Rolling 2014 Thread on Race

seems like they got the idea from this piece that was going round a couple of months ago: https://medium.com/@nkkl/ride-like-a-girl-1d5524e25d3a

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdyin6uipy4

Nothing really new in this vid but feel like when even College Humor is making content about this stuff it gives me a little... hope?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/opinion/nicholas-kristof-is-everyone-a-little-bit-racist.html

Nothing new in this either but provides a good roundup to some more recent studies/empirical findings, for those who give more weight to that type of evidence

Gonna also pre-register my disapproval of the article title

I like the potential punctuation of that url.

Nicholas Kristof is: everyone a little bit racist?

Very forksian thing for you to like

Very 龜ian thing for you to say

Nicholas Kristof is everyone. A little bit racist!

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/08/28/338622840/how-the-kung-fu-fighting-melody-came-to-represent-asia

(Some melodies that fit this pattern make no reference to Asia whatsoever — you might recognize it in Peter, Bjorn and John's song "Young Folks.")

Always knew there was something fishy about Young Folks http://i.imgur.com/HzB9zYq.gif

I remember that Straight Dope thread. Glad it got a better answer.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/08/30/344334960/how-are-different-asian-american-groups-faring-economically

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2014/08/27/343732090/lifetime-promises-to-bring-out-the-strong-black-woman-in-white-women

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/08/29/race-issues-raised-when-oakland-firefighter-kids-detained-by-police-officer-opd-keith-jones-station-29-profiling/

A black Oakland firefighter has filed a complaint with the Oakland Police Department after he and his young kids were detained by a white police officer outside the station where the firefighter worked.

...

@idabeewells
Judge Hathaway sentences #TedWafer to 17-30 years in prison for the murder of #RenishaMcBride.

@idabeewells
Attorney for #RenishaMcBride's family says they are very pleased with sentence.

Defense attorney revealed -- not sure why -- that Wafer had two drunk driving convictions, and there was something in a pre-sentencing report regarding Wafer's marijuana use ("occasionally"). Yet the victim was portrayed (prior to and during the trial) as a drug fiend.

http://nypost.com/2014/09/05/teachers-defy-union-warnings-to-show-support-for-nypd/

Many teachers had worn the shirts to school on Tuesday and Wednesday as a show of support for cops in the wake of the Eric Garner death and union-backed rally by the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Other teachers across the city posted photos of themselves in pro-cop attire on a Facebook page titled “Thank you, NYPD.”

Homicide, yay.

teachers who are being activists themselves by wearing a T-shirt
teachers who are being activists themselves by wearing a T-shirt
teachers who are being activists themselves by wearing a T-shirt
teachers who are being activists themselves by wearing a T-shirt
teachers who are being activists themselves by wearing a T-shirt
teachers who are being activists themselves by wearing a T-shirt
teachers who are being activists themselves by wearing a T-shirt
teachers who are being activists themselves by wearing a T-shirt

Other teachers across the city posted photos of themselves in pro-cop attire

Didn't mean to spill that liquor all on my pro-cop attire

From a book review in the Economist in 2014:

Slave owners surely had a vested interest in keeping their “hands” ever fitter and stronger to pick more cotton. Some of the rise in productivity could have come from better treatment. Unlike Mr Thomas, Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.

http://www.economist.com/news/books/21615864-how-slaves-built-american-capitalism-blood-cotton

I fucking can't

James Campbell in the Times Literary Supplement was complaining, the other day, about black poets getting to use the n-word when their white counterparts can't. When someone wrote in to take issue his response was pretty much 'aha! You don't deny it's true!'.

I think that we're probably quite complacent in the UK about discussions of race outside of obviously reactionary circles. We expect, at least to some extent, people involved in the arts or high-calibre journalism to 'get it' or there to, at least, be a failsafe mechanism where someone else in the office tells them they're making a mug of themselves before it goes to print.

