rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

Crystal not criticized for doing 4 years of blackface at Saturday Night Live

Thought Crystal was the mononym of some pop si ger I wasn't acquainted with

Alluding to the controversy last fall when Eddie Murphy bowed out of Oscar hosting duties after the show's original producer Brett Ratner exited over his use of a gay slur, "max read" wrote: "lmao remember when you were all like "billy crystal is going to be so SAFE" and then he did BLACKFACE."

lmao

alleged

"max read"

maximum readability

Awwww

was just coming to c+p that

"When Octavia Spencer later won Best Supporting Actress for "The Help," comedian Paul Scheer tweeted that her win "shows just how far we've come since Billy Crystal performed in Blackface."

lollll

http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-traffic-stops-0226-20120223,0,793365,full.story

color me surprised

Blacks and Hispanics fared especially poorly when stopped for equipment-related violations. Among nearly 4,000 stops related to the display or use of license plates, for example, 13 percent of white motorists left with a citation, compared with 27 percent of black drivers and 36 percent of Hispanics.

For more than 2,600 stops involving improper taillights, black motorists were twice as likely and Hispanics nearly four times as likely to be ticketed, compared to white drivers.

ffs I broke my one sacred rule of never looking at the comments
it's really a life-enriching formula, don't follow my bad example in breaking it

Top Commenter · Norwich Technical High School

i'm not sure comments sections serve any real purpose beyond making halfway decent people feel a little miserable about fellow humans.

"Sharia Law will make us all equal soon enough."

what is the deal with people complaining about "Sharia law" infiltrating the U.S. court system - does Sharia law ever come up in court aside from like divorce cases??

can't say i really understand the mentality of seeking out racists

― illuminati girl (J0rdan S.), Saturday, February 18, 2012 7:44 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark

is this why you never talk to me on AIM

http://www.aics.org/images/aimaim.gif

I don't think I had every looked in detail to the AIM's logo before, but god forgive me the peace sign just says "bunny ears" to me.

― beachville, Tuesday, February 21, 2012 8:10 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark

i was thinking air-quotes

still lol @ i.Beat Blaxx

― Big Mr. Guess U.S.A. Champion (crüt), Wednesday, February 22, 2012 12:35 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark

same

what is the deal with people complaining about "Sharia law" infiltrating the U.S. court system

― Big Mr. Guess U.S.A. Champion (crüt), Tuesday, February 28, 2012 4:49 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah on the one hand i wonder this all the time. on the other hand i think it's standard oh-god-those-brown-people-breed-like-flies panic.

one thing thats sort of "comforting" about islamophobia/creeping sharia is that it seems to take on a pretty similar shape to anti-catholic/anti-immigrant crazes in the past. i mean its obv horrible but at least its sorta recognizable, and its past precedents point toward a decent future

i mean i could be talking out of my ass too and i dont want to undersell anti-islamic bigotry

http://muslimrepublicans.net/

MuslimRepublicans.net
Welcome to the home of Republican and Conservative Muslims all over the United States. Due to the onslaught of the liberal media, and often times our own communities, we have not been able to voice our opinions, communicate and share ideas. MuslimRepublicans.net aims to change all of that and provide a home for conservative Muslims who believe in the ideals of the Republican Party, are members of the Republican National Committee and want to work towards having more Republicans elected to office

yeah that is a good point. that pattern seems to historically have been overcome by assimilating immigrant groups into "whiteness" in part through recourse to the grand american tradition of antiblack racism. for various reasons i find it hard to imagine the various american muslim ethnicities being assimilated into whiteness, but i guess it could happen in some future where muslim fundamentalist terrorism is no longer the main foreign security threat the united states faces.

xp to max

I love how the crazy anti-sharia types mostly seem pissed because it's not the particular type of theocracy that they want to impose.

american muslim ethnicities already are assimilated into whiteness in some parts of the country. I think the bigger issues are:
a. there aren't really very many muslims in america
b. they're usually clustered in a few areas

or is it? lot of common ground amongst christian fundies and muslim fundies.

xp

they want almost the exact same set of rules but they want to be able to put their label on the box

american muslim ethnicities already are assimilated into whiteness in some parts of the country.

no. only true of some ethnicities: mostly arab and, you know, bosnian. has not happened for south indian muslims, african muslims, african-american muslims (non-immigrants of course) etc etc etc.

also for the purposes of talking about the current strain of anti-muslim sentiment, that muslim is racialized. it's not really about your bosnian neighbor who can pass.

also since 9/11 i'd imagine a lot of palestinian/lebanese/syrian muslims have been re-racialized. i know the yemeni community in buffalo never achieved whiteness to begin with. there are arabs and then there are arabs.

I tried to skim through this Islamophobic blog to see if they listed any actual examples of Sharia law being implemented in U.S. courts but nope all the stories that have to do with actual court cases are just "Court rules against conservative group lobbying against construction of a mosque in whatever community" or "Judge looks at/mentions Qu'ran during trial."

http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/

muslims exist! those people have a lot of babies!

have any people who aren't technically white achieved whiteness? that's kinda hard to measure. there are certainly 3rd generation asian-americans who are culturally 98% 'white', but has society accepted them as such? etc.

heh

i mean what does it mean to be 'technically' 'white'

well by 'technically white' I mean caucasian I guess, which includes arabs

obviously whitness here is a construct. when i say achieve whiteness in part through appeals to antiblack racism i'm talking about inclusion for irish americans, italian americans, later eastern european americans. nativist sentiment gives way to solidarity against the true threat, where blackness is imagined as irreducibly other. this is all imaginary of course; it's not like racism is coherent. or that being white means anything in this imagination other than not a threat.

well by 'technically white' I mean caucasian I guess, which includes arabs

― iatee, Tuesday, February 28, 2012 12:40 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

weeeeell it's not like those 19th century racial categorizations hold up rigorously

non-european immigrants end up unassimilable in that way, is basically what i'm saying

fyi there's no good youtube video of the Wayne Brady question from the Chapelle "Negrodamus" sketch

xposts

don't think asian americans are viewed by white people as white

they need more tumblrs

people from North India and Pakistan are Aryans (can't get more white than that, at least if you're Hitler). not that that makes much difference to yer average redneck.

Sharia vs. Santorum-approved theocracy seems like narcissism of small differences to me but sounds like total end of the world hysteria to our local zealots. "We're cool with the subjugation of women but God forbid they have to cover their hair, that's insanity!".

I don't think non-european immigrants end up unassimilable tho! every time I hang out at the queens mall I gawk in amazement at how people from every country in the world can turn into the same annoying american teenagers.

there is def a 'whiteness' and a 'white-ness' and maybe the first can eventually exist outside of the second, but I think it's simplifying things to say that, idk, some jewish or italian guy who could pass as a wasp due to the way he looks isn't different from someone who never, ever will be able to 'pass as a wasp'.

come on guys, whiteness in america means "absence of race." nobody gives a fuck that my kashmiri peasant relatives are "Aryan" according to some defunct wack racial typology

i do

i kinda miss the days when theocracy was anathema to American Catholics across the board ... b/c of the shit that JFK had to go through, plus a general sense of self-preservation (even now, this country is still largely Protestant and an American theocracy would most likely be a Protestant Evangelical one).

I don't think non-european immigrants end up unassimilable tho! every time I hang out at the queens mall I gawk in amazement at how people from every country in the world can turn into the same annoying american teenagers.

i don't mean unassimilated culturally! the swarthy hairy/hijab-ed yemenis on the corner are assimilated culturally! i mean assimilated as white. at some point cartoons of irish americans made them look like apes. eventually that stopped happening, because there were other people to caricature as apes.