Rolling 2016 Thread on Race

I mean I know "ok it's high school kids" but like I'm tryin to think of any situation where anybody at my high school woulda made a joke anywhere near in that ballpark and failing. and if they had, they'd have been missing a few teeth afterward.

"I ask ze black fraulein to the prom with KFC hat. She says ja. Ze racism is over."

Do people usually ask people they don't particularly know to the prom? I know it happens all the time in movies, but I assumed that wasn't really normal practice.

a defense for Euro-Blackface

ta for this

I can't see pictures of that german guy without thinking of the it's always sunny lethal weapon sequels

very guilty lols at always sunny's lethal weapon sequels

Do people usually ask people they don't particularly know to the prom?

Do you mean, do people go to prom with people they aren't dating? Yes, absolutely.

I don't know if we can say anything about how well these two know/don't know each other beyond "he knew her well enough to know he could call her 'dark meat' and give her a KFC crown and she'd still say yes"

Yeah I figured there was more personal detail to that part because although I would never rule out social pressure & bullying in that moment, that's not the kind of invitation I would probably say yes to? I say as someone who was asked out publicly during HS math class by a popular boy and said no because I was sure it was just an opportunity for humiliation.

Paul Mason grappling with white working-class underachievement, not entirely successfully:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/04/the-problem-for-poor-white-kids-is-that-a-part-of-their-culture-has-been-destroyed?CMP=share_btn_tw

Yeahhhhhh, not at his best there.

Alarm bells rang at the mention of the Catholicism and, having googled, yes he is a Catholic.

Yes, beyond questions of whether white working class culture was monolithic, defined by its relationship to work and destroyed completely by Thatcher rather than a range of broader factors, this seems odd:

But the headline grabber in the paper from the liberal thinktank CentreForum concerns ethnicity: the serial losers after 28 years of marketisation, testing, a centralised curriculum and decentralised control of schools are poor white kids.

“During the early years, white British pupils are among the highest achievers,” say the authors. “By the end of secondary school however, those white British pupils are overtaken by 10 other ethnic groups to just below average, when compared with other ethnicities.”

Let’s confront squarely what this means. If the country is populated with low-achieving, inarticulate white kids it is something that happens between the year they stop being toddlers and the year they start being Neets (Not in Education, Employment or Training).

You would expect white British kids whose parents are both native English speakers to do well in comparison to others in early years education. You would expect other kids to catch up. You would also expect the default population of the UK to be around the average (in this case, marginally below) unless you are Michael Gove and committed to making every school "above the average". It doesn't show that the country is populated by low-achieving, inarticulate white kids (measuring against benchmarks and not other ethnicities is the important thing) and it doesn't show that they end up failing to capitalise on better early potential, just that most people who start with a disadvantage more or less catch up. Native English speakers perform better at GCSE and more broadly, the margins are extremely tight afaict - a couple of percentage points either way in most cases. It's a strange lens to view education problems through, though that is not Mason's fault.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/04/04/do-blacks-feel-less-pain-than-whites-their-doctors-may-think-so/

This reminds me of when someone on here brought up midwesterners who thought Jewish people grew horns.

I don't understand how someone could think that when there are so many more redheaded white people than redheaded black people.

xp: this bullshit has directly impacted my wife

Fuck, that sucks DJP.

I should try harder to curb my flippant behavior in this thread in real life.

Chait is pithy:

No community in the United States is more aware of the power of its enemies than African-Americans.

But overall comes across as a dick, as usual

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/pragmatic-tradition-of-black-voters.html

Actually until you get to the last paragraph where he takes an equally pithy massive shit on white Bernie supporters performing as if they won't vote for Hillary. I enjoyed that a lot.

https://sports.yahoo.com/news/bomani-jones-makes-statement-indians-085500948.html

holy shit at the WaPo idiot-doctors piece

"Some are saying a part of town labeled “Pflugerville Colored Addition” on city maps should not be changed, while others are calling to remove an offensive label that relates to a time of racial inequality."

http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/conflicting-opinions-on-pflugerville-colored-addit/nq3tJ/

This is the same problem/issue with pulling the family crest of the slaveholders who founded Harvard Law School off of the school's shield; it's a symbol of some of the more terrible parts of our history but our goal in removing them seems to be so that we can pretend that they never happened.

hey Dan what's your take on DeBlasio and Hillary's CPTime skit?

I'm pretty sure we've talked about these things before, and while I agree with you on the Harvard Law School crest I respectfully disagree in this case. I think names like this and White Settlement (a town outside of Fort Worth) are more divisive than symbols. Its not like they'll be erased from history; maps will still show those places listed by their old names up until the change. I also think it's a false comparison to the Harvard crest. That is more like the Minnesota Seal, not a town name or official neighborhood designation. Names have a different power.

xpost

Though White Settlement will never change its name. The residents voted a few years ago to keep it by some resounding number like 2000 to 100.

it took until 2002 for Frisco, TX to lengthen their mascot name to "raccoons" despite protests that the shortened version of the name was, pretty obviously, inappropriate to be written all over water towers, signs, t-shirts, etc.

not that it needed to be said but texas is the worst

hey Dan what's your take on DeBlasio and Hillary's CPTime skit?

