named scott pelley. and hence it was not discussed in the mainstream media. also if you want to include espn.go.com you are correct, they did not plaster 'BTW MILEY A RACIST' in their boxscore for game three of the world series. they do however give more prominent placement to grantland pieces on espn.go.com than they do for any other non-simmons approved commentary.

Maybe your point was that Stuart Scott interrupted his reporting on who made the Orange Bowl to tell viewers to head over to Grantland.com/articles/Miley-appropriation-twerk-looking-for-pagehits.com? In which case yes, I must have missed that

xp I guess we're on the same wavelength!

balls is annoying, who cares, i don't even think we actually disagree, my point was just i wonder how "inescapable" these discussions were for most americans. i agree with the piece that it certainly felt like this year crossed some threshold and a lot more ppl were talking about race. but while watching tv at my mom's over the holidays all the 2013 in review segments on talk shows all focused on miley, but foam finger and tongue, not twerking or singing into a butt. made me think like wait is that what everyone thought was so controversial?

there is nothing cultural that isn't 'inescapable' in america in 2013 (predict the pattern holds for 2014). cf all the ilxors going 'wtf is duck dynasty' a couple of weeks ago.

Hey I worked long and hard on this inescapability-proof bubble and I want my efforts to be acknowledged.

i'm not sure that being in such a bubble necessarily requires as much work as you're attributing, which may or may not be an issue

Don't be ridiculous, my parents think the federal reserve doing its job is "scary" and would feel better if we were back on the gold standard, where "money" "means" something. I built every inch of this pink bubble with my own two hands.

lol i read you completely opposite my bad, yr efforts should be acknowledged

balls is annoying, who cares, i don't even think we actually disagree, my point was just i wonder how "inescapable" these discussions were for most americans. i agree with the piece that it certainly felt like this year crossed some threshold and a lot more ppl were talking about race. but while watching tv at my mom's over the holidays all the 2013 in review segments on talk shows all focused on miley, but foam finger and tongue, not twerking or singing into a butt. made me think like wait is that what everyone thought was so controversial?

― flopson, Wednesday, January 1, 2014 9:10 PM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah. it's weird when the majority of the criticism you hear is about the cultural appropriation but the majority of what everyone else heard was only about sexuality, her role-modeliness, etc. there were two completely different arguments happening, one in which miley was a feminist hero and one in which she was racist. she gained an enormous liberal fanbase this year! and the two arguments never really met except when stray commenters would respond to the appropriation charges with "STOP SLUTSHAMING". i think appropriation generally isn't something the mainstream will ever care about or really be able to grasp in a culture reliant on thinkpieces shared on facebook.

by mainstream you mean "white mainstream" right, because i think certain things were acutely felt more broadly. also i don't think 'appropriation' was as much a concern, in this latter conversation, than was minstrelsy and exploitation.

White mainstream - is there any other kind

yes?

i mean that's sort of what i'm talking about? before this thing became such a huge media whatever with all the DEFEND MILEY people coming out of the woodwork, my impression was that the actual issue was about race, because my impression of "mainstream" was different than what ended up happening in time magazine or w/e. there are different mainstreams but if a story gets big enough, the whitest and most racistest mainstream is gonna win out and miley is gonna come out of it stronger than ever.

Really got sick of people saying "What I love about her is she just does what she wants!" as if that's an excuse for any behavior at all.

Not really sure why anyone takes anything she does seriously, no matter the context.

she's so unbearably trivial and foisting racial arguments on her behavior seems to trivialize them to a degree

Really got sick of people saying "What I love about her is she just does what she wants!" as if that's an excuse for any behavior at all.

It's terrible in people supporting politicians: here, in Boris Johnson; in Toronto you get that impression about Rob Ford. I don't get why being completely unfiltered is seen as a good thing.

tons of people do racist things, lots of them are stupid or make bad art or w/e. that fact doesn't/can't trivialize the problems that racism engenders. there's no "foisting" racial arguments "on her." she has engaged in racism.

nice rolling 2014 miley cyrus thread guyz

Cool that we're two days into the year and half a dozen witedudes have already tried to derail the convo itt.

all witedude posters on ilx should have to have some kind of icon next to their dn so we know who they are. like maybe a pale smiley face or something.

Works for me.

I couldn't get the icon to work, so hopefully this will suffice

all witedude posters on ilx should have to have some kind of icon next to their dn so we know who they are. like maybe a pale smiley face or something.

― Mordy , Thursday, January 2, 2014 7:32 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'll pass

http://i.imgur.com/o6wjKf6.gif

Mine is actually all of the white space in your browser, including all negative space around the words.

Not a bad metaphor for how whiteness works, actually

can there be a race thread that is only for non-white ppl, the same way the grrrls thread provides for a non-male-dominated space

i think that's a great idea

Haha gr80

i think that's a great idea

― A White Guy , Thursday, January 2, 2014 3:09 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dogg

lol

all witedude posters on ilx should have to have some kind of icon next to their dn so we know who they are. like maybe a pale smiley face or something.

― Mordy , Thursday, January 2, 2014 7:32 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'll pass

― sad banta (wins), Thursday, January 2, 2014 7:40 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fuck y'all this was funny

Just got it - nice one

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/12/17/251957062/a-graduate-program-works-to-diversify-the-science-world

Hey, I've been meaning to post this for a while, so apologies if it's already been discussed (I searched and it didn't seem to have been, on the 2013 thread, though a terribly intimidating thread to walk into, 2000 posts already in progress)

http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/

^^^on the surface, this looks like a pretty special interest blog, in that it is an art history blog, focusing mostly on the late medieval period (I love medieval art so this in itself is like catnip to me) but also encompassing some later and also vastly earlier European art, showing how People of Colour have been both traditionally represented in, and later erased from Capital-A Art.

But the range of the curator's knowledge, the participatory nature of the blog - and her good humour in dealing with racist trolls - have turned it into something much bigger and more interesting. In that, by applying modern notions of race to ancient art, she is able to get at a history of racism, and the invention of Whiteness as a political and power-bearing concept.

The original purpose of the blog, so I've surmised, was to counter people who would talk about films like Brave and Frozen and say "but medieval fantasies can't have black people in them, because that would just be ~historically inaccurate~" by showing, time and again, with historical documents from the time, that there have been People of Colour in Europe since the Roman Empire, and probably well before then. On one level, I feel quite shocked at the erasure, because, growing up in a liberal christian house, I have never not known that e.g. one of the Three Kings/Three Wise Men was *always* represented as Black African, and that there have always been saints depicted as being Black (e.g. St Maurice, and that even saints depicted as "Anglo-Saxon" were originally e.g. Turkish or Anatolian or whatever, because that's what the Dictionary of Saints said.) But on many other levels, she's done an exceptionally rigourous job of dismantling racist myths and other Things We Were Taught which I completely took for granted, in a way that has completely rearranged my thinking.

And even though she is an American, and posting from (inside?) the American academic system, it's really interesting to see the way that American ideas of Race differ from and rub up against European ideas of Race. (Really interesting debates happen when she will post a racially ambiguous figure from e.g. Italian or Spanish art, especially from the Moorish period of the latter, and Americans and Europeans will have completely different ideas of "that is a Person of Colour" vs "that is just an Italian" and how race is both identified and policed, and thusly the ways in which American and European expressions of racism can differ. That has been eye-opening to me, to say the least) I think she does really good work, and has made quite complex concepts easily visible, even to a fool like me.

She's also really, really funny, and the "medieval reaction gif-memes" alone are worth reading the blog for.

Yeah that's a quality tumblr

Race in the ancient world is a whole huge fascinating subject

It's a really, really good blog. A completely different era but i got my fiancee this for Christmas and it looks very interesting:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Black-Victorians-People-British-1800-1900/dp/0853319308

Feel the need to link to this Key and Peele sketch here now

http://vimeo.com/80117015

ahaha "y'all heard the ursher"

My old school classroom, which was mostly used for classical studies, used to have a huge poster about 'black Athenians' in ancient times. Always wondered how accurate it was.

But yeah I mean my only interface with European History has been like, stained glass and churches seen in movies

Don't remember anything at all from my world history class in high school & it was all text-based and there weren't too many pictures

Not an art history buff at all but have no trouble imagining that the images that are canonized were also selectively so

Not to mention Game of Thrones, which I think is a pretty okay series, but there's a definite racial hierarchy being depicted (in the books too)

Cool that we're two days into the year and half a dozen witedudes have already tried to derail the convo itt.

― The Reverend, Thursday, January 2, 2014 1:19 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

feel like i notice this a lot more on ilx.
A: "i have a legit complaint about some fucked up stuff ive noticed."
B: *eyeroll* farreal? this again? *participates in 1400 poll threads about bandz*

m bise did you guys talk about this anywhere? http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/why-teachers-of-color-quit/282007/

I don't even know how to begin talking about the complications of race in Europe (without even getting into ancient world vs medieval vs early modern vs today and how things have changed) except to say that the very idea even of "Whiteness" is more complicated and far less straightforward than American depictions thereof. (I recently read an extremely hateful Victorian-era book through Cornish studies, depicting "the Races of the British Isles" with a gradated map showing Cornwall and Wales getting shaded darker, with notes as to how the "Celts" were more "negroid" and therefore of a "lower race" - that is the level of o_0 WTF-ness you come up against.)

But the things MPOC discusses are at the level of, what gets canonised and what gets left to rot in a museum basement. But also, how images get literally cropped and reframed - there was a 17th and 18th Century vogue for powerful and important Europeans and later Americans to have themselves painted with a couple of picturesque Black servants or slaves in the background as a literal display of their power and race privilege. (I can remember as a child, one of the books in the House At Green Knowe series had as a character a small, black slave child who was brought as a companion/pet for the children - this stuff was just *these* in canonical English books I read when very young. Though I guess Green Knowe was recent enough a series for this to have been done on purpose, to show, rather than deny the history of history in Britain and how powerful British families got rich.) And nowadays when you see these portraits in catalogues or history books or textbooks, they will be cropped and the Black people left out, because it's too awkward to explain how they are using the actual bodies of human beings as metaphors for power. Yet the message that somehow comes through that is the old lie "what, there were no Black people in Britain before Windrush and if they were, they were slaves" and all that rubbish. It's fighting erasure and fighting the rewriting of history even at that basic level before you can even get at the more subtle questions of whether Saxons and Celts considered themselves the same "race" - let alone Spaniards.

x-posts sorry, the convo seems to have moved on now but it took me too long to type that to abandon it now. Apologies for derailing.

sorry: this stuff was just *these* *there* in canonical English books

I don't know that the American version of "whiteness" is really that straightforward, but the rules are definitely very different from those in Europe. Different by region, really.

whoever says in a frustrated voice 'we're getting off track'

<3 <3

thread's pretty north american tbh

lol oops I meant that for the conference call thread doh

But also, how images get literally cropped and reframed

Yeah - there's an American photographer, Arnold Genthe, who took pictures of San Francisco's Chinatown - he would, in the darkroom, remove any evidence of white people from the photographs to emphasize the "Chinese-ness" of the photos

The first thing you learn in art school is negative space: what - and more saliently *who* - gets omitted from a picture, says just as much (and sometimes more) than who is included.

Thinking about race through art really brought home the foregrounding of "Whiteness" (whosever definition that takes, US or European) and leading to ask questions I'd never much thought of, about who and what is happening in the "negative space" that concept creates through omission.

(Sorry, I do feel like I'm derailing talking about European stuff on a predominantly North American thread, but...)

The most egregious use of political cropping that immediately springs to mind, how it is STILL GOING ON, was in the London Riots two summers ago:

In the aftermath of the riots, there was a groundswell, twitter-organised clean-up effort - which was promoted in this totally annoying and twee nicey-and-whitey kind of way. But there were photos going round of a badly-hit street near where I lived, with the clean-up crew gathering and waving their brooms in the air, and it was a mixed crowd because it is a mixed neighbourhood. But then you saw the photographs that got published in the press afterwards, and the crowd looked predominantly white - but because the pictures had been on twitter it was very easy to compare them. That in the original, it was very obvious that there were a group of several black ppl right in the foreground waving brooms, and when the photo had been published, the whole front row had just been completely cropped out.

And this was part of a concerted political effort to depict the riots - which most people on the ground reported as being anti-Police riots - as being just "race riots", and the clean-up operation being "white ppl restoring order" rather than what actually happened - a mixed neighbourhood rallying round a complex situation.

This editing and erasing process not just being something that happened 100 years ago in these old paintings being discussed, but something that is still actively going on.

o_O

(Oops, that 'just "race riots"' is a vast over-simplification. In that race was a critical element in provoking the riots - a police force known to be racist shot a black man dead in cold blood, and the riots started as a protest against racist policing. But "anti-racist-policing protests" is vastly different to the right wing press's take of "people rioting because of sheer criminality" which was what it turned into. I realise this is something it would be easy to misread and misconstrue if you were not living in the UK that summer. Sorry, I will now take my Britishes self off a North American thread before I completely put my foot in it.)

Closely following BB's posts, but also in response to the Atlantic article about teachers xp

Yet still, many teachers seemed indifferent to discussing these issues at all. When Teach for America organized diversity sessions, many teachers in the corps would skip the sessions or come back telling me, “I am so sick of being forced to talk about this.” In one diversity session, so many teachers walked out in the middle of the meeting that corps members all received an email from the Teach for America Bay Area Director asking why so many people had left. A white teacher told me, “All those sessions do is make us all feel uncomfortable.”

This is the kind of behavior that blows my mind, although I'm sure it's tragically common and I'm being naive.

Wtf this thread is not in any way limited to NA concerns! Keep bringing it, BB.

no one said it was, just that our terminology isn't quite the same

m bise did you guys talk about this anywhere? http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/why-teachers-of-color-quit/282007/

― 龜, Friday, January 3, 2014 11:05 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(C&Ping something I told a friend re: this article)
it's a solid piece. It hits at a major flaw in TFA: the organization is not interested in cultivating life-long teachers. So as they try to diversify their corps, they continue to contribute to the churn of teachers in low-income schools. It's just that their team of temps is compositionally less white than it used to be (still majority white, I should add, even though 90% of the students TFA reaches are of color.)

It also hits a greater challenge: how do we keep teachers in schools serving low-income neighborhoods, especially good ones? We cannot rely exclusively on altruism: this creates burnout, high levels of stress, and unnecessary savior complexes. There must be some structural changes made to the recruitment, training, and retention of teachers. Require more pre-service training, especially on tackling white privilege. Pay teachers more for committing to higher-risk settings. Reduce/eliminate stakes of standardized testing, etc.

otm
also relying on altruism is its own form of exploitation imo

Wtf this thread is not in any way limited to NA concerns! Keep bringing it, BB.

― Horreur! What are this disassociated lumps of (in orbit), Saturday, January 4, 2014 3:30 AM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark

For sure - there were some great contributions last year about the history of South Asians in the UK, iirc. I like to think of this thread as being about Race in The_West

Yeah the financial aspect of TFA can't be ignored

I mean, teaching in general. But especially regarding teachers of color

Financial matters can further alienate teachers of color from coworkers. Teachers from well-to-do families have the advantage of accepting a low-paying teaching position and still having money available to them through other means. They have the comfort of knowing their families could help them out in the case of an emergency, or satisfy the occasional craving for luxury when they couldn’t afford it themselves. Teachers from lower-income backgrounds do not have this same sense of security. Often, we are the ones responsible for supporting our families, instead of the other way around. In Teach for America specifically, 39 percent of their teachers of color received Pell grants in college, meaning their families had incomes roughly below $23,000. I knew several teachers of color who had the responsibility of sending money home or otherwise contributing to paying family expenses.

