Rolling 2018 Thread on Race

I feel dumber every moment I hear about this story, and never need to hear coworkers talk about it again, but here we go

1. Guy holds up stupid sign with his venmo address asking for beer money for busch light at state's largest college football event
2. Fans send him ridiculous amount of money
3. He vows to send money to a children's hospital, beer company says they'll match it and send him a bunch of beer. Dumb ploy makes good for everyone, ok so far
4. Local paper reporter decides to check out guy before publishing another article, finds idiot racist teenage tweets
5. Paper reaches out to guy saying they found this, deciding what to do with it
6. Guy preemptively tells everyone he was an idiot teen, is no longer idiot teen
7. Paper writes round-up on all that has happened, tries to make clear they were preempted
7a. College football fans go nuts trying to figure out how to cancel their nonexistent newspaper subscriptions
8. Beer company still going to donate money, not going to give guy free beer
8a. Some fans with poor reading comprehension think beer company is not giving money to hospital, vow to never drink their beer again
9. Reporter who initially found racist tweets investigated by roving mob of online college football fans, racist tweets found
9a. Fans attempt to destroy reporter in addition to paper, salt earth

I have not worked from the office today and have heard nothing more

xp yeah, everything resolved relatively ok, other than the college football fans who are trying to figure out where to aim the torches and pitchforks still roaming around. apparently the reporter is fired now?

the governor was/is proclaiming a state day after the beer donation guy, but I'm unsure whether it was before or after the racist tweet debacle. I'm assuming after, because the governor is an idiot

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/from-the-editor/2019/09/26/carson-king-tweet-editor-response-investigation-iowa-childrens-hospital-donations/3780741002/

I'm hoping this dies, but I'm also wondering if the beer guy's going to be outed as the son of a racist cop

you get a milkshake duck! and you get a milkshake duck! everybody gets a milkshake duck!

everybody IS a milkshake duck inside a larger, slightly more racist milkshake duck

it's completely wild to me that companies, like newspapers, let reporters use their existing twitter accounts (and get them verified) when they become reporters

and also amazing that people would want their twitter presence, including all existing tweets, linked to their employer in that way

I KNOW RIGHT

I say absolutely NOTHING about my job on Twitter and am prepared to nuke the entire account if I ever become famous and I haven't really said all that much that's controversial

xxp to djp, see now THAT i would truth bomb!

lol this reminds me of my friend who is very good at many things but was very naive about social profile in the past. his idea was that he has no real regrets portraying any part of his life to the world, nbd

so he was a little confused when a friend asked him to remove pictures of her at a party at his place, or at least remove her name, but came around to it. the final nail in the coffin was probably when he absent-mindedly posted a picture of his new drivers license because the picture was funny, and forgot to obscure details. you've heard of identity theft? that's how you get identity theft.

I did say naive, right? going to stick with that out of kindness

looooooooool

The longevity of these accounts is fascinating. There have been enough times where I dive into someone's Facebook photos and then scamper right back out as soon as the sixth-grade church camp photos appear.

Not saying I'm without a little guilt: Beeps has already gotten on to me after she found kid photos of her on my Instagram. But Beeps! I said, that account is locked and private!

Good thing she hasn't found this place yet.

Anyway. Good thing this is an Iowa newspaper. Otherwise, we'd be waiting on "This just in... Newspaper endorsed Dred Scott decision..."

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/08/half-of-wisconsins-black-neighborhoods-are-jails/495152/

Sharing this info on the Young, Gifted, and Black Coalition’s blog, Blank explains that he used the Racial Dot Map to identify where predominantly black neighborhoods—defined as “a certain area where the majority of residents are African Americans”—are located throughout the state. There are 56 of them, 31 of which are either jails or prisons. There are 15 cities where the only black neighborhood is a jail. The city of Winnebago claims it has an African-American population of more than 19 percent, but most, if not all, of that black population is located among one of four correctional facilities there. It’s perhaps no wonder that Wisconsin perennially comes up as the worst place for African Americans to live in the country.