The Economist probably falls within 'obviously reactionary circles', though it tends not to let the mask slip quite so obviously. I can't remember who said that it was staffed primarily by unpleasant young men pretending to be unpleasant old men but they were broadly correct.

http://www.theonion.com/video/gop-maintains-solid-hold-on-youth-that-already-loo,36778/

i'm an economist subscriber and the frequency with which they publish that kind of explicitly racist and classist shit is deeply alarming

Regarding that Economist review:

http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/what-does-your-social-network-look-like--325889091804

Something more lighthearted

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2IHPIqTNcI

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/sep/09/carol-howard-black-female-police-officer-discrimination-met-tribual-victory

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/07/ohio-black-man-killed-by-police-walmart-doubts-cast-witnesss-account

When Ronald Ritchie called 911 from the aisles of a Walmart in western Ohio last month to report that a black man was “walking around with a gun in the store”, he said that shoppers were coming under direct threat.

“He’s, like, pointing it at people,” Ritchie told the dispatcher. Later that evening, after John Crawford III had been shot dead by one of the police officers who hurried to the scene in Beavercreek, Ritchie repeated to reporters: “He was pointing at people. Children walking by.”

One month later, Ritchie puts it differently. “At no point did he shoulder the rifle and point it at somebody,” the 24-year-old said, in an interview with the Guardian. He maintained that Crawford was “waving it around”, which attorneys for Crawford’s family deny.

Tased, arrested.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/08/the-problem-is-im-black/379357/

If you're 27 and black with dreadlocks, sometimes you're waiting to pick up your kids and someone calls the cops to get rid of you. The police report indicates a call about "an uncooperative male refusing to leave," which makes it sound as though someone else first asked him to vacate where he was; another press report says that he was sitting in a chair in a public area when a security guard approached and told him to leave as the area was reserved for employees. The Minnesota Star Tribune visited the seating area and reported that "there was no signage in the area indicating that it was reserved for employees."

Not to thread police but there's been some talk over here Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

http://gawker.com/django-unchained-actress-mistaken-for-prostitute-accos-1634555094?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Django Unchained Actress Accosted by LAPD After Kissing White Husband

Right on the heels of that: http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/09/ny_lawyer_teachers_say_they_were_accused_of_being_prostitutes_by_nyc_hotel.html

https://twitter.com/PiaGlenn

unfamiliar with this writer, but worth reading TL right now (on new pictures TMZ has of Daniele Watts)

http://www.politicususa.com/2014/09/18/militia-group-plans-target-african-american-democrats-polling-places-wisconsin.html

Maybe not the place for this...? Still jaw droppingly terrible regardless

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/arts/television/viola-davis-plays-shonda-rhimess-latest-tough-heroine.html?_r=0

So uh, the NYT called Shonda Rhimes an angry black woman

x_x

jfc that was an abomination

Stanley has a history of being an awful writer doesn't she

Exhibit B, an anti-racist installation / drama project by a white South African artist, has been shut down at the Barbican by anti-racist protesters who felt it was exploitative:

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/sep/24/slavery-exhibition-black-actors-cages-shut-down

There had been a petition circulating for a while asking for it to be shut down, and ongoing discussions with the groups involved, but when that wasn't successful, direct action to block access to the gallery was taken.

It received numerous five-star reviews in Edinburgh, including from The Guardian, and had the vocal support of its cast of black actors, but was obviously shocking in its approach:

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/sep/05/exhibit-b-is-the-human-zoo-racist-the-performers-respond

The objective, afaik, was to use the concept of the 18th / 19th century 'human zoo' to parallel historical abuses with modern ones (African immigrants being killed using legal restraint techniques during deportation, etc) via a series of tableaux vivants. Again, afaik, none of the protest leaders had actually seen the installation but felt that it was too close in tone to the original human zoos to be defensible.

My sense is that a lot of ppl are so traumatized already by the news and everyday life bullshit that the punch in the gut of something like that exhibit is too much. Even if we assume that it's not a "vanity project" and has a completely sound critical foundation (which may be too much credit, I don't know these details), it's still kicking someone in the ribs when they're already down.