Also, though some teacher training programs, including Teach for America, allow teachers to defer student loans during a short period of time, afterwards, teachers from low-income backgrounds still have to confront this debt. This makes committing long-term to a salary with little likelihood of ever making more money harder to justify. When I saw teachers from wealthier backgrounds stay in the profession, I had to remind myself that they, through their family or connections, could more easily tolerate a teaching salary knowing they would always have access to a lifestyle my family and I could only aspire to.

That life-long aspiration is the last issue that teachers from lower-income backgrounds struggle with. There is something disheartening about working so hard to honor your family’s sacrifices, only to find that your job has not improved your family’s situation. Twenty-seven percent of Teach for America teachers of color are the first in their families to earn a college degree. Many more are the first to go to a top-ranked school. To people from our backgrounds, admittance to college is not seen as only an opportunity for intellectual pursuits. It is seen, as my mother always used to tell me, as “a great equalizer,” a way of escaping the lower social status and finally gaining the respect or financial success of the upper class.

My roommate, a Latina graduate of the University of Southern California and a former chemistry teacher for Teach for America, expressed this concern when she left the classroom after her second year to pursue a career as a medical doctor. Her parents had worked their way out of poverty in Mexico through education and obtained scholarships to get Ph.D.’s in chemistry in the United States. She said, “After all that, to become a teacher making $39,000 a year? That feels like failure.” Another friend, a black Teach for America alum from an immigrant Haitian family who also left the profession after two years, expressed the same inner conflict saying, “At least for me another consideration was the life I would be giving my kids. By staying in teaching, I was setting myself up to struggle to provide for them in the same things my family struggled to provide for me.”

I know this sentiment all too well ;_;

i'm p sure i've met that last quoted teacher from usc, i think she was in my tfa cohort in san anto

Also, never not posting David Brothers to this thread

http://4thletter.net/2014/01/stuff-i-liked-in-2013-black-is/

much clapping

good luck improving the pay and incentives for teachers in public schools whilst they continue to provide a service that the wealthy don't use

sorry, that's needlessly negative but as far as i can tell the fact is that the barriers to improving public education in a lasting way are so tied into the broader socioeconomic divides in the West that the former are highly unlikely to disappear unless the latter do

:/

just popping in quickly but i think it'd be really helpful if this thread focused on racial issues worldwide, because how racism manifests itself can be so subtly and illuminatingly different from country to country (was in pub w/some french people last night talking about the recent incident with the footballer making that anti-semitic gesture)

Yeah for sure

I post mainly about race in America because that's what I'm plugged in to and that's what I feel I can offer the best perspective on

But I'd love to learn more about how racialization happens in countries that are not America

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-backstage-paranormal-20140103,0,1973917.story#axzz2pIiA8F5Y

Saw the trailer for this before the Wolf of Wall Street and was definitely surprised (pleasantly so) by the setting of it in a Latin@ community

Like I didn't even figure out it was a horror movie until after the first minute

http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/

thanks for this link Branwell. v interesting subject

Seconded!

suggestion that philippa of hainault might have been brown-skinned & therefore the black prince might be named for his colouration is kind of amazing, but given that we know all her ancestry seems unlikely?

Race-ing people at a remove of 800 years based on contemporary descriptions of them, aged 8, as "brown skinned" is understandably impossible. Parroting back the argument, based on the little evidence that survives and has been debated back and forth on that blog, but the general thrust of the argument is something like: She (and her family) were from Holland. Holland was at that point in and out of control by the Spanish. The Spanish, in their history, were in and out of control of the Moors. The Moors were historically described as brown or black; in contemporary conceptions of race, Moors would be "People of Colour." It is a theory - not inconceivable, but also impossible to prove - that a member of a royal family with strong associations with The Moors - could today be raced as "Black", or at least "Black" in the modern political sense.

It is not inconceivable. It would be amazing, if true. There is no way to prove it either way, but neither can it be dismissed out of hand. That is the whole point. Ambiguity is ambiguous, but not impossible.

(Caveat: Yes, during the middle ages, European people who were darker-skinned, and had brown or black eyes and hair were often raced as White yet described as "Black" at that time. Maybe including the Black Prince, maybe not. And yet many historical pictures show skin tones of people then raced as "European" in the middle ages, who would today probably get followed round a Whole Foods for being "Brown" if they turned up in contemporary Manhattan. That is kind of the whole point of that blog.)

Like almost everything else on that site, the question is not so much "Was Philippa of Hainault black?" as much as "What is race, how do people become raced, what makes a person be viewed and treated as belonging to one race or another?" The latter is an interesting and worthwhile question in itself.

What is it that makes one person read as a dark-skinned White and another person read as a light-skinned Black when they are depicted the same literal pantone colour on a piece of canvas? How was/is race constructed in Europe?

Yes, during the middle ages, European people who were darker-skinned, and had brown or black eyes and hair were often raced as White yet described as "Black" at that time.

Huh. This reminds me how my Mexican friend is called "La Negra" by her family but they have afaik no Black heritage and she's no darker skinned or haired than anyone else. It's not a connection, I'm just reminded.

Yeah in the Chinese language if someone gets a tan they are referred to as having been "tanned black" and people who have heavy tans are described as "black" (in the adjective form, but they wouldn't be "black" in the sense of a noun)

Which leads to all sorts of unfortunate translation "Engrish" type errors naturally

Which is also not to say that anti-black racism doesn't exist in China because it does, and it manifests itself in many ways

a weird book about racism irrespective of color is how the irish became white. the wages of whiteness by david roediger talks about the same issues and is a better book, probably.

Yeah Irish Americans were raced as non-white, I think maybe even as 'Negro,' in the 1800s / early 1900s

I was wondering what the Victorian-era manual on race that BB mentioned had to say on the Irish, and how English conceptions of race tied in to the racing of Irish Americans back then

It's weird to see the rubbing together of Italians saying "Americans keep your cultural imperialism off our art, that person is Italian, end of!" with American PoC saying "OMG! Representation! A person that *looks like me* in a period of history that our textbooks say never happened!" And both sides seeing the other viewpoint as "racist" and, well, yes and no?

That language quirk of Chinese is interesting, too. Descriptions of "darkening skin within same racial context" both as distinct from and interfacing with skin colour in externally-viewed race.

yeah I find it particularly interesting to interrogate any easy ideas of 'whiteness' by going back. i wonder about how ppl who lived w/out coming across anything like modern ideas of racial identity would really perceive 'otherness' in ppl from far away who didn't look like them. does make me curious about pre-colonial european identity w/ less sense of cultural/technological superiority & so much more emphasis on religion (history of anti-semitism seems distinct & mb more consistent than other racial relations)

X-posts, stupid iPhone.

Do you really want to get me going on "Celtic Studies" bcz we could be here all day. But yes, British - well, Anglo-Saxon - conceptions of The White Race which include English of course and some well-behaved Scots, but the highlanders, Welsh, Cornish and Irish were seen as barbarians and that "beyond the Pale" barbarity caused them to be read by Sowsneks as "Negroid" - the division of "Celts" into "swarthy" & dark Brythonic ones and tall, ginger, "White" Goedelic ones based on like us/not like us conceptions of race rather than the actual matter of using Q's or P's in interrogatives... There's a lit of that stuff in there.

Sorry for x-posts and iPhone typing!

That language quirk of Chinese is interesting, too. Descriptions of "darkening skin within same racial context" both as distinct from and interfacing with skin colour in externally-viewed race.

― Branwell Bell, Sunday, January 5, 2014 12:19 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

Yeah, when we think of 'race' we think of 'skin color' first but there are periods of history where 'racing' has happened completely separate from skin color / morphology / phenotype and it was much more about genealogy or native/foreigner status

Zactly!

i support a celtic studies thread. is sowsneks an incredibly obscure cornish term for english ppl?

relevant, perhaps - this piece on passing in the guardian today

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/02/trouble-with-passing-race-sexuality-religion?CMP=fb_gu

Haha no please no Celtic Studies thread GOD NO!

Sowsneks = Sassenachs = Saesnegs (oh god don't make me spell in Welsh) = Anglo-Saxon witedudes

x-post yeah I saw that article on "Passing" and thought it was v v relevant to this thread's interests. Good post!

ah of course. if only we had a celtic studies thread where i cld wonder what % of the english population has actually been largely of anglo-saxon origin & how it's varied, given that england has probably always been the more cosmopolitan part of the uk.

Dude Cornish tin has turned up afield as far as Tunisia and Turkey, at hugely pre-Roman dates which suggest that either there were Cornish in Africa or more likely Africans in Cornwall at a point in time when London was not even a bunch of huts waiting for Roman invasion, so let's not talk about "cosmopolitan" just yet, mar pleg?

Anyway let's talk about Lex's link and racial passing, because it's interesting the parallels between racial passing and LGBT passing.

yeah historically the most "cosmopolitan" early civilizations were the ones with access to sea routes and trade goods, most of England didn't qualify

xpost ha, WELL, yes, bronze-age trade is p mysterious & of course presence of a resource doesn't necessarily mean presence of the ppl from whence it came but obv tin is a v interesting case all round w/ cornish ppl building trad-style mines in south america & what not. iberian links to the west coast of the british isles definitely a big deal tho, theories about african-welsh links &c.

This is why they don't let the Britishes on the race threads. Sigh.

The trad Cornish tin-mines are in Mexico; it was Welsh who started a P-Celtic utopia in South America. I have Welsh-African connections in mine own family but that's probably not the era youre on about. Bronze age trade routes to/from "The Tin Isles" of the North Atlantic pretty well substantiated.

Could any Merkins as awake please explain what is going on with Melissa Harris-Perry at the moment? I don't have enough background to understand.

That thing with the adopted Black American Romney kid who they named Kieran iirc? Which is like Gaelic for "black" so that's not awkward or anything. I think she said something real on her show and got attacked and then completely without reservations apologized but is still being hounded in a perfect example of "false equivalency."

"See, liberals/black ppl are prejudiced/hateful too" etc etc.

I'm behind in my MHP viewing but that's what I gathered from Twitterverse.

It wasn't MHP, it was a guest on her show, who has also apologized

The resulting media fallout has been a perfect example of false equivalency but tbf it was a pretty bad and insipid joke that mocks trans-racial adoption

*mocked

yeah it was a really thoughtless comment, and as one could imagine the right has just had a field day with it and has tried to make it into one of the usual "liberals are the REAL racists" etc

As good an opportunity as any to link this http://bitchmagazine.org/post/why-we-need-to-talk-about-race-in-adoption

OK, thanks. I saw MHP's apology RT'd a lot on twitter, with accompanying "this is how you do a classy apology" commentary but had no idea what she was supposed to be apologising for.

Yeah, it was unavoidable that it would be compared with the Ani DiFranco non-apology and postings from involved artists etc that were happening at the same time.

(Also, echoing earlier thread discussion, how Kieran / Ciaran / Piran (in P-Celtic) is a name that essentially does mean "black" or "dark-skinned" whilst still being within the racial boundaries of "white")

Was that the objectionable thing, saying it was inappropriate for a black kid to have a Gaelic name that means "black" or did it go beyond that? Or is that not the point, and the kerfuffle is way out of proportion for anything that actually happened on the programme because white supremacists are just being racist, business as usual?

It wasn't about the kid's name at all

They were just joking about how the kid looked like he didn't belong in the photo of the Romney family. Might have been a joke for how the family photo looked like a typical Republican party convention

MHP I think was wondering what it would look like if Kieran were to get married to North West

Normally, I would google, but that's ungoogleable. Who's North West?

Kanye and Kim's daughter

Ah! of course. Thanks.

Another piece on trans-racial adoption

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/darron-t-smith-phd/kieran-romney_b_4531158.html

In predominately white communities where transracial adoptees are typically reared

I find it interesting that at least IME and anecdotally, trans-racial adoption seems to be unidirectional, i.e. always a white family adopting a child of color, rarely the other way around

Is that because it 1) just doesn't happen the other way around (structural racism and inequality leading to unequal distribution of resources, including reproductive health) or 2) because it's just not considered notable when it does - i.e. finding examples would require foregrounding ppl that aren't white or visiting countries that aren't The West? or both? or other?

("reproductive health" in that sentence should probably be replaced with a more general "reproductive rights" TBH)

IDK but this one time I flew to China there were a bunch of white families flying over to adopt Chinese babies and afaict it was done for religious reasons, i.e. saving heathen babies

Which isn't to say that's the only reason. I suspect that maybe people also hear about how rural Chinese baby girls are abandoned & want to 'save' them

The second reason wouldn't have any bearing at all on Korean adoptions, obviously

IDK. White people be wanting East Asian children I guess

It's always been my understanding that there aren't as many nonwhite people adopting white kids as the other way around because there aren't as many white kids up for adoption.

Does cross-racial adoption always have to mean "white adopting non-white" and "non-white adopting white" or, if a Japanese family were to theoretically adopt a black and/or African orphan, would that not count as "cross-racial"? <-this is what I mean by "foregrounding of ppl that aren't white"

I used to babysit these white twin babies and people used to stare at me hard wherever I went with them

tons of white babies in my neighborhood are babysat by caretakers of a variety of ethnicities + i don't think anyone looks twice - that's a very common configuration

I am male tho

I used to sing the song white wedding but say white babies instead when walking around w/ them so that could've been it

White people have a habit of hiring people of color to be their nannies, for sure

Also sang white Xmas with the words white babies

People look at nannies of color + the white kid & say hey, that's just another nanny + white kid combo

Bet nobody would ever think the nanny was actually a mother and had adopted the white kid

tons of white babies in my neighborhood are babysat by caretakers of a variety of ethnicities + i don't think anyone looks twice - that's a very common configuration

I don't think this has anything in common with what complicates trans-racial adoption? xxxxp

I mean, the "saving babies for religious reasons" thing is kinda fucked up on many levels. In my Mum's parish, there is a couple that adopted two abandonned Chinese girls, and my Mum was all approval, saying "they are literally living their theology" and it took every ounce of not-start-a-fight-over-her-religion self control to not say "what, they couldn't adopt American babies closer to home? O wait no American babies would be black!" but then realising, actually, there is also, in my Mum's parish, a young black girl who has been adopted by a white family into a village where she is literally the only African-American in a 50 mile radius, which we both know is not easy, because this kid goes and moans about it to my Mum, because my Mum, being the only African-born American in a 200-mile radius, is the only adult that isn't somehow afraid of her. So, it's one thing to have these noble ideas of "saving babies" and "living your theology" but the reality is that these 3 kids' lives are complicated in ways their parents are struggling to understand right now.

It's always been my understanding that there aren't as many nonwhite people adopting white kids as the other way around because there aren't as many white kids up for adoption.

source?
http://www.npr.org/2013/06/27/195967886/six-words-black-babies-cost-less-to-adopt

Lantz says she remembers a phone call with an adoption agency social worker. "And she was telling us about these different fee structures that they had based on the ethnic background of the child. And ... they also had, sort of a different track for adoptive parents."

Moving through the process would be quicker if the family was open to adopting an African-American (not biracial) child, the social worker explained to her. "And that is because they have children of color waiting," Lantz says. Adopting biracial, Latino, Asian or Caucasian children could be a slower process, she was told, because there were more parents waiting for them.

http://www.bemyparent.org.uk/info-for-families/about-adoption/adoption-the-basics,45,AR.html

Children who are black Caribbean or black African, Asian (particularly Asian Muslim), and of mixed ethnicity (black African and white, black Caribbean and white, or Asian and white) wait much longer for an adoptive family in comparison to white children.