I think people need to calm the fuck down, basically. It was a terrible joke but terrible in a way that made me giggle a lot, and not particularly malicious especially given who DeBlasio is, who his wife is, and who his children are.

I'm pretty sure we've talked about these things before, and while I agree with you on the Harvard Law School crest I respectfully disagree in this case. I think names like this and White Settlement (a town outside of Fort Worth) are more divisive than symbols. Its not like they'll be erased from history; maps will still show those places listed by their old names up until the change. I also think it's a false comparison to the Harvard crest. That is more like the Minnesota Seal, not a town name or official neighborhood designation. Names have a different power.

I think you aren't grasping how tightly coupled the Harvard shields are to their respective schools/undergrad houses; they are literal pictoral signifiers that represent entities that make up the University and are ubiquitous across campus in practically every context you can think of. You're not going to see the Minnesota state seal very many places outside of the Capitol Building in St. Paul as you travel around Minnesota; you're going to see the Harvard Law School shield not only all over the law school campus, but on every single piece of university correspondence that references the law school, from posters for events happening there to leaflets/brochures talking about programs/lectures/extracurricular events happening there to official correspondence originating from there and sometimes, from the global university level, correspondence that mentions the law school in passing. Right now, at my cubicle, I have a coffee mug that my wife received as part of a campus green initiative that looks like this:

https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1636/26348507041_f39ed51467_k.jpg

The ENTIRE student body, faculty and administrative staff of Harvard Law School received at least one of these. The iconography is literally everywhere.

To carry the analogy further, if you're getting swag from Minnesota, it is most likely to have one of the following pieces of iconography on it:

- An outline of the state's shape;
- A loon;
- A sports team logo;
- Some representation of lakes
- A mosquito

No one is selling tons and tons of Minnesota merchandise with the state seal on it.

By contrast, it is difficult to find swag for Harvard Law School that has some form of iconography on it that doesn't feature the shield. The shield and the name are interchangeable, particularly in the University community.

(I do think, ultimately, that the decision is one that needs to be made by the people living there; if they don't want to change the name, I don't think you can force them to do it. Also, if the shittily-named white town gets to keep its problematic name, why shouldn't the shittily-named non-white town get to keep ITS name?)

I am within 10 feet of four objects with that seal on them, and I am not the most gung ho of alum.

thank god someone else posted, I was beginning to feel incredibly overbearing

The Harvard Law School crest is ubiquitous in a closed system of several thousands of people. It also isn't offensive to view without knowing the history of the family whose crest was adapted. I wouldn't have a clue without knowing you.

The Minnesota seal may not be on much swag, but I bet millions see it several times a year on paperwork and on the web. It's also questionable - at least it raises an eyebrow - even in its most sanitized current form.

But it's the understanding of it that matters. A name can be grasped without the information needed to understand the history behind the Harvard Law School emblem. That's why Colored Addition or White Settlement are different to me.

I also think it reaches a point where local desires are trumped by cultural change. Whether you think that's good or bad is another thing. I'm glad my high school removed the Native American mascot. They kept the name Raiders but decoupled it from any Native imagery. People were pissed for a while but figured out pretty quickly it was for the better. I think the Redskins and Indians need to move on too, despite local support.

The reason someone wants to hold onto a name is also important. "We should keep this name so that people remember what happened here" is palpably different from "I've always rooted for that team name and I don't like change. Eliding the reasons given in the article for keeping Colored Addition (which btw is a terrible name) with the presumed reasons for keeping White Settlement doesn't seem particularly fair.

tbh cracking up at your list of Minnesota signifiers, including the state bird (not the loon)

Harriet Tubman to your wallet

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/04/20/report-tubman-replacing-jackson-on-20.html

nice choice of picture, daily beast

Yeah, couldn't they have picked a shot where she was smiling? Jeez, what a bummer!

not quite what I meant

Speaking of racial insensitivity, introducing the Bob Marley Snapchat filter!

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/20/snapchat-and-kylie-jenner-in-hot-water-over-blackface-filter

please tell me this is another ridiculous cash-in licensing deal with the marley estate

omg according to Snapchat, it is

after seeing the recent offerings from the Marley Beverage Company at the store, I had no doubt

Even ClickHole is getting in on the act:

https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13055420_1703145313259061_1465614224259570121_n.jpg

Twenties are for buying drugs - please leave the nasty old white guy on them!

What, they should put her on the dollar coin so commuters can use them for underground railroad tokens?

imo Franklin's portrait on the hundred looks most stoned

Jackson looks too sympathetic on the twenty, he was a harsh sumbitch

given the nationwide gouging of urban transit, we'd need to carry a bag of Tubman dollars pretty soon. xp

i am told jumping the turnstiles is the correct way to do it