Yes, it's difficult to be too critical of the protesters' motivations - or at least to handwave away concerns about a white artist creating this kind of exhibition for what would inevitably have been a primarily white audience. At the same time, i get the impression that effort was made to address the concerns - offering the organisers an opportunity to see the installation before it opened, trying to start a line of dialogue between them and the performers, etc, and it wasn't really engaged with. As I understand it, most of the people involved tended to be older, more radical and, perhaps justifiably, more cynical about the intentions of the white arts establishment than you'd see in a lot of similar social-media-led storms.

lol wait it was a WHITE ARTIST?

Okay no.

Tbf, he's a hugely respected theatre director who has a strong following across racial lines in his native South Africa. But yes, that was definitely a factor in the reaction / concern.

I dunno, I just think...not every story is yours to tell? It seems like a lot of...hubris? to think you are necessarily the right vehicle for something that problematic. Why not support someone else from within the marginalized community to tell their story instead.

That's kinda my take on Tim Wise, too, apart from the fact that he was so hateful on social media where it will never ever stop trailing him. It's not that you can't make one single "mistake" over a whole career of trying to do good. It's that if you hadn't positioned yourself as a highly paid expert, singularly in demand for this expertise, you could have raised up other people who had the same mission as you and who needed the support more, and then your actions would have spoken for you and you would have had a legacy of actually walking the walk instead of getting paid $$ for the talk.

A large part of what he does is geared towards empowering marginalised communities to tell their own stories, via public arts festivals, but that's always going to be an issue for any white South African engaged in discussion of post-colonial themes. On the one hand I can definitely appreciate why it codes as massively problematic, on the other, if major figures from the Xhosa and Zulu arts communities support him, and the performers view the work as important, I'm not in a position to second guess them.

The two hands you point to aren't on the same body. There's no reason to assume that the response of black Londoners to his work should mirror that of Xhosa or Zulu communities in South Africa.

No, there's definitely a distinction to be made between how it works in an African context and how it works in Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, etc, but the question was more around whether it should have been created by a white artist in the first place, I think, rather than a direct comment on how people should be reacting to it in different countries.

Don't really think it makes sense to view the two separately.

It's all too easy to elide different kinds of whiteness and how they function in different contexts and I don't think I truly understood this until I went to SA as an adult. Its not all that surprising that there's more room for a white artist to tell controversial black stories in South Africa, where its harder to marginalize black artistic expression, than there is in Western Europe where its easy. If the exhibit hadn't gone abroad this controversy would not exist and given the receptivity of black South Africans to his work it would seem pointless to question its validity regardless of whether or not the artist was white.

http://instagram.com/p/tVDGkALEfO/

never heard of the schmoney dance

It's all too easy to elide different kinds of whiteness and how they function in different contexts and I don't think I truly understood this until I went to SA as an adult. Its not all that surprising that there's more room for a white artist to tell controversial black stories in South Africa, where its harder to marginalize black artistic expression, than there is in Western Europe where its easy. If the exhibit hadn't gone abroad this controversy would not exist and given the receptivity of black South Africans to his work it would seem pointless to question its validity regardless of whether or not the artist was white.

― tsrobodo, Wednesday, September 24, 2014 12:34 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

different kinds of blackness too to be clear

schmoney dance officially over when the ryder cup guys are doing it

different kinds of blackness too to be clear

― everybody loves lana del raymond (s.clover), Wednesday, 24 September 2014 19:19 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah that's kinda what I was getting at with this,

"There's no reason to assume that the response of black Londoners to his work should mirror that of Xhosa or Zulu communities in South Africa.

Excerpt from Daisy Hernandez's memoir:

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/28/latina_at_the_white_male_new_york_times_%E2%80%9Cwhy_are_people_thinking_it%E2%80%99s_ok_to_say_racist_sh_t_in_front_of_me%E2%80%9D/

(h/t DJP)