Have always heard that healthy white babies get adopted fastest & children with disabilities, from minority backgrounds etc are more likely to spend time in the system.

I find it interesting that at least IME and anecdotally, trans-racial adoption seems to be unidirectional, i.e. always a white family adopting a child of color, rarely the other way around

Largely because:

a) Depending on the system you are looking at, it is a much shorter wait to adopt a non-white child. (xpost: see gyac's links)
b) Private adoption is fucking expensive and, given the way the world works, it's more likely a white American family is able to afford it than a non-white American family.

Not adoption-related, but several friends of mine with multiracial children have told me that they've been mistaken for the nanny/caretaker when out with their kids multiple times.

The only semi-famous POC-adopts-white baby case I can think of is NFL linebacker Scott Fujita, whose adoptive father Rodney was Japanese-American and partly grew up in an internment camp during WWII.
http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.194113.1314069292!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_200/amd-fujita-family-color-jpg.jpg

it's really terrible that I am imagining the government saying to his father "we're so sorry about this, to make up for it we have decided to grant you a white male child" after the war ended

Hah yes I've read about Scott Fujita xp

You know, thinking about the selective teaching of history that we touched upon upthread w/r/t the MedievalPOC blog, it blew my mind to learn that the Japanese American internment camps are not a standard component of the American history curriculum at all, but is selectively taught

I mean, it shouldn't have blown my mind, but I had just assumed everybody knew about it from high school

Since that was mostly a west coast/mid american atrocity, i think it's primarily a regional thing as pertains to schooling?
my southern teachers were too busy explaining at length that the civil war was not about slavery and that "slave" was really a much less constrictive lifestyle than you would think
no time to come up with good excuses for more contemporary internment camps, we got dodgeball

Uh 1.) it was a national atrocity 2.) I grew up in Philly

I mean, dude

i'm not making the argument it wasn't a national atrocity but location of the camps was <img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Map_of_World_War_II_Japanese_American_internment_camps.png";>primarily west coast/mid america</a> and naturally affected areas with japanese american population. i'm sure there were pinpoint horrible stories to come out of the american south in the early forties but in the midst of trying to smokescreen the more immediate institutionalized community racism, I doubt it was even something any of my high school teachers knew about.. which is my larger point: poor american school systems routinely chug out kids with little or no awareness of cultural/racial history beyond the things that affect the local prior generations most immediately and even that gets put through a prism of dumbed down obfuscation

i have been kinda shocked via facebook postings to discover how many ex-classmates who hail from my segregated and often viciously racist home town ended up adopting black children. having spoken with several friends who have adopted asian, hispanic and black kids (both from home and abroad), it seems like adopting kids-o'-color is the easiest option... and by "easiest", they mean a two year process that will likely cost tens of thousands of dollars

i've been thinking about the issues brought up in this conversation quite a bit over the past several years as my long-term goal is to adopt in my forties and expect to adopt color-blind. i like the point about how it shouldn't be an either/or argument about whether the safety and support of a family system gets to trump racial identity.

or more to the point, you should never be surprised that anyone didn't learn something in high school

though on doing some reading now, was not at all aware that there was a german internment camp in my neck of the woods that illegally detained some 700 citizens

Well dude I just think that your first reason is kinda bunk, there are plenty of events of national significance that only happened in one state or one city but routinely get taught in nearly all high school curricula because they fit a nationalistic and jingoistic American image

Agree though that one shouldn't be surprised about what other people don't learn in high school

Yeah there were German internment camps, iirc they mostly detained actual German nationals, not German American citizens. Also it was selective and done so based on the work of intelligence agencies, it wasn't a blanket interment of anybody of Germanic descent

lucky for General Eisenhower huh

http://gawker.com/transformed-into-white-gods-what-happens-in-america-wi-1494266254

A little OTT but a lot to identify with here

xp

because they fit a nationalistic and jingoistic American image

Nah I don't think you mean that it's appropriate or justifiable at all, I genuinely think that you're suggesting high schools only teach about things that happened within a certain geographical radius of the high school

Anyway

yeah, anyway

maybe internment camps lack an agreed-upon 200 page or less memoir/novel that can be taught to high schoolers. I definitely learned about the camps when i was young, but it was more through my own reading than school.

that Gawker article was not the most well-written, but contained quite a few painful, familiar truths

i don't remember what was the turning point in my adulthood when I started telling my liberal friends, who I'd grown up with my entire life, to go fuck themselves with their Asian jokes

it did remind me of the time when I was accused of plagiarism when I handed in a great essay in my AP English class by the teacher. i didn't catch on then.

Our US history class barely got to the Civil War before the semester ended, so I definitely didn't hear about internment camps in school.

i definitely did but our textbook was zinn, so...

the regionalism thing is not far off as growing up in the southwest I definitely learned a lot more in school about oppression of Native & Hispanic Americans than I did about African & Asian Americans.

Yeah but at least one of the camps was in New Mexico, may have been one in Utah too iirc

I've met people from California who weren't taught it

Whatever the reason is it's inconsistent

OBSESSED with medieval poc blog

^

i have to skip over the really really tumblr-y parts though

I find tumblr massively confusing in a context like this tbh but yes, it is an immensely fascinating resource.

yeah i find tumblr really crappy to use but the pix and content here are beautiful

That David Byunghyun Lee thing on Gawker, above, is a weird mixture of "identify with SO MUCH" and "cannot hope to understand in a million years" and not even along the racial lines one might expect.

I identify with the "immigration to American is brutalising and de-humanising and strips you of your identity" stuff, and though I definitely read as White (though was treated as alien and Other) I was friends with mostly other immigrants and ESL kids at school, so I saw very closely how immigrants who read as "not-White" experienced another level of shittiness and bullying and racism added to an experience which was not particularly pleasant to start with. And that kind of "third culture kid" experience where you definitely can't seem to belong to your host country's culture, no matter how hard you try - but you just can't identify with or fully understand your parents' culture, either, because you didn't live there and you missed great chunks of it and god it's kinda embarrassing the way it's represented - holy shit, yes, that was my entire life from the age of 9. (Complicated in my case by the fact that my parents, themselves, were from yet another country than the one I was born in.) It's hard living that shit while passing as "White American" - it sounds impossible living that shit when you can't.

But where I always differed, and do not and cannot relate to other stories of immigration and integration (or failure thereof) is that I - and my family - never, ever, saw "America" or American culture as in any way better, or desirable. This might just be British arrogance or pique, but American cultural imperialism was seen as a *bad* thing (the British? talking about Imperialism as a bad thing? ha! And yet we really, really did, in a super takes one to know one kind of way.) I find it strange to see people who talk about being disillusioned with America by actually moving there, because for us, that illusion was never there in the first place. (That SNL sketch, "it's it's not Scottish, it's CRAP!" - that is almost every member of my family) I spent my entire teens desperate to get *out* of America and back to Britain, idolising not White American Gods but Wonky-Toothed British Gods. It wasn't just some idealised yearning for "The Old Country" it was "what do you mean, you have no NHS? Fuck this shit!" turned into a refrain of "I'm So Bored With The USA".

Yeah, I know it's totally eye-rolly to get into dumb "Americans vs Britishes" shit on ILX and blah blah Whiney will shout at me etc. And it feels almost... disrespectful talking about construction of the "White" "Race" on a race thread because the whole conceit of racism is that "White" is somehow the absence-of-race and "White American" is not an ethnicity, it's just the default. Like I'm doing that thing I hate when cis-het dudes do, to go "let's talk about white people, let's talk about white people!"

But I guess my immigrant experience was seeing first hand how "White" as a concept is constructed by Americans, and having experiences that made it impossible to deny the existence of White Privilege (every time a PoC candidate got asked for their Green Card, and I didn't, and if I'd offer "don't you need to see my Green Card?" they'd laugh as if it were an impossibility for a witegurl to even have a Green Card) even at the same time as internally thinking "White? What the fuck is this white bollocks? You're trying to say I'm exactly the same as a *German*? Fuck THAT!" "America" as a concept feels different when you are brought there against your will, as opposed to when it's portrayed as some shining beacon of hope.

So it's weird. Reading other immigrant experiences is a weird combination of "yes! that!" and "nope, IDGI" which race complicates but does not fundamentally alter?

Re: viewing American culture as desirable, I think it's often driven by a desire to assimilate and fit in - which sometimes may lead to an unquestioning acceptance of American ideals that may seem like privileging American culture over one's native culture

I think you see it much more often with second generation, born-in-America kids than you do with first-generation foreign-born Americans

Re: the article on passing upthread, there's a really, really excellent book by Kenji Yoshino on passing, or what he calls "covering," both in a race and in a sexuality/gender context:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covering:_The_Hidden_Assault_on_Our_Civil_Rights

Also this is a good read: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/travel/traveling-while-black.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all

IIRC, a lot of the civil rights-era Supreme Court cases that broke new ground were brought forth based on incidents experienced by or on behalf of black Americans who faced discrimination while traveling

Also, if you are trying to adopt a baby from China, make sure you go through a legitimate and reputable agency; otherwise you might be engaging in human trafficking

There's a market in China for kidnapped children

And finally, a good post summing up the Ani Difranco brouhaha http://scottwoodsmakeslists.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/5-things-no-one-is-actually-saying-about-ani-difranco-or-plantations/

maybe internment camps lack an agreed-upon 200 page or less memoir/novel that can be taught to high schoolers. I definitely learned about the camps when i was young, but it was more through my own reading than school.

― I got the glares, the mutterings, the snarls (President Keyes), Saturday, January 4, 2014 10:36 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I learned about the internment camps in 8th grade via Farewell to Manzanar, which was required reading. Didn't hear a peep about the camps again until senior year of college when we read Manzanar in a course on children's literature (where, it turned out, some of the students were learning about internment camps for the first time).

iirc this photo was in my high school us history textbook:

http://i.imgur.com/7Tilr6A.png

prob more famous than any single photo from inside any of the camps?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/01/05/260006815/the-ugly-fascinating-history-of-the-word-racism?ft=1&f=1015

Don't think I had seen that pic before. But you're right that what was allowed to be photographed inside the camps was heavily controlled & restricted, for obvious reasons xp

My old job was in a university archives and during my time there we received and processed this collection: George and Frank C. Hirahara Photograph Collection, 1943-1945. It's a bunch of images from the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming; Hirahara had a camera and darkroom and took tons of photos of day-to-day life there.

We also had a bunch of material dealing with internment from the Seattle area, like posters commanding all people of Japanese descent to show up at a certain time and place, really surreal stuff.

One of my kids asked me other day if internment was as bad as enslaving people.

yay parenthood.

My kids in 4th grade and just finished a huge unit on Journey to Topaz.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/does-immigration-mean-france-is-over/

Nativism is a terrible thing

How many French citizens does ILX have? I can only think of a few

http://soletstalkabout.com/post/72473127176/mindy-kaling-on-elle

http://i.imgur.com/iIAN2jw.png

At first I was like, oh maybe it's just a stylistic decision for that month but then I realized all four covers are for the same month

The American approach to immigration is plainly rooted in historical exigencies connected to the appropriation of a continent, and it is this same history of appropriation that continues to induce shame in most Euro-Americans who might otherwise be tempted to describe themselves as natives. America has to recognize its hybrid and constructed identity, since the only people who can plausibly lay claim to native status are the very ones this new identity was conjured to displace. But in Europe no similar displacement plays a role in historical memory: Europeans can more easily imagine themselves to be their own natives, and so can imagine any demographic impact on the continent from the extra-European world as the harbinger of an eventual total displacement.

I thought this was particularly interesting ^

Yeah for sure, very interesting to read in conjunction with the MedievalPOC tumblr

My own point of reference is China, where the national history now being promulgated is the 5,000 year history of the Han Chinese (despite the government acknowledging the existence of 56 separate ethnic minorities) when that's never really been the case, as dylannnnnnnnnnn has wrote about elsewhere on this site

was gonna say kaling's closeup on cover has more to do with elle's issues showing normal size people (poehler had to bust out the cleavage to get a full body shot) but then i noticed she's the only one in black and white so anyway fuck fashion magazines forever

That's awful - Elle has gone down the shitter recently, especially in the UK (a bunch of their best, most aware/literate staff got poached by UK Harper's Bazaar). I can totally see the meeting where the Kaling cover sales are 'disappointing' compared to the others and it isn't blamed on a poor B&W cover choice.

This is getting quite a lot of discussion (and burn, rightly or wrongly) but it is does go into some basics about how the American Model for Race (and racism) and how that gets imposed onto European (and therefore different) conceptions of race, and how that causes problems.

http://black-in-asia.com/post/70367046393/whiteness-in-europe-tumblrs-us-centric-sj

(I think the main thrust of criticism in this article is where he says: Americans don't /get it/ and this being a negative reflection on American PoC, rather than what I read as him saying "the domination of American ideas about race erase local narratives about race and how racism operates in places that aren't America. Saying "The world does not revolve around America" is criticising the *whole* of America, not just American PoC.)

I'd question whether Poles and Irish Travellers are considered 'non-white'(and the blog does ignore issues of nationalism vs racism) but it hits on a lot of good points. It's always frustrating to see an American-led discourse that talks unquestioningly about southern Europeans, Albanians, Russians, Jewish ppl, etc as being 'white' without taking the time to consider how these issues are viewed locally and by those people themselves. It also ignores America's own history of redefining the whiteness of southern Italians, etc.

i've been reading/thinking a fair bit about rights and especially natural rights this week and i wonder if the dominant American conceptions of inalienable rights don't come from a similar place to this dominant paradigm of race - both discourses have significant origins in the US and have then been naturalized (realized?) by US cultural/economic hegemony. both discourses are probably more contingent than some of their champions care to believe

that blog on us-centric privilege is bang on

I am trying to figure out if I actually have the time/energy to get into the subtle ways that blog post is wrong; basically it boils down to "do I want to argue about whether the Dzhokar Tsarnaev is considered white in the US?"

like, don't write an imperious piece on how using localized ideas of race in an inappropriate context is counterproductive and then use as an example a localized idea of race in an inappropriate context

it says he wouldn't be considered white in russia, not the US, which is kind of its point

Chiming up only because this is the subject that got me unwelcomed on ILX: I think the blog post is pretty right-on, except the biggest point of confusion is that, while white supremacist in nature, European racism doesn't actually have much of a concept of "whiteness" to it. It tends to be pseudo-anthropological (you are inferior because your culture is inferior) the way US white supremacy is pseudo-scientific (you are inferior because your blood is inferior). That's an over-simplification, obviously -- this stuff is dumb but not simple -- but ultimately, "White" isn't a meaningful word in Europe -- "European", or "French/German/Swedish etc." are more like it.

1. Dude lived in the US from the age of 8
2. Dude is a naturalized American citizen
3. Dude was attending college in the US
4. Whether or not dude would be considered non-white in Russia has absolutely no fucking bearing whatsoever on whether he would/should be considered white in the US and the only people making the argument in the US that he isn't white are people who are seriously advancing the argument that white Muslims/white terrorists don't exist

^this is OTM, and my point of agreement with the blog post is elsewhere.

re. the piece on France, "the procedure at French immigration offices, where all foreigners must go to obtain their residence permits, but where the Malians and Congolese are taken into one room, and Americans and Swedes into another" is totally not my experience. I waited in the same shit lines as everyone, mostly Caribbeans and Africans, at the prefecture. my wife went to the same immigration/indoctrination classes as these folks.

but otherwise he's right. ~educated people~ tell you that you'll catch tropical diseases riding the metro. cops violently hassle Arab youths in the streets. maybe it's that way in London too? but the legitimization of it is distinctively French

TWU, that was to lex rather than you (also welcome back)

I mean, it's kind of rich to be all "race issues don't revolve around the US" and then use as an example someone who was considered by everyone around him as white right up until he killed three people and blew the legs off of many others

i don't think the blog is trying to make a point that he "should" be considered white or not, more using him as an example of someone who is considered white in the US but not in his home country (and if you are born and raised until the age of 8 in one country, how you're perceived there is absolutely relevant)

sorry "someone" should be "a US citizen living in and operating in the US"

basically, I agree with the thesis but not the supporting arguments

x-post to DJP: Oh, I know, but I didn't want to be all "this piece is great" moments after you attacked the central serious weakness of the piece.

Dude's non-whiteness in Russia is irrelevant because Whiteness is a US concept, mostly -- Euro racists have other words to deny full personhood than to say "not White".

someone who was considered by everyone around him as white

ok, this is interesting to me. would you say that he wouldn't have been othered/considered as "different" on the basis of his origins or heritage at all? despite his name? or if so, is that a separate issue to his race?

(on the subject of passing upthread, i meant to add that insofar as i've passed in my life, it's almost wholly down to my name and command of english, and i'm 100% convinced that if i had a chinese name i'd have been treated very differently at various junctures)

Dude's non-whiteness in Russia is irrelevant because Whiteness is a US concept, mostly -- Euro racists have other words to deny full personhood than to say "not White".

i don't think either of these are true. british racists (can't speak for other countries as well) may not say "white" because british people tend to never say what they actually mean in the first place, but they assuredly mean "white". immigrants are often judged on how well they've assimilated into "british culture" which pretty much means "white people"

P sure I know how this argument is gonna unzip. With European posters saying "that blog is spot on about US-centric conceptions of racism being privileged" and US posters saying "No, because of this particular error..."

The blog post is not about Dzhokar Tsarnaev.

The blog post is about: In the US, racism is constructed around ideas of Whiteness vs Non-Whiteness, but in the rest of the world, especially Europe, racism is constructed around ideas of Our Nation vs Disgusting Savages with "Whiteness" not really being a cohesive concept, and to apply American ideas about racism is to erase a hell of a lot of bigotry that is deeply, deeply informed informed by racist ideas.

I mean, when my neighbour on the one side (2nd or 3rd generation Afro-Caribbean-British) and my neighbour on the other side (2nd or 3rd generation Asian-British) stand outside and talk about the coming "deluge of Bulgarians and Romanians" and how it's going to destroy everything, do you define that in terms of racism, or xenophobia, or what? Especially knowing that the whole dialogue about "migrants" and "Eastern European hordes" as whipped into hysteria in the tabloid press, is a deeply, deeply racist institution? My neighbours are not "being racist" according to any workable definition, but the whole argument about "migrant Slavs will bury us" is very very racist, though Americans would seem to be unable to recognise that.

Except for that neither side is making the argument you are positing, with Lex saying that in Britain the racism IS rooted in whiteness and me saying that the blog post's thesis argument is absolutely correct and that the problem with it is that it doesn't apply the argument to its own examples.

Remember the thread on gender identity where you said "talk about yourself and don't project onto others" and it worked out to be a productive, wonderful discussion? I think you should do the same thing here.

Language very freaking much matters here. Britishness is talked about because it's what matters (actually, I feel a lot more comfortable talking about French and German, as British racists can and do borrow US racist concepts and there's been plenty of idea miscegenation (hee hee) there) -- so where skin color is clearly a large part of what makes you a part of a protected social class, it's simply not true to say that they are the same concept. More importantly, when you move away from looking at conscious virulent racism into what makes the socially-favored class define itself, what the privilege IS, it isn't conceptually right to include Whiteness into that concept (too many despised Eastern Europeans and North Americans on the Continent for that to work). There is privilege, it is racist at its base, but it's not working with the idea of White.

x-post -- lots of agreement between Branwell and me here.

But not just agreement!

OK, when I'm being lectured on European conceptions of race by an American, that's when I check out of the thread. Been nice talking with you, bye.

An American who has been living in Austria for (decades?) and is agreeing with you!

unless you mean me, in which case:

1. Dude lived in the US from the age of 8
2. Dude is a naturalized American citizen
3. Dude was attending college in the US
4. Whether or not dude would be considered non-white in Russia has absolutely no fucking bearing whatsoever on whether he would/should be considered white in the US and the only people making the argument in the US that he isn't white are people who are seriously advancing the argument that white Muslims/white terrorists don't exist

― SHAUN (DJP), Tuesday, January 7, 2014 11:42 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

By which I mean:

I understand that the local context in which your operating makes your point different, but in the context where all of this shit went down you are supporting racists with this argument, and I don't think it's American imperialism or privilege to point this out. American imperialism/privilige is looking at the Bosnian genocide and going "eh white ppl killing white ppl, who cares".

This is a potentially interesting discussion if folks are willing to assume there are reasons to disagree that don't have to do with willing a shitstorm to happen. And -- xpost -- I think part of what DJP is getting at is that there is a real danger in slicing the baloney of racist logic thinly enough to make it vaguely comprehensible, you run the danger of appearing to concede the validity of either of the two racist worldviews -- but it doesn't have to be that way!!!

Dude's non-whiteness in Russia is irrelevant because Whiteness is a US concept, mostly -- Euro racists have other words to deny full personhood than to say "not White".

In Russia a common insult for people from Central Asia, the Caucasus region, etc is to call them "blacks" so I'm not sure the above is true at all.

"Blacks" is this context doesn't mean "not white". This is a vital point of the argument.

I have issues with people imposing a 'white' identity on Tsarnaev when we don't know how he identified himself or, really, how others identified him before the attacks.

This is all beside the point though, as has been noted. If people knew who Ramzyn Kadyrov or Artur Atsalamov were they could have been used as examples without changing the argument.

'White' identity is definitely an imposition, and it only gets worse when the white ppl feel like they're doing you a favor that they should be thanked for by inaugurating you into the 'white' club. I'm sure this is where DJP will bring up 'passing,' but the truth is that there's an awful lot of smoothing out and nuance ignoring going on when we talk about who is white and who is not - generally you can come up w/ the answer that fits your argument such that I'm not sure it's much of an interesting question to ask if Tsarnaev was white or not. It depends on what you need him to be for the moment.

this thread will be a lot more productive if ppl stop going "this is what the black dude will say"

My apologies - I didn't intend to imply that you would bring up passing bc you're black, only bc you specifically 'DJP' has brought it up in similar conversations in the past on ilx w/ me.

not every conversation is the same and this is the second time today someone on this thread has decided to invent an argument for me rather than let me express my own thoughts/opinions

anyway, this is the post I was obliquely referring to and tho it was a different conversation i'm not sure it's inapplicable to this one:

I don't want to get too deeply into this conversation but can I throw a conversational bomb into the mix about how "passing" is a two-way street, one direction involving people taking on a cultural identity based on their looks and the other involving how people assign default cultures to people based on their perceptions of them and that you don't have to actively participate in part A to benefit from or be hurt by part B, and then run away?

― You are kind, I am jerkface (DJP), Thursday, September 19, 2013 11:45 AM (3 months ago)

This thread & is US centric because each year some of the most brutal and ugly incidents involving 'race' happen in the US

I think where a lot of wires are getting crossed is that, for better or for worse, the act of discriminating against a group of people - and whatever arbitrary identifying characteristic those people are said to have in common - of any kind, is 'racism'

Which isn't to say that 'racism' is inappropriate. But the term is... at its root, an American term (cf the NPR article posted above0, and almost necessarily brings in American conceptions about race when invoked. I don't know if it would make any difference if 'xenophobia' were used instead or tribalism or nativism or *. Or if instead of understanding those differences as 'racial differences' maybe they would be better categorized as 'ethnic' differences. IDK.

I'd like to think that it's clear whatever the national-cultural context of pieces are when they get posted in this thread. Usually the stuff I post is in a US context, because 'race' is the way we talk about these things in the US

Like I guess the way I come down on this is if Europeans feel like the social construct of 'race' is the best way to talk about inter-group conflicts in Europe then sure, go ahead. I don't know if I would, given the choice. I speak the language of 'race' because this is what I have been taught as an American. I wish to hell that I could do away with it and find some other way to talk about difference.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/01/melissa-harris-perry-and-the-contrition-complex.html

which one of you is chris40

Dayo is completely right in saying that race is a stupid social construct but it's a stupid social construct that is extensively used outside of the US, both by racists and the people opposing them. There are specific reasons people have for not using 'xenophobia' or 'ethnicity' in its place.

I don't think that anyone is really objecting to the US focus of a thread that is dominated by American posters or saying that there's a huge amount ILX has to learn from the post. The issue is the broader SJ sphere and the tendency to assign US racial categories to people either outside the US or who have a strong connection to other countries.

Like if a Romanian guy comes along and says "i am white and racially distinct from the light-skinned Roma dude across the road" and a British guy says "no you aren't, Romanians have too much Turkish and Jewish heritage to be white" an American bundling in and saying "Roma, Romanians, Brits, Turkish and Jewish people all look white to me, this is not a race / racism issue", is not particularly helpful.

Equally if, idk, Dzokhar Tsarnaev, Action Bronson, Mordy and D0m P@ssantino all decide that they don't self-identify as "white" and there are plenty of people out there who would agree with them, it's legitimate to say 'perhaps, but you have a certain amount of racial privilege in the US that African and Asian Americans don't have', less so to say 'nah, you're totally white'.

IDK but this one time I flew to China there were a bunch of white families flying over to adopt Chinese babies and afaict it was done for religious reasons, i.e. saving heathen babies

Mormons have historically been into this rescuing babies of color for religious reasons. Mostly it was Native American and indigenous Latin American kids.

Wishing any one of you Anglo-Americans at least 10 years overseas living in another language. Then, we can talk.

Because here is the thing: any advantage I might have in Austria for virtue of being white is from virulent, in-your-face, self-identifying racists You go down the scale the slightest bit, even just as far as the "I'm not racist, but..." crowd, and that advantage disappears, especially the moment I open my mouth and a slightly too hard r or an incorrect article comes out. The response isn't "he's not White", because that would be kind of silly, but it is very, very clearly "he's not one of us". And that means a surprisingly worthless degree from Harvard, enormous difficulties making friends that I don't meet through my Austrian wife, quick dismissal of my opinions in intellectual or cultural discussions (because as an American, I am assumed to have neither culture or intellect), and fairly instant assumptions about my politics and ideology (conservative, racist, libertarian, gun-happy, and kinda dumb) if people are able to guess my accent correctly. And that's before cops and public servants come into the picture. One can fight against this shit and persevere, but it is always there and the fight always has to be re-fought.

And as the Austro-Left takes up Tumblrish identity politics, the situation gets worse: The Right doesn't want to hear me complain 'cause I'm a foreigner, the Left doesn't want me to complain because I'm clearly privileged. (Folks who say that are often surprised to learn that changes in citizenship laws in Austria have been moving to my disadvantage fairly consistently over the last ten years or so.)

I would never say that what goes on in Europe is not racism -- it is, very much so -- but that it isn't American-style racism, and grand universal theories of worldwide white privilege that base themselves on analysis of US racism don't work.

The point is this: The American concept of Whiteness is a racist construct that has real and huge impact in the US and elsewhere in the world, but talking about it and problematizing it without assuming too much validity for it can be difficult and screw things up for lots of folks. The goal is to try harder, not to shut up about it, of course.

tbf swathes of English-speaking Britishes will happily make all those sociocultural assumptions about all Americans too

and less glibly i still think there are good important reasons for separating some forms of cultural or even sectarian bigotry from racism

dislike, distrust, even discrimination against all perceived "outsiders" is not precisely the same territory as racism

I absolutely believe that's true, but would be willing to bet (dunno, never lived there) that you can go farther down the self-conscious racism scale before the advantages of being white disappear.

x-post -- the reason I don't wanna make a very clear distinction there is that I do think there are existing subconscious notions of race (i.e. "those are trash people, and if my daughter were to marry one it would weaken our bloodline") that don't view race along a strict White is Right continuum, and that stuff sometimes get played off as mere cultural discomfort when it isn't.

Dayo is completely right in saying that race is a stupid social construct but it's a stupid social construct that is extensively used outside of the US, both by racists and the people opposing them. There are specific reasons people have for not using 'xenophobia' or 'ethnicity' in its place.

I don't think that anyone is really objecting to the US focus of a thread that is dominated by American posters or saying that there's a huge amount ILX has to learn from the post. The issue is the broader SJ sphere and the tendency to assign US racial categories to people either outside the US or who have a strong connection to other countries.

Like if a Romanian guy comes along and says "i am white and racially distinct from the light-skinned Roma dude across the road" and a British guy says "no you aren't, Romanians have too much Turkish and Jewish heritage to be white" an American bundling in and saying "Roma, Romanians, Brits, Turkish and Jewish people all look white to me, this is not a race / racism issue", is not particularly helpful.

Equally if, idk, Dzokhar Tsarnaev, Action Bronson, Mordy and D0m P@ssantino all decide that they don't self-identify as "white" and there are plenty of people out there who would agree with them, it's legitimate to say 'perhaps, but you have a certain amount of racial privilege in the US that African and Asian Americans don't have', less so to say 'nah, you're totally white'.

― Ramnaresh Samhain (ShariVari), Wednesday, January 8, 2014 4:36 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

Yeah just to clarify, I mean that it is a stupid social construct but more importantly, a social construct implicates the society that constructs it - that is, which society are we talking about? Whenever I talk about race I mean race as constructed by American society. And you're absolutely right that American conceptions of race radiate outward and transnationally and that's why whenever I visit China I hear an earful of xerox-of-a-xerox racial stereotypes parroted back at me

I just mean that, to say something is 'racist' also implicitly validates or accepts the concept of 'race' to begin with. That's something that's unavoidable in the US, where racial categories are woven into the very fabric of society. I mean, not just talking about cultural conceptions but it's literally in the laws of the country, whether they were racist and discriminatory (Jim Crow et al) or trying to address the irreparable harm that it's caused (affirmative action, employment discrimination etc)

And also how the concept of 'race' in America differs from how groups of people are categorized in Europe. Like, how the concept of 'race' in America rides roughshod over notions of national-origin or ethnic identity. IDK if that's also the case in Europe, if the groups that have been mentioned in this thread are considered sub-ethnic groups of the white identity, or if there even is a white identity as an overarching organizing category or if instead it's nationalistic in reach and just happens to strongly correlate with the American notion of 'whiteness'

I think there are too many overlaps and synergies between the US and European social constructs of race to view either cleanly as the product of their own societies but there are also a lot of complex differences and all we can really ask is that people are mindful of them.

Race is definitely unavoidable and, in some ways, legally coded in Europe. Many countries have a history of formal discrimination against so-called "non-white races" and, on the other side, laws against 'inciting racial hatred' that cover some groups and not others.

There is no simple answer to whether any specific group is considered part of a white identity, there are too many regional variations to count, but all discussed in this thread (Chechens, Jewish people, Sicilians, etc) are considered non-white by somebody and discriminated against on that basis.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/08/mark-duggan-verdict-live-coverage

oh god.

i put this on the us politics thread, can anyone help?

help me find something!

last year sometime this map was going around of the world's racial attitudes. 'surprisingly' the western hemisphere looked pretty chill but europe was not and africa and asia were all bigoted as hell:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15/a-fascinating-map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-racially-tolerant-countries/

someone linked to an analysis of it saying that it had big problems both in the stats themselves and in the presentation of them. anyone know what i'm talking about?

a correction on wonkblog links to this, which showed huge errors in the numbers for bangladesh, but that's it:

http://sites.tufts.edu/inclusivecommerceblog/2013/05/16/surveys-gone-bad-when-yes-means-no/

― goole, Wednesday, January 8, 2014 10:17 AM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I do, goole

IIRC this was the definitive takedown http://africasacountry.com/the-cartography-of-bullshit/

ah terrific thanks

There was also stuff (not from that blog) delving more into the conclusion that HKers were 'racist' - I could dig up those too if you needed them

This also sort of ties in m/l with the discussions upthread

But the biggest problem, of course, is that “race” is impossible to operationalize in a cross-national comparison. Whereas a homosexual, or an Evangelical Christian, or a heavy drinker, or a person with a criminal record, means more or less the same thing country to country, a person being of “another race” depends on constructs that vary widely, in both nature and level of perceived importance, country to country, and indeed, person to person. In other words, out of all of the many traits of difference for which the WVS surveyed respondents’ tolerance, the Swedish economists – and Fisher, in their wake – managed to select for comparison the single most useless one.

Dzokhar Tsarnaev, Action Bronson, Mordy and D0m P@ssantino all decide that they don't self-identify as "white"

to be a fly on that wall

(sorry, should have left the "if" in there to avoid confusion)

Action Bronson is an mot.

also sorry for derailing from the more serious issues that have been brought up -- should have read the rest of the the thread before posting

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/08/mark-duggan-verdict-live-coverage

― SHAUN (DJP), Thursday, January 9, 2014 12:18 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

This looks really awful but I confess I don't know too much about the case (you can call me US-centric now)

Do any of our UK ilxors want to weigh in

Being talked about on the London Burning thread.

London's Burning: Rolling thread for the 2011 summer protests, riots and general unrest

http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/snl-hires-two-african-american-female-writers.html

Thank God weed will someday be legal.

Also:

49% of black men have been arrested by 23.
44% of Hispanic men have been arrested by 23.
38% of white men have been arrested by 23.

http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/obasogie-blindness-sight-race

Since race is strongly connected to visual cues, it is widely assumed that race is of diminished significance to blind people’s daily lives. But in my new book Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind, I interviewed more than a hundred individuals who have been totally blind since birth—people who have never seen anything, let alone the physical traits that typically serve as visual markers for racial difference—and found that this is not the case. Blind people understand and experience race as everyone else does: visually.

When asked what race is, the blind people I spoke with largely defined it by skin color, facial features, and other visual cues. Take Nell, a blind white woman who said that race is “not only skin color but [other] characteristics . . . [such as] bone structure and facial structure. . . . Color can be a defining characteristic. But [race] is not only based on color.”

This was a common sentiment. But what stands out in this and other responses is not only the visual sophistication with which blind people conceptualize race, but that this visual understanding shapes how they live their lives. Among the blind as much as the sighted, everyday choices, experiences, and interactions are meditated by visual understandings of race. Consider this statement by Madge, a blind white woman:

Race is important in terms of a date. I remember meeting this guy at a program for the blind at the university. And most guys there I really wasn’t impressed with. But this one guy, he really stood out. And I liked him and I enjoyed talking to him. And when I found out that he was black, I knew it wasn’t going to work for me. But I felt kind of bad then, because I was hoping that it would [work out]. But that’s where [race] usually makes the most difference in my life.

that's fascinating; has it been excerpted elsewhere? I feel like I've read something very similar within the past month

o_O

the visual sophistication with which blind people conceptualize race

i feel like this is a little clumsily worded because i assume the author is talking about visual metaphors/descriptors within language, which on reading the full review seems to be more what this is about.

xp Not sure, maybe the author had given another magazine excerpts previously?

And when I found out that he was black, I knew it wasn’t going to work for me.

would be nice to know why Madge felt this way

xp

The answer seems pretty obvious?

You know I'm a bit dim, so please tell me

doesn't like rap music

Because Madge had been taught by the people around her that miscegenation was unacceptable? xp

poor madonna :(

maybe she had gone black and decided in future she was going to go back

guilty lol

oh dear

Baby steps: Cleveland Indians change primary team logo from Chief Wahoo to block 'C' - http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/01/08/the-indians-are-changing-their-primary-logo-from-chief-wahoo-to-the-block-c/

http://bullettmedia.com/article/13-voices-speak-on-fashions-appropriation-of-urban-culture/

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/pictures-of-men-friends-or-lovers/?_r=0

Yo Rev if you're reading you gotta check this out ^

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/10/racist-bullying-children-media-white-black

This took me back to my school days. Had a lot of really great liberal / socialist teachers who would probably have known exactly what to do with vocally racist white pupils but were completely lost when extremely vicious disputes flared up between pupils from African and Afro-Caribbean backgrounds mirroring what would normally be seen as white racist stereotypes about both groups.

ugh i hate when that happens

total deer in headlights moment yesterday for me when one of my black students called another black student a "n***** orangutan with camel ears"

i totally understand the awkwardness there but it seems completely reasonable & necessary to step in and tell a student not to bully & demean other students in the classroom like that even if it was done in a semi-jocular manner

nb i have zero knowledge or experience about doing anything like i just described as i am not a teacher or authority figure, so

yeah i told them i'd kick them out of class if i heard anything like that again (thankfully they stopped)

"racist" bullying (not sure racist is the right word?) is depressingly pervasive among my students of color :-(

racist is the right word!

ok good

Look at "respectability politics"--racism by a minority against itself to try to bring it into line with the oppressing majority's standards in a bid for legitimacy in the eyes of the oppressor. Totally racism! Everybody got to decolonize they minds.

I don't know why I said that in Caribbean, I blame it on the fact that I was up until 2.30am drinking my neighbor's smoke-filled kitchen and that's just how I heard it in my head.

*drinking IN

Look at "respectability politics"--racism by a minority against itself to try to bring it into line with the oppressing majority's standards in a bid for legitimacy in the eyes of the oppressor. Totally racism! Everybody got to decolonize they minds.

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Saturday, January 11, 2014 1:42 AM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark

I totally get this as a concept - but I don't know if that's the appropriate tack to take in the context of a school or when you're dealing with people not yet in college

Wait - now that I read your sentence more carefully I'm not sure if we're on the same page

Anyway I think we are all in agreement that we should teach kids not to be dicks to each other

easier said than done :(

Yeah for sure. There's a ton of anti-Asian violence in the public schools around where I grew up in Philly coming from black students who go there (and it's ricocheted so now there's anti-black violence at those same schools) and the whole thing is just very unfortunate and I don't think anybody has any easy solutions

Yeah, I was sort of referring to this convo but also thinking of a recent UK article, "New Poll Shows US Totally Racist!" basically, and one of the cherry-picked stats was that a significant percentage of liberals say minorities can be racist, and it was packaged in the article as if meant in a "Black people are the REAL racists!" way. But of course anybody can be racist/anti-semitic/homophobic/bigoted against any other minority group or even against other parts of the group they're IN, and acknowledging that does not necessarily entail any intent to shift blame away from white supremacist structures etc.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2355964/More-Americans-feel-black-people-racist-whites-Hispanics-study-finds.html

I mean it's the DM so whatev, obv.

Oh yeah I agree with that xp

This stuff:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/10/us/nebraska-swearing-toddler/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

A libertarian from high school posted that story on Facebook. One of his friends posted the following:

I'm thinking that his parents are properly preparing him to participate in his community. Isn't that what parents should do? I can see how they'd be proud of their child for being precocious, and want to record and share that

This caused me to ragequit for the day.

Gah @ the reporting in that story. Talk about putting the cart before the horse

This isn't a story about a police department that is "serving" their community by singling out one of their constituents and calling them a "thug", this is about a two year old who swears. Let's lead with that

I cannoooooot. Cannot.

reading the comments for that CNN story makes me want to ragequit humanity

thats true of lots of comments on lots of CNN articles but this one in particular is just ... ugh

If you really want to ragequit humanity go look at all the WHITE TEARS being shed over the #whiteproverbs hashtag on Twitter.

http://the-toast.net/2014/01/10/what-would-yellow-ranger-do-cartoon/

assume this will be circulating a fair bit in the next few days, i really enjoyed it and it is germane to this thread's interests

People 'in the know' will now ask "Where are you from originally?"

Also, RIP Yellow Ranger :(

I totally don't mind people asking me that but I suspect I would a lot more if I lived and worked in an environment that wasn't so multiracial.

Honest q:

In a scenario in which you are talking with someone who has accented english, and who may or may not have visual indications that he/she is from another country. . . I'm placing this scenario in the U.S. fwiw, but you get the gist. . . anyhow, say you are getting to know the person and are genuinely interested in where he or she may have lived abroad in the past, is there any way of asking about this that is not potentially offensive? I mean obv it depends on the person but, y'know, generally speaking?

I mean I'm a person who speaks English as my first and pretty much only language, looks white, has visual indicators that suggest north american residency, a last name that is clearly Germanic. When I'm out of the U.S. and people ask "where are you from?" it doesn't bother me at all, but that may very well be one of those white privilege things. But where people were born and raised is generally a significant part of their identity, right?

i think whereabouts in a conversation with a stranger this question is introduced - in the cartoon it seems to be experienced repeatedly as an opening gambit - plus the disparity between how often a white person wd be asked the same question in the same way, is how this becomes problematic to the author. plus i read it as more about exoticism, the assumptions of otherness made before you hear somebody speak, the failures to recognize shared aspects of culture (ESL classes) etc

i'm sure there are non-othering ways of asking where somebody comes from but this story is interesting in teasing out the underlying assumptions around that kind of question i think

I have noticed that the question doesn't bother me when it's asked by other non-native German speakers -- because I can always ask back and get the same answer on the same level, with no hidden agenda -- but that it does really get my back up when native German speakers ask it, because it feels less like an honest interest in my background and more like a case of "to which of my vaguely racist categorizations am I to assign you"? (I should say that my German is good enough enough that I "pass" for Austrian in most of Germany, and usually only Austrians can tell I'm not from here -- they usually guess Dutch.)

Almost everything is potentially offensive. No matter how sensitive you are nothing guarantees that you wont be the last straw for someone that's already had a bad day.

Just ask where the person currently lives, most people naturally go on to say where they're originally from(if applicable) anyway. That's the best way I can think of to ensure that you're never forcing the issue.

Hahaha! I love that comic essay thing.

plus the disparity between how often a white person wd be asked the same question in the same way, is how this becomes problematic to the author. plus i read it as more about exoticism, the assumptions of otherness made before you hear somebody speak

Agreed. I don't get this question outside of the actual meaning but my other half does & it's apparent that what quite a lot of people are actually asking is "why are you British & brown".

We came from our own country in a red room
which fell through the fields, our mother singing
our father’s name to the turn of the wheels.
My brothers cried, one of them bawling Home,
Home, as the miles rushed back to the city,
the street, the house, the vacant rooms
where we didn’t live any more. I stared
at the eyes of a blind toy, holding its paw.

All childhood is an emigration. Some are slow,
leaving you standing, resigned, up an avenue
where no one you know stays. Others are sudden.
Your accent wrong. Corners, which seem familiar,
leading to unimagined, pebble­-dashed estates, big boys
eating worms and shouting words you don’t understand.
My parents’ anxiety stirred like a loose tooth
in my head. I want our own country, I said.

But then you forget, or don’t recall, or change,
and, seeing your brother swallow a slug, feel only
a skelf of shame. I remember my tongue
shedding its skin like a snake, my voice
in the classroom sounding just like the rest. Do I only think
I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space
and the right place? Now, Where do you come from?
strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate.

I am the most British-looking of British ap-BritishPersons, but I have an accent which codes equally "foreign" on both sides of the Atlantic. I am asked about my accent *everywhere* and constantly, as soon as I open my mouth. This is not a racially loaded question for me, so I cannot speak to the experiences of People of Colour when being asked about their accents.

HOWEVER, I completely relate to that comic strip in the understanding: when someone asks "where are you from?" this is an *inherently* hostile question, because it carries the implication of "you are not from here, and you very clearly and noticeably do not belong here."

Because this question is not racially loaded for me, I always reply "South London; are you asking where my *accent* is from?"

For a British person, this answer usually suffices me, because what they are really trying to do is work out what *class* I am, and "Streatham" tells them everything they think they need to know. For an American person, this answer usually triggers some dumb chat about "You're English, how interesting, I love Doctor Who/Sherlock Holmes/Princess Di, do you know my cousin's husband in Manchester." In which case, please stop. That's annoying, no matter how well intentioned.

if you really are that curious and nosey that you cannot hear an unusual accent without wanting to know what it *means* about a person, I suggest asking the question you really mean, without the hostile (and potentially racist) overtones, by asking "That's a distinctive accent. Where is your accent from?" because that question, although still invasive and therefore potentially rude, is more likely to get answers like "Oh, it is a Parisian accent, I went to school in France, but my family from Algeria" or even "Bradford, but my parents are from Barbados via Uganda" rather than just making a blanket assertion of YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE. But bear in mind, it is an inherently invasive question, and if you ask a person who gets this question a lot, you are putting *yourself* in a box with a whole bunch of racist or xenophobic people, even though your intentions may not be malicious. Also, make sure that you ask people who do not read as "foreign" where their accents are from. If you don't feel comfortable asking it of someone whose accent is "Los Angeles" or "Liverpool" why would ask it of anyone else?

Sorry if it seems like I am trying to speak to the experience of People of Colour; I am absolutely not. I'm just trying to express how invasive and alienating this line of questioning can be, even without the complications of race added.

"Whereabouts in Scotland are you from?" <------ code for "I hope you're not from Glasgow because a) then I might just be able to understand you, b) otherwise you might be some sort of ruffian.

"Oh, I thought you were from Edinburgh" <------- "a) I can understand you, b) you haven't glassed me yet".

couple of xposts. . .

I just now watched the Girls episode where Hannah (white jew) told the black man that she had been seeing for some weeks that she "had not even noticed" that he was black, and he was like "well you certainly should have, b/c it is important!" and also "stfu of course you did, and denying it is fucked up."

I'm always wondering about how best to communicate that I recognize when someone comes from a different racial/cultural/ethnic/insert-group-identification-here and acknowledge it a respectful way (as opposed to pretending it doesn't exist), and also ask more questions as a matter of true interest in getting to know the person better, understand their background and personal history, etc. . . without being an asshole. Like Hannah was in claiming to have not noticed that the dude she was dating was black. She definitely noticed that he was a republican!

I am not sure it is inherently hostile. Can be in some situations but there is a jump from 'you are not from here' to 'you do not belong here' which I don't think is necessarily integral to the query. I can see how some people might take it that way though.

Again, I think it comes back to how frequently you are made to feel defensive about your heritage in the society you live in.

That makes a lot of sense, Shari, thanks. Clearly there is a balance between the Hannah model of denial of difference and a way of acknowledging difference that is not offensive, alienating, otherwise negative.

There are *ways* to ask it which *are* inherently hostile, and ways to ask it which are just expressing interest/noticing diversity in a positive way.

"Where are you from?" = "You do not belong here. Justify your existence here." = "It's highly likely I'm a massive xenophobe/racist/blundering fool"

"You have a cool/unique/interesting/positively-framed attribute - how did you come by it?" = I acknowledge our differences, invite you to share your story = "I am just interested in learning about you."

It *is* a personal question. The whole tension around asking personal questions is fraught with issues of context, which make them either invasive or appropriate. My immediate reaction to being asked a personal question by a near-stranger is "why the hell do *you* need to know that?" When you get asked a certain question 100 times in a row in a way that makes it clear "WTF are you doing in our country, Limey" how the hell are you supposed to tell if the 101st person is actually just super-interested in linguistics and wants to have a fun talk about regional accent variation? It is the person on the receiving end of multiple versions of this question who gets to say whether a question is inherently invasive; not the asker, no matter how well-meaning or clueless they might be.

i ask ppl where their families are originally from all the time but maybe it's different in the US where unless yr a native-american you are definitely not originally from here

how the hell are you supposed to tell if the 101st person is actually just super-interested in linguistics and wants to have a fun talk about regional accent variation?

One key way to tell is if they respond to a particular regional word variation with the response, "What are you, 12 years old?"

I would probably err on the side of *not* asking someone in the UK where their family was from, because that just seems up there with "and where did you go to school?" as sniff sniff sniffing to try to work out someone's class background. This question may code very differently in the US.

Well I mean ime in the US outside of major cities, we're so surprised to meet people who "aren't from here" that locals will def act like you came from Mars. This is a country where less than 5% of people travel overseas in a year. A significant number of Americans will never own passports (and that number was a lot lower before you needed one to go to Mexico and Canada). There can be nastiness in it, I guess, depending on the person, but at rock bottom there's still going to be open curiosity and treating you like a strange phenomenon.

For someone who has a traumatic experience with trying to acculturate/assimilate, erasing parts of themselves, spending years feeling various kinds of bad about it, I can understand that's always going to feel like an aggression. It is dehumanizing, in a way, although I think there are also ways to navigate that. But if you were hoping to go unnoticed, you'll def have a problem.

There's a lot of different kinds of nastiness being dropped on that author in her story, but not all of them have the same...genesis? I don't think.

Er sorry, the number of Americans who will never own passports was a lot HIGHER (not lower) before 9/11 made border security a whole different thing.

I mean I was just home for a week and meeting ppl and most everyone my family knows is aware now that I live in NYC but when new people find out, THERE IS NO WAY I'm going to avoid a conversation about that fact because it's just WEIRD and notable to them. AND I'M FROM WEST MICHIGAN.

tangentially, asking where someone is from is a big thing among jews + i can only image other groups share this phenom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_geography

fortunately facebook tells me these things without my having to ask

why converse with people when you can just follow their internet trail

x-post to in orbit

When I went to visit my Mum in Upstate Vermont, I was made aware of this. She did warn me in advance, that her parishioners were "very quizzy"; that they did not have hostile intentions, but they were just bored and isolated and any new person - let alone a new person with an exotic accent from a foreign country - could expect to be grilled in a way that might seem invasive. Forewarned, I was able to stall people with kind of "Yes, I am from London, no, I have never met the Queen" kind of stock responses, then plead jet lag and excuse myself before the conversations got too personal.

But this is one of those things that codes differently with race, in that - I don't know how many times I've told my green card story in ILX - people from races that are not read as "White" get lumped with that aspect of "foreign" and asked all sorts of invasive questions, regardless of whether they are, in point of fact, local or not-local, and the source of this is not small-town inquisitiveness, it is racism.

There are certainly ways to talk about Being-Raced with friends or colleagues or acquaintances who are PoC that don't fall into that racist trap of "all brown people are from elsewhere and Other". I have certainly had many interesting conversations about race and culture and either being immigrants, or being the child of immigrants, and the way that all of this affects you, and I'm trying to think how they come up. Maybe I just have some advantage, in that once someone has already asked me "That accent! Where are you from?" it's easier for me to turn it around and go "I've told you mine. What's your background?" and they can tell me as much or as little as they please - if they just want to say "East London" and leave it at that, or tell me an interesting story about where their grandparents came from, in reply to my story about my crazy globe-hopping grandparents, depending on what *they* feel comfortable with. But I think that's kind of the key? If someone feels comfortable enough with you, to tell you, then that person will raise the topic. Which is not to say that the onus is always on PoC to bring up raise, because that isn't fair, either! But it's a question of *you* showing that you are worthy of this person's trust, before trying to push them into a conversation. You have to justify your intentions; they don't have to justify their existence.

Yes, of course--absolutely agree. And race complicates everything, and because of racism that complication is rarely (never?) benign or innocuous, or even in the best possible case probably won't feel like it to the non-white person. I can't speak to that personally but I'm aware of it.

i am not particularly sensitive to this question, having grown up with it. i think quincie, if your intentions are okay, you can probably get away with asking "where are you from?" without causing too much offense.

in some ways isn't it a kind of ennobling question to recognize + place a human being from a specific location and not just the vast void of Other? i understand not everyone necessarily wants to see themselves as defined by a particular country/region/city but isn't that kind of stuff important for a lot of humans in formation of self/identity?

I think so. My students are proud of where they're from and are happy to tell everyone on the first day of class without anyone having to ask, usually.

i obviously dont want to speak for anyone but my general sense is that the "problematic" and generally offensive question isnt the first "where are you from" but the second "no where are you *really* from"

Xp That's certainly how I see it but it won't be the same for everyone. Anyone expecting hostility to their presence in a particular place is likely to read it as hostile. Anyone who had generally positive or neutral interactions with others surrounding their heritage probably won't. That would change if the person asking was in a position of authority though.

I understand how it is an issue, but I'm just saying that from my daily perspective, the people who i interact with don't get super offended when you ask where they're from. In fact, no one gets offended unless the person asks in an obviously hostile way and that has never happened ime.

It has happened ime outside of this workplace, for sure.

That's getting closer to the heart of the issue bcz there is a world of context between "this is my culture/background, I am proud of it; let me show you it" and "Where are you from, no where are you really from?"

xp to max Yeah, if you were Asian and someone asked you where are you from and you said, "Pittsburgh" and they were like, how bout those Pens this year, eh? that could be the end of that. Unless you hated hockey, in which case you'd be one of the millions of ppl who moved to New York to avoid having to talk about sports at parties.

In a scenario in which you are talking with someone who has accented english, and who may or may not have visual indications that he/she is from another country. . . I'm placing this scenario in the U.S. fwiw, but you get the gist. . . anyhow, say you are getting to know the person and are genuinely interested in where he or she may have lived abroad in the past, is there any way of asking about this that is not potentially offensive? I mean obv it depends on the person but, y'know, generally speaking?

― quincie, Saturday, January 11, 2014 7:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

I think it's okay in this situation - the question really rubs American-born nonwhites / nonblacks

People who have grown up overseas and who still strongly identify with their native country don't really mind this question at all, I don't think

in the cartoon it seems to be experienced repeatedly as an opening gambit

I was actually sort of wondering about this, like if the frequency non-white/non-black Americans experience is gendered in some way. Like it's maybe more likely asked by dudes who are trying to hit on someone. I don't get asked this question that often but people are more likely to just outright assume I was born overseas + immigrated recently, which I kinda hate - maybe it's due to the way I present

i obviously dont want to speak for anyone but my general sense is that the "problematic" and generally offensive question isnt the first "where are you from" but the second "no where are you *really* from"

― max, Sunday, January 12, 2014 1:02 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

But yeah this is OTM. "Where are you from" is a common opening conversational move used by virtually everybody socialized in the US

"Where are you REALLY from" is used by people who believe that it's impossible for some Americans to have existed in America for more than one generation

So, despite the evidence of a non-native person who was born and grew up overseas and identified very strongly with their native country saying they did mind the question, you just go ahead and say it's OK, on our behalf?

I mean, I know I don't speak for all immigrants, but when you are speaking on behalf of a group I was part of, in direct contradiction of my words, that is so not OK on so many levels.

Like yeah I don't find the first iteration of the question offensive at all - I'm more than happy to tell you where the best place to get a cheesesteak is in Philly

I also know where the best place to get a good Chinese meal is in Philly Chinatown but maybe you'll have to get to know me better before I'll tell you

There was this comedy skit last year on Youtube that sums it up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWynJkN5HbQ

I mean, I know I don't speak for all immigrants, but when you are speaking on behalf of a group I was part of, in direct contradiction of my words, that is so not OK on so many levels.

― Branwell Bell, Sunday, January 12, 2014 2:30 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

Your self-exception has now been duly noted

Thanks. Because next time someone tries to claim "oh no, the rolling race thread isn't US-centric/doesn't try to erase the experience of non-Americans" I can point to your posts and say, no, actually, they literally just did. :)

Sorry I usually skip your posts because they are tl;dr

I think other people read your posts though

vid misses part where blonde blue eyed dude mentions he is pretty sure he's 1/16 cherokee.

That'd actually be enough to get you in to some tribes, depending

There should probably be a way to just have the Codeswitch RSS autopost into this thread

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/01/11/261449394/who-gets-to-be-a-superhero-race-and-identity-in-comics?ft=1&f=1015

oh weird. I just posted that to ilc.

Alan Moore did something stupid this past week didn't he? Not a comics nerd at all

The erasure *is* actually salient, because "don't be silly, white Europeans don't actually count as ~immigrants~" is a thoroughly racist trope. And one I've heard many, many times.

But it's OK Dayo, I'm just gonna start not reading your posts, either.

That's a relief

The Alan Moore interview in question:

http://slovobooks.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/last-alan-moore-interview/

Revolves around defending the use of the Galley-wag character in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

It's a bit tldr in itself.

wow Lance Parkin, haven't seen that name in a while

I certainly wouldn’t want it to look as if I were suffering from liberal qualms over the character’s inclusion, nor that I only gave in to the pressures of my South London Irish racist collaborator.

Is the implication here that an Irish from South London occupies a relatively low slot in the UK pecking order so you know, he can't be and I can't even finish this sentence?

I don't think so. I think he's rejecting the theory that Kevin O'Neill forced him to include the character because he is a racist. Although it's worded in a way that might imply he is a racist, i assume that's not the intention. The reference to South London Irish might potentially be because there has, according to many, historically been more friction between white and black Londoners south of the Thames than North, but even that might be contentious.

Alan Moore appears to be very impressed with himself

(I pretty much agree with him btw, I am just lolling at his imperiousness)

(well okay I wrote that before I got to the invocation of Birth of a Nation, I am impressed with how viciously he is tearing this Batman dude apart tho)

(I mean, the big glaring issue I'm having here is that, aside from Watchmen, every work of Moore's I've read has been as emotionally-stunted and juvenile as the superhero books he's decrying; it's not like dude wrote Maus. Given that opinion, I feel most of his rebuttals are dripping with wholly unearned high-handedness.)

Alan Moore appears to be very impressed with himself

weighing "quite" vs "rather" here, gimme a minute

ok I got it

quite

indeed

ooh, shoulda gone w/ 'rather' xp

lol

When I started scrolling down through the Grant Morrison diatribe and saw it never ended, I feel like I learned a very important lesson, and that lesson was this: "lol"

wishing I was a funny and committed enough person to write a 3,000-word "otm" here

whole lotta splaining going on

was not so impressed with the "white proverbs" tumblr / twitter but this one stood out to me

me! me! me! what about ME!!! This isn’t about me and everything is usually about me but consider ME! Here’s something you didn’t consider— ME!
white feminist proverb

you know really a lot of people are like that, not just white feminists

Is it me or did Moore not make some blatantly untrue assertions about Upton's Golliwog?

And that notwithstanding how can anybody see his stance here as reasonable/defensible?

i'm going to try to avoid generalizations or rehash the old arguments again but just observe that the reasons people find this stance okay include the belief that any artist (in any field) that they're a fan of is essentially infallible and their actions must always be attributed to good motives, coupled with an internal sense of hierarchies that gives much more importance to their own aesthetic worldview than it does to the statements or opinions of people who experience social injustice

and this shit happens all the time because privilege means never having to say you're sorry

unless we accept that there's a perspective from which Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill understand more about the context and history of this

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20121214100554/lxg/images/9/94/Calley-Wag.JPG

than any black person who might find it irredeemably offensive

This is from a paper published yesterday in West Virginia.

http://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/saywhat.jpg

http://www.awesomelyluvvie.com/2014/01/relationship-african-african-americans.html

That is reeeeeally interesting. I have sometimes heard a low regard for African Americans from some Africans. It's one of those things that I haven't thought of any productive response to yet.

Yeah it's super interesting

The dynamic between Chinese and Chinese Americans is sort of the reverse, with the latter looking down on the former for being rude / uncouth / uncivilized / bad manners etc.

Blame the West

Same situation in the UK with African and African Caribbean ppl, as referenced in the teaching article posted a few days ago. Lots of negative stereotypes on both sides.

To some extent also true of Indian and Indo-Caribbean people.

Yeah I think the Afro/Afro Carribean divide exists in the US too. See the shade that gets thrown Rihanna's way

Although to qualify I think the animus is sometimes more unidirectional - like Chinese nationals don't really hold too many negative stereotypes about Chinese Americans, at least not ime

I have sometimes heard a low regard for African Americans from some Africans.

When I worked in Newark Airport, the Africans I talked to would talk so much shit about American blacks. Lazy, ignorant, always starting fights...every racist trope you can imagine.

When I worked in an adult ed ESL program, very similar results. Not always, but there were a lot of misunderstandings.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/is-the-united-states-a-racial-democracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMdcqLn7ufM

http://www.thisisafrica.me/opinion/detail/20131/asian-anti-black-racism-at-an-embassy-in-nigeria

Definitely an important issue and I wouldn't want to undercut that, but I think she understates the extent to which Nigerians treat other Nigerians like shit both generally and in the workplace to add weight to her point.

I mean the suggestion that its not in Nigerians to come up with slurs like "ching chong" is laughable and almost infantilising, especially when you consider the things that Nigerians and Ghanaians have to say about each other if not Yorubas and Igbos, or even Yorubas and Yorubas (Remember my cousin not getting her father in law's blessing because her dad is Ijebu, who are widely believed to be stingy and or wicked for reasons nobody ever bothers to explain).

Respect is definitely an important aspect of Nigerian culture but she kinda ignores how drastically white collar workplace dynamics and emergent class categories have warped and muddied intergenerational relations across the country. As somebody from a wealthy background she'd know all too well that there are many middle class and upward young Nigerians that grew up treating much older 'house helps' (basically household servants) with scorn and contempt.

My dad's cousin is going to speak about the murder of my great-grandfather at this event: http://www.northeastern.edu/50yearsforward/

Ways in which the world is tiny: the grandfather of the professor who reopened investigation into the case is the man who agitated for an FBI investigation into the case; my grandmother was his secretary.

Wow

don't wanna be all "Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote something great again, guess I should post it" but this is a good piece, gets to exactly what bugged me when i was reading a different Neal Brennan interview recently: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/01/neal-brennan-white-americas-greatest-klingon-writer/283172/

don't wanna be all "Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote something great again, guess I should post it"

This is actually how everybody should be

^^^^^^^^^^^^
never enough coates

love the shine on the titanic quote at the end

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2540015/Black-women-pushing-white-babies-Candid-photo-series-exposes-deep-racial-divide-New-York-nannies-young-wards.html

Touching on the discussion upthread about transracial adoptions, nannies of color, etc.

nice facebook ad Global Village Duluth

http://s22.postimg.org/7nfikr4b5/globalvillageduluthmlkad.jpg

Today is always a good day for seeing what America -- and especially conservative America -- really thinks about race, and there are countless examples of these lizard-brained cretins making idiots of themselves, but this is a particularly good example: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/20/conservatives-mark-mlk-day-by-attacking-liberals-and-running-down-a-classless-black-man/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2013/01/16/the-messy-link-between-slave-owners-and-modern-management/

that's pretty amazing, seems like it ought to become better known pretty swiftly

Forbes magazine that Marxist rag

sounds like the perfect kind of historical analysis that will be swiftly ignored by psychopaths. or embraced, i'm not sure which

"Lessons Our Fathers Told Us: Looking Back to Antebellum Times for The Management Tips of Today"

'slaves who were literally the opposite of free'

lol underlining it for the forbes readership

that "modern management is based on owning slaves" analysis has been floating around for at least a year IIRC; I thought we talked a little about it somewhere on here (or maybe I'm remembering Facebook conversations)

Forbes magazine that Marxist rag

there seems to be an odd (or maybe not) recent trend of publications for rich people like Forbes and The Economist being open about these constructed contingencies of capitalism that the rest of the media still tends to naturalise.

I do think that, whatever their other faults, Forbes and The Economist prefer being accurate over being conservative

they're reasonably good winners

that article is part of the forbes contributor system

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/173743/what-the-forbes-model-of-contributed-content-means-for-journalism/

ie its not some white dude w/ a top hat and monocle at hq writing, the site is more or less huff post at this point

true capitalists prefer not having to employ people, even if that means they'll ruin your site w/ marxist nonsense once in a while, at least that person is still poor

I do think that, whatever their other faults, Forbes and The Economist prefer being accurate over being conservative

more or less a truth bomb

after a quick skim my main bone of contention wd be the extent to which modern management and/or social policing owes to the mid 19th century as a whole but that doesn't really detract from the slaveowners bit

also there are real and v important distinctions to be drawn between slavery slavery and wage slavery and it seems pretty bad form to let the horribleness of the latter play down the outright horror of the former

lol @ the researcher being worried she might be misconstrued as pro-slavery.

Cause the first thing I thought when she pointed out links between slavery and modern management techniques was gee modern management is so swell this woman must really ike slavery imo

but that IS how these fat cats think

A follow-up to the story about my great-grandfather's death:

This past Friday, his story was told during an event celebrating the work done by the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice department at Northeastern Law: http://www.northeastern.edu/civilrights/

The law student who did the research presented the facts of my great-grandfather's story, followed by my dad's cousin telling a story about how his grandfather's death radicalized him; he had a job at the time as a paperboy and organized a job walk-off due to harassment from the white paperboys, which included things like forcing all of the manual labor involved in unloading and folding the papers onto the black paperboys and general name-calling and mistreatment. Things got so bad that a local church had to step in and mediate between the paper and the black paperboys before the latter would go back to work under improved conditions. The harassment all then was targeted towards my dad's cousin since he was a ringleader, culminating in a physical fight with one of the white paperboys. This was the precipitating event that led that entire section of my father's family (my grandmother and her two sons, my great-aunt and her children, and my great-grandmother) to leave the South and move to Akron. My dad's cousin spent the rest of his life, both in the military and as an NYC transit cop, challenging systemic bias against black people.

thanks for that update

always gratifying to hear when violence and hate culminates in positive social change

thanks for relating that story, DJP

he had a job at the time as a paperboy and organized a job walk-off due to harassment from the white paperboys, which included things like forcing all of the manual labor involved in unloading and folding the papers onto the black paperboys and general name-calling and mistreatment.

a good object-lesson in how white supremacy was instantiated, on the ground, among children. since memories seem to be so short these days.

The keynote speaker at the event was Douglas Blackmon, author of Slavery By Another Name, who talked a little bit about how the South reinvented its penal system into a defacto slavery engine that flourished from the 1890s until 1943, when the Attorney General issued an edict to prosecute slavery, which up until then had been "unconstitutional" but not "illegal" and had resurfaced as hard labor chain gangs. Dude also told his own life story about how he, as a white man born in Arkansas in the mid-60s, ended up making this type of writing/reporting his work of passion.

I'm not a non-fiction person; I bought a copy of dude's book and had him sign it.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/marcjaysonc/29-astounding-soviet-propaganda-images-promoting-r-ffhg

amazing

shame about katyn, holodomor, etc etc etc

we need to come up with some general field theory on the elites of one system of power getting "concerned" about the subjected people of another (cf. right-wingers suddenly getting all feminist/gay-rightsy when talking about islam or africa) -- the target audience is always domestic political enemies, right? as in "shut up, you don't know how good we (let you) have it"

There was an element of sticking the boot into the racist US, with a view to demonstrating how much more progressive the USSR was but it went much deeper than that.

Russia is an incredibly multiracial society and anti racism was adopted as a unifying policy. The USSR was also heavily involved in the struggle for hearts and minds in Africa - giving aid, doing student exchange programs, etc, in an effort to consolidate influence.

In addition, I think there was an element of revulsion at colonialism / racism which may have been hypocritical under the circumstances but was genuinely held.

Many thanks for sharing that DJP - was wondering how it had went

A lot of the pro-civil rights decisions issued by the Supreme Court were also subtly-maybe-not-subtly in response to the Cold War

Like ambassadors from countries in Africa who were making the trip between NYC and DC literally could not find a place to stop and use the restroom on I-95

Much to the embarrassment of US government officials

A companion to goole's link

http://chineseposters.net/themes/african-friends.php

Notable because this guy was a federal judge

http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/Judge-Richard-Cebull-sent-hundreds-of-racist-5160325.php

"So far, nearly everything you had anything to do with has turned out to be what the folks like, even things some of 'em resisted. Take that there," he said, pointing to the wall near my desk.

It was a symbolic poster of a group of heroic figures: An American
Indian couple, representing the dispossessed past; a blond brother (in
overalls) and a leading Irish sister, representing the dispossessed present; and Brother Tod Clifton and a young white couple (it had been felt unwise simply to show Clifton and the girl) surrounded by a group of children of mixed races, representing the future, a color photograph of bright skin texture and smooth contrast.

"So?" I said, staring at the legend: "After the Struggle: The Rainbow of America's Future"

"Well, when you first suggested it, some of the members was against
you."

"That's certainly true."

"Sho, and they raised the devil about the youth members going into
the subways and sticking 'em up in place of them constipation ads and things -- but do you know what they doing now?"

"I guess they're holding it against me because some of the kids were
arrested," I said.

"Holding it against you? Hell, they going around bragging about it.
But what I was about to say is they taking them rainbow pictures and
tacking 'em to their walls 'long with 'God Bless Our Home' and the Lord's Prayer. They're crazy about it."

(by way of suggesting maybe not only them nasty Russian communists were identifying anti-racism as a defining plank of Socialism)

depends on how nationalist the brand of Socialism was, i think - weren't their specific communist regimes against the international spread?

There was a schism between Trotsky and Stalin in relation to whether they should actively strive for international revolution or focus attention on building up the Soviet Union, which Stalin eventually won, but in practice they were never entirely isolationist even at the height of Stalinism. International revolution wasn't something he was going to dedicate huge amounts of resources to but it would have been seen as a positive thing to happen without Russia's help.

I can't think of any communist regimes that didn't claim some form of solidarity with workers overseas but there may have been.

Have we done this yet?
http://www.raceforward.org/research/reports/moving-race-conversation-forward
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjGQaz1u3V4

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5476/12126731996_8e9e24aa22_z.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tiDIUwQRmQ

Fucking hell

In defense of the Iowa GOP, they're only directly/excluding alienating about 400 ppl in Iowa with that

Of course the poor kid didn't complain! He had just been abused and didn't want them to do it again!

omg ruptured testicle omg

interested in that raceforward paper, but oddly you have to have a login to their site to actually read it

http://www.npr.org/2014/01/26/266434175/growing-up-white-transracial-adoptee-learned-to-be-black

This feels like a harsh truth:

"I don't have a checklist," he says, "but if I did, it would sound something like this: If you don't have any close friends or people who look like your kid before you adopt a kid, then why are you adopting that kid? Your child should not be your first black friend."

truth bomb

If you don't have any close friends or people who look like your kid before you adopt a kid, then why are you adopting that kid?

bc you want to adopt a child and you don't think the color of their skin should be a factor in that decision?

You don't think it should be a factor but it's going to be a factor in the childhood of the adoptee no matter your best intentions

That's the point of that adoptee sharing his perspective growing up transracial

It is going to be a factor in their childhood regardless of your best intentions, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

Right, I think he's just saying that a family ought to have knowledge and awareness of the situation they would be putting their child into before they do it

Okay, I'd just be concerned about cautioning people against interracial adoption - even if the caution is delivered w/ the best of intentions (the psychological welfare of the child growing up in a family that doesn't look like him), it smacks heavily of racist beliefs against miscegenation. Even one child obv shouldn't languish unadopted bc of hang-ups about racial difference. I agree tho that anyone going into interracial adoption should educate themselves thoroughly.

They were raised in a white suburb, but worked hard to expose them to other people who looked like him, and checked out every library book with a black author they could find. They even sent them to a more diverse school in a different neighborhood.

sounds like they had some awareness

assuming that being adopted is better every time. xp

it smacks heavily of racist beliefs against miscegenation.

Uh

I don't think this is where the author of the article is coming from at all, why are you strawmanning?

All the author, a transracial adoptee who grew up in a white family, is saying is that families should also consider the potential wellbeing of the child when adopting transracially

if his only point is that families should consider the potential wellbeing of the child, that's not much of a harsh truth

well and consider that in spite of their best intentions they may not have as much of an effect on the potential well being of their child as they might like.

i guess my only objection is that i believe the world, and the child's world, is better when there are more transracial adoptions - that these kind of racial identity concerns should def result in more aware + educated adopting parents, but should never reduce actual adoptions.

'don't adopt this child for his own good' is not a sentiment i can get behind. it's very callous.

I can, sometimes (NB I am very aware the evangelical Christian international adoption movement is not full of bad apples & is of a very different bent & awareness than what the NPR piece describes, but still)
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/christian-evangelical-adoption-liberia
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/11/hana_williams_the_tragic_death_of_an_ethiopian_adoptee_and_how_it_could.html

hana williams article is pretty devastating.

during the woody allen thing a week or so ago i stumbled on some pretty gross left-wing blogger types arguing that the real villain of the whole situation was mia farrow for promoting 'imperialist adoption.'

'To Train Up A Child'

this fucking planet

Oh yeah welcome to THAT particular dark corner.

lj save yourself some aggravation and don't study that bit too hard it fucking sucks

this is a bit tangential but people i know were involved in a case where people in social services (under specific but prob not unusual circumstances i don't want to get into) tried to get a black-caribbean/white mixed-race child placed w/ black adoptive parents rather than award custody to their single white biological parent. the concerns social services voiced about raising a mixed-race child in a white household & neighbourhood were v similar to the issues raised here over transracial adoption. everyone in this kid's family is extremely aware of the unusual circumstances & tho this kid looks set to have a really awesome childhood it's obviously hard to know how they will feel about everything in ~10 year's time. [what i hope was] well-intentioned concern around this kid's identity ended up in a huge amount of scrutiny & pressure being piled on to what was already a difficult single parenting situation, w/ a really awesome parent who has a fantastic relationship w/ their kid having it threatened & being forced to justify themselves in a way millions of much worse parents never will. makes me a bit apprehensive about how parenting/custody can quite often become a battleground on which wider concerns about race are fought out

That sounds messed up

He says that while a black home may be best for a black child, he's not opposed to transracial adoption.

This is fundamentally a fucked up thing to read. You're not opposed to transracial adoption? But unmixed is better.

http://gawker.com/black-person-in-yoga-class-causes-profound-moral-crisis-1510975100

Over the course of the next hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt.

haha these would be exactly my stages in a yoga class

What are "Things that read like an Onion article but aren't."

people are really fucked up huh

credit where credit is due:

http://www.xojane.com/issues/it-happened-to-me-i-read-an-essay-about-a-white-womans-yoga-class-black-woman-crisis-and-i-cannot

It would be great if xoJane didn't publish garbage like the original piece regularly in the first place so a response like that wouldn't be necessary.

I refuse to believe white people and xoJane are so fucking clueless that they didn't expect the response they got. Fuck them.

well yes, I don't disregard any of that

true fact: xo jane requires authors to post a selfie w/ every post

did the Cheerios commercial with the mixed-race family get pulled off the air?

the editor on facebook:

OK before you all flip the f*k out — this piece on xoJane today about a skinny white woman's experience in a Brooklyn yoga studio is blowing up with hate. I assigned this piece after the author, who I know from my neighborhood, and with whom I was having a casual conversation, felt she could share this experience with me — I was impressed by her candor in telling me, a black woman she doesn't even know all that well. I told her to write about the experience. This is the result. I didn't edit or change much. This is her first person experience, which I think is very likely the experience (admittedly seeped in white privilege) of a lot of folks. For that reason, I felt it was a narrative that should be heard.

The other part of this — the fairly vitriolic comments — is about my being a black editor who should have made a better judgement call (according to them) about what constitutes suitable race content. As if I am now the official president of the Black Ethics Committee at xoJane. I have many feelings about this, and will address later. Too overwhelmed by the hate right now.

I think this tweet from Sarah Nicole Prickett about this is pretty otm: https://twitter.com/snpsnpsnp/status/428300683398631424

clickbait works, why not

http://africasacountry.com/yoga-heavyset-and-black-women-need-not-apply/

Giving a fuck about you isn't necessarily in an editors job description tbf

I kind of don't get why these borderline thought-catalog level pieces generate make such big ripples. Someone said something dumb on the internet.

Like I don't feel like dissecting this woman's stupid yoga journal is really advancing the ball much on dialogue about race, it feels more like "OMG LOOK WHAT THIS DUMBSHIT WROTE!"

come on man, this is the year of liberals attacking each other on the internet over attitudes toward race and gender, get in the spirit

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

Britishes can now see if their ancestors owned slaves

the yoga piece was really something, because there's a feeling when you're in a room, and you think "there's someone who thinks i don't belong here, or maybe a few people, and they're just looking at me thinking about how i don't belong" and then boom here's this article from the standpoint of that person. and you think about all the people in all the rooms where someone just cannot get over the fact they're there, and there's something gutting about the whole thing.

http://calvincato.com/site/fujane-it-happened-to-me-i-saw-a-white-person-buy-jerk-chicken-and-i-couldnt-handle-it/

^^^ have been this guy

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/toward-visual-paths-of-dignity/

http://calvincato.com/site/fujane-it-happened-to-me-i-saw-a-white-person-buy-jerk-chicken-and-i-couldnt-handle-it/
― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Thursday, 30 January 2014 06:16 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a bit o_O

Can you elaborate?

It would go a long way to alleviate my discomfort with that photographic collection if at the end he announced he was donating it to a museum or foundation that preserves the history and representation of the African diaspora or something.

http://m.nydailynews.com/1.1593047

man that is just so so sad

The two victims are black and the shooter is white but McComas said there is no indication race was a factor in the the suspect's motive.

this language elides so much

Death penalty

Line of defence likely to be: "your honour, the defendant really honestly thought that it was his property those guys were standing on so altho a tragic error this is all basically fine imo"

i think there is a significant portion of the population who fantasizes about getting to legally murder someone who trespasses on their property, the same way i fantasize about getting to send helicopters to pick up all my best friends and deliver them to a never ending pool party on a secret island

― ᶓ͠סּᴥ͠סּᶔ ᶓͼ᷆ₓͼ᷇ᶔ (gr8080), Friday, November 8, 2013 8:15 AM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.nfb.ca/film/qallunaat_why_white_people_are_funny

got no sound at work, gonna watch the shit out of this when i get home

gr80 sadly otm (tho the never ending secret island pool party fantasy is far less sad)

no it is def sad, i am a grown man

I doubt they'll treat his "mistake" as a complete defense, since it was a negligent and idiotic one at best.

never too old for hot pool parties, bro

there is a mayor missing from this picture

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/nyregion/a-mayor-most-everybody-looks-up-to-even-when-he-slouches.html

seriously!?

well, two mayors

oh right, rudy.

still, good job leaving out the black guy.

yeah giuliani and dinkins were average height. presumably in an infographic about nyc mayors and notable heights you might focus on nyc mayors that were noticeably tall or short. alot of those pics are shot at angles that makes lining them up for comparison kinda useless.

I love the mayor, and I want to be hugged by the mayor,” said Jimmy van Bramer, a 5-foot-7 city councilman from Queens. “But he’s so tall that sometimes I’m not sure where to go in for the hug.”

this quote is cracking me up

wait, huh? Why is this in this thread?

Dinkins (pointedly?) left out of the illustration in that NYT story, presumably

and Giuliani?

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/02/missouri-executed-this-man-while-his-appeal-was-pending-in-court/283494/

on Wednesday night a black man in Missouri, a black man convicted by an all-white jury, was executed before his federal appeals had been exhausted. He was executed just moments after reportedly being hauled away by prison guards while he was in the middle of a telephone call discussing his appeals with one of his attorneys. He was executed even though state officials knew that the justices of the United States Supreme Court still were considering his request for relief.

You could x-post this to several threads

http://observer.com/2013/12/whos-the-fairest-of-them-all-on-hilton-als-white-girls/

& another great piece on one version of the immigrant experience: https://www.michigandaily.com/opinion/michigan-color-american-plus-chinese

oh wait was this
http://calvincato.com/site/fujane-it-happened-to-me-i-saw-a-white-person-buy-jerk-chicken-and-i-couldnt-handle-it/

a parody of stuff linked here?
http://africasacountry.com/yoga-heavyset-and-black-women-need-not-apply/

i see now if so

Yeah, it was a direct response to the XOJane post

ah yes, newbie to the thread sorry.. read my posts and cry.

please refresh our memory balls

― 龜, Wednesday, January 1, 2014 5:52 PM (1 month ago)

I dunno where to put this so I'm putting it here

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/31/i-am-hello-kitty/

fwiw!, (& i haven't read every essay), i just loved "white girls", it's just so beautiful & new & panoramic. its first essay is my favourite thing i can remember reading, this ~100pp piece sorta digressive memory-log called tristes tropiques

her piece makes me wanna ~go deeper~ read the women, too

The Times Sq cartoon people is a CRAZY world that I only realized existed when a friend of mine who was broke and jobless and has a ton of official Disney princess costumes (long story) decided to try to make some money like that. I went with her so she wouldn't be Tinkerbell alone.

I noticed a divide between characters who have costume heads and don't talk to ppl, just wave and gesture and wear shoulder bags that say "Donations" or "Tips Welcome," and white ppl who play for ex superheroes with their heads uncovered and will talk to you. We also watched Batman extort money from tourists by walking up and telling them they owed him $5 for taking his picture, that was funny/disturbing.

i've seen an elmo scream at people, think it was this guy
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/anti-semitic-elmo-year-jail-girls-scout-extort-article-1.1480585

anti-semitic-elmo-year-jail-girls-scout-extort

this could be an excerpt from a Skinny Puppy song

is it bad that I wish he had used the Elmo voice during his rant

it was just muffled screaming iirc

Speaking of Skinny Puppy, have we seen about them suing the US government for $666,000 for not asking permission to hateplay their records to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay?

seeing them next week in a dc suburb, hoping they riff on this repeatedly

http://www.policymic.com/articles/80841/12-beautiful-portraits-of-black-identity-challenging-the-one-drop-rule

Think I had posted a link abt this in last year's thread, a Lens post, I think

On OKCupid, you see a lot of profiles where people preempt the "What are you?" question in the "The first thing people notice when they see you for the first time" question with descriptions of their heritage by 1) acknowledging that they get asked this all the time and 2) giving a brief genealogical makeup

OKC being a perfect segueway into http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/01/31/269551194/why-its-hard-to-talk-about-attraction-in-race-and-culture?ft=1&f=1015

http://www.polygon.com/features/2014/2/6/5361004/fighting-game-diversity

I want to believe that and yet I keep thinking about this: http://boingboing.net/2012/02/29/meet-the-sexist-racist-pigs-o.html

haha I should have kept reading

yeah, they cover that too

solid. they cover the basics pretty well - good representation in both racial, international and economic diversity, but still badly sexist due to the literally dark, macho origins of the arcade scene. most people don't want to wait on line for their turn while some fool accidentally drops cigarette ashes on you. not a metaphor!

one of the things mentioned i do hate is how online breeds some really shitty behavior. but you go to a RL meetup - which of course is WAY tougher and much better as an experience - and people are far more respectful, polite, fun, supportive, and so on (though of course, the no winning/no respect thing still applies so some extent)

that applies to online anything vs RL anything i reckon

http://deadspin.com/the-big-book-of-black-quarterbacks-1517763742
brief notation on every black qb to play in the nfl

^ Great article

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/02/08/273292636/let-me-introduce-you-to-my-cousins-lupita-nyongo-and-louis-c-k

i should just start reading code switch every day

^^^

http://jezebel.com/elle-editor-explains-why-mindy-kalings-cover-was-black-1517689447

The notion that we would try to hide Kaling's shape or ethnicity is counter to everything we believe in. There was another picture of Mindy, in color, that was cropped right above her knees. She looked good in it, but she'd been shown like that before. At ELLE, we want our cover images to surprise, to reveal a side of someone that you might not have seen, and to convey that she's more than just a pretty face in a cute dress. In the black-and-white photo, I thought that Mindy looked powerful, beautiful, potent, and sexy in the best sense of the word: When she looks at the camera, you see a woman who's alluring and in control, a woman who's not afraid of her own desires.

Not really buying it

I'm kind of conflicted about the whole Elle cover thing.

I am about 95% certain that the black and white picture was chosen because of (possibly sub)conscious bias but I also think it's an undeniably great picture.

it is a good picture, but that excuse is like, come on

http://groupthink.jezebel.com/surya-bonaly-was-the-biggest-bad-ass-in-winter-olympics-1517897822

subtly condescending, y/n?

n

no

Something about "badass" rankled me a little, but then I thought maybe that's just standard corny jezebelspeak

that's what i figured
it was surprisingly light on that sort of language though, and her story is pretty damn great and requires 0% joke plumping aside from the word "badass" which is shorthand for a certain sort of person but can be forgiven in the context of this very real story of badassery.

chiming in to say that I just came across max's 2012 piece on girls and Lesley afrin and it was A+

http://www.tmz.com/videos/0_2rq330ri/

funny and sort of painful, because Samuel L. Jackson is actually, rightfully, kind of mad about this, and the anchors are nervously trying to laugh their way out of it

That was righteous to watch

on the plus side, i found out omar is in robocop

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/10/274789348/stuart-hall-godfather-of-multiculturalism-dies

Some talk in the rolling obit thread - not familiar with him or his work

Any UK ilxors want to weigh in? Any recs?

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2014/02/harlem-renaissance-photographs-carl-van-vechten.html

These photos are amazing

Young James Earl Jones!

i have a pdf of policing the crisis on my computer but i didn't read it because i don't read anymore

"the vibrancy of Kodachrome"

damn, you got that right! incredible.

"...and I'm the only black guy in Robocop who's not a criminal."

multi-xp

a lot of Stuart Hall's work is essay-length and distributed around various collections so i'm not sure what a key single book wd be

Representation is probly a good start, Policing the Crisis is excellent, Visual Culture: The Reader is at the heart of his stuff on popular culture i think

oh, Culture, Media, Language is a bit like a 70s greatest hits set from Hall and the Cultural Studies gang from Birmingham

Will look for those NV, ty

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/african-american-history-from-family-albums-to-museum-walls/

dayo, you might like this TV programme Hall did in 1979, "It ain't half racist, mum" - the points they make are by now cultural studies starting-points and so maybe don't sound so fresh, but the tv clips and the general sense of what the UK was like in the late 70s are pretty bracing.

http://youtu.be/gy57O9ZMENA

tbh a hell of a lot of what they say in that programme about the way that the bbc's concept of "balance" functions to give credence to racists is true of the uk media's coverage of "the immigration debate" today

Ty for that csm

http://nplusonemag.com/white-indians

not a bad article

three paragraphs in and i'm super-annoyed. does this article have an author? what is this "the editors" shit? maybe n+1 is just not for me.

HI WELCOME BACK I MISSED YOU A LOT

hi io! i missed you, too.

this article has a lot of good information, but there's a tinge of self-hatred that i find off-putting. also a problem with generalizing even about south asian americans--we're not a monolith. some of us are even muslim! my parents sure bother the american elites they know to discuss kashmir 24/7, being kashmiri themselves. if jesse helms makes use of us to further his preexisting project of disenfranchising black americans, i'm not sure that's my fault. dinesh d'souza is complicit, absolutely.

it is true that india seems to have never had an analogue of the Black Power movement (nothing is the same as anything else, but a moment where white supremacy was debunked and "brown is beautiful" was widely affirmed.) and it desperately needs one. but i'd say that's less true of my generation of indian americans. if anything, i think this article is evidence of an awareness that's shared. not sure it's selling out to become a doctor, either. moments like that seem to speak to self-hatred.

It seems weird to list a bunch of shows that have southeast Asian characters in them that are neither coolies or smother-mother stereotypes and then dismiss them all as coolies and smother-mother stereotypes. (Caveat: I don't watch The Good Wife and only sporadically watched Whitney, which was terrible for many other reasons.)

if i put a point-by-point rebuttal/qualified agreement response to this article in this thread, i need you guys to forgive me, because it is a snow day.

xp i find his/hers/their analysis of racial minstrelsy lacking. also when i first read that part i thought he/she/they was calling good wife a bad show and i was HOT let me tell you

kalinda is a problem as a character sometimes but she's not a fawning white people are better than i am type

like the smattering of freckles on Pippi Longstocking

really? i need to you to ditch the "literary" flourishes, dude/lady/dudes

haha I didn't make it that far

Every South Asian reader knew the answer

please don't speak for me, dude/lady/dudes. i feel like this is symptomatic of a larger tendency to internalize white racism. like i refuse to take responsibility for the fact that some white people are less scared of me than they are of black people.

But just as often the television South Asian echoes the gestures of the standard fawning coolie of yore: palms clasped together, head shaking from side to side, mumbling “sahib” through an apologetic smile crowned with an anachronistic mustache.

i need a citation here. this might be true of Outsourced for all i know, and the existence of that show was galling to me, but i somehow doubt indian americans created it.

Or she is a cartoon auntie flinging her sari over her shoulder as she hovers over a pot of steaming aloo methi, yelling to her son in Rushdiean patois: “Eat-na, why you no eat! Food is spoiling-goiling,” et cetera.

this is fair, made me think of bend it like beckham which does strike me as dabbling in minstrelsy. the rushdie parody also made me laugh.

tom haverford on parks and rec, kelly kapoor of the office, and kalinda sharma of the good wife are not minstrels whatever else they may be, as djp points out. do you even watch tv, dude/lady/dudes?

South Asians have done this proudly for years, chiefly in film: from the many who played monkey brain eaters in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Kal Penn as the repressed nerd in the Van Wilder movies, Dev Patel tomming through The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and the guy who literally played a coolie in The Royal Tenenbaums

have they done it proudly? how the fuck do you know? like the tradition of Af Am minstelsy, i think it's more complicated than that. sometimes people need to work and they take the jobs that exist.

It's n+1 so no, they don't even own a TV, man.

Outsourced was based on an (according to IMDB) Israeli movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425326/

All I know about the movie is that many of my Indian coworkers loved it. The show started out horribly but evolved into something watchable right when it got cancelled; I keep seeing different actors from it popping up all over other shows and commercials.

the accentless, “American” desi nebbish who fills the minority quota on TV.

who is this? is this tom haverford? i feel like i am an accentless desi nebbish, so i'm kind of okay with it.

writer forgot about depictions in mindy project, new girl, newsroom - those are just off the top of my head

I kind of feel like the last TV show the author(s) saw was an early episode of The Simpsons

The South Asian presence on TV is also evidence of the enormous power of the South Asian diaspora — the most powerful and successful immigrant minority in America.

this and the other points like it are the best points this article has to make. i still feel like he/she/they do an inadequate job of explaining the mechanism. like it's not like the pro-India political lobby got Aisha Muharrar a job writing for Parks and Rec. it's more that the relative economic privilege of Indian Americans means that a fair proportion of my generation attended exclusive colleges and networked with the communities that make these kinds of positions available.

this is my own hangup obv but couldn't help but notice author kinda fixated on jews + indian diplomatic/business relationships w/ israel

also it's only a problem to be a successful immigrant minority if you obscure the workings of class that contributed to that. dinesh d'souza saying black people have a culture of failure is disgusting. it's not disgusting or insufficiently racially progressive to want to be a doctor. who gives a shit if white people stereotype indian americans as doctors?

because white people stereotyping anybody as anything is always bad for everyone

it is just true that the pro-india political lobby in the u.s. is also pro-israel inasmuch as it is afraid of militant Islam globally. it's also true that the kind of indian nationalism embodied in that lobby is...troubling.

kinda the real pt that the article seems to elide is that indians seem well poised to become white a la other once racial minorities now subsumed into 'whiteness'

because white people stereotyping anybody as anything is always bad for everyone

― Nhex, Thursday, February 13, 2014 11:28 AM (56 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sure but it is crazy to respond to this by being like, doing what white people expect of you, working a meanigful job that is fulfilling and well-paid, is being a tool of the man! like, give me a break with this shit. stop being embarrassed by your parents or whatever is at the root of this.

(many xps) It seems super weird to use a still from "Harold and Kumar" at the top of the article and then talk about "Kal Penn as the repressed nerd in the Van Wilder movies" (caveat: have not gotten to the end of the article yet)

okay I just did a search for "Kumar" and Kal Penn's name isn't even mentioned in connection with the character, which is probably his most famous role outside of House so I don't even know what's going on here structurally

also this made me lol: 1 An earlier version of this article misspelled goras as ghoras. The former means ‘whites,’ the latter, uh, ‘horses.’ We regret the error.

American magazines, which largely count no blacks or East Asians on their staffs, always have at least one pliant South Asian.

"pliant"? seriously, stop hating yourself. it's boring.

I don't watch a lot of TV, man, either, but I do feel like I've seen a gradual evolution of the roles of South Asian characters in TV and film in my lifetime, and that it's mostly been a positive evolution, although it probably has a ways to go. I mean it used to seem like all you ever got were Apu-type characters, purely there as a joke. Harold and Kumar was probably a big turning point, and I really liked the way that film handled race, actually, because it wasn't some hackneyed attempt at "reversing" the stereotypes, like "Let's create a musclebound Indian superhero who is surrounded by hot babes," but it was actually in spite of being a completely ridiculous comedy a believable and complex portrayal of an Indian guy and a Korean guy who actually DO fit some stereotypes while bucking others, which describes a lot of people, i.e. instead of "here's someone who is nothing like what you think an Indian person is supposed to be like," it was "the cultural stereotypes that this person partly meets are not the totality of who they are."

It does seem like although you see more south asian characters in mainstream comedies, there's a tendency toward having them be either servile or dorky (e.g. 30 Rock, Parks and Rec).

the very end of the article posits kumar as something positive