old but, man

oh god

brad pitt jamaican king pic.twitter.com/dnOf9fw0f2

— florence niggh (@ohfIux) December 8, 2019

lol wtf is that from

meet joe black, whose title was apparently more literal than i realised at the time of its realise

I'm wiping away tears at my cubicle from stifling laughter

Brings back memories:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwDgA9LUVMA

https://hyperallergic.com/533465/mellon-foundation-pulls-1-5m-grant-after-unc-settles-with-neo-confederate-group

Kind of glad I never did get around to grad school as UNC Chapel Hill would have been my first choice for what I wanted to study

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/19/us/wyoming-students-white-robes-and-hood/index.html

hmm

I know they don't actually speak about the punishment for these kids but I kind of hope the school district burned crosses on their lawns and tried to burn down their homes.

When I was a freshman in high school in Illinois in 1993, some seniors started a "KKK" group and the response was also pretty much: "They did not have an understanding of the impact that would create but they do now."

#itsokaytobewhite is trending on Twitter

The posts I've seen fall under the following categories:

• "makes sense that 2019 would end like this"
• "who is Tobe White?"
• this prime galaxy brain example:

We all bleed the same blood
Breathe the same air
A race is not inherently bad its the personalities that just so happen to be a certain race
Stop fighting and start uniting, we are all human so stop being hateful#itsoktobewhite

— 𝕾𝖙𝖆𝖗𝖑𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙 ( D̷̝̅a̸͇͆̇r̸̗̿̕k̷̼̊̍) (@StarGirlAlways) December 31, 2019

A race is not inherently bad its the personalities that just so happen to be a certain race

I'm gonna just stare at this for the rest of the day

a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their personalities that just so happen to be a certain race

"Here where it says 'Race,' do you want the one for me or for my personality?

"Because they're exactly the same, hence why I asked that with a big ol' smirk."

"My personality? Well, close friends describe me as 'white'. *giggles*"

I keep subbing “it’s ok to be white” into the lyrics for that song from the tv show Arrested Development, “it’s not easy being white,” in my mind

should not be this funny

https://youtu.be/xvgCvT9xX7A

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/02/the-unwelcome-revival-of-race-science

The recent revival of ideas about race and IQ began with a seemingly benign scientific observation. In 2005, Steven Pinker, one of the world’s most prominent evolutionary psychologists, began promoting the view that Ashkenazi Jews are innately particularly intelligent – first in a lecture to a Jewish studies institute, then in a lengthy article in the liberal American magazine The New Republic the following year. This claim has long been the smiling face of race science; if it is true that Jews are naturally more intelligent, then it’s only logical to say that others are naturally less so.

I’m surprised the piece doesn’t acknowledge the hideous flipside of that argument, which is a favourite of Neo-Nazis.

This is an important point imho, as we'll certainly be seeing even more of this bullshit in the coming years:

One of the reasons scientific racism hasn’t gone away is that the public hears more about the racism than it does about the science. This has left an opening for people such as Murray and Wade, in conjunction with their media boosters, to hold themselves up as humble defenders of rational enquiry. With so much focus on their apparent bias, we’ve done too little to discuss the science.

Yeah, can’t wait for the academic approach, that’ll definitely solve the racism when you’ve got some white nationalist on one side of the reasonable debate about which races are less worthy than others making diluted versions of their actual points while achieving the main goal of getting the points into the mainstream.

He says it's '[o]ne of the reasons'. I take your point, but why shouldn't the academic community leverage its specific know-how in the fight against racism? Similarly, while you don't neutralize climate change denialism via scientific arguments alone, it would be wrong to say it doesn't help.

My issue is about platforming the denialists/race scientists/flat earthers. Just by having them in the room, it legitimises the viewpoint. They’re not cranks too extreme for tv anymore if they’re on Question Time being allowed to sound reasonable. Any converts are a win.

You could promote scientific anti-racist views and debunk junk science without giving the racists a platform though.

I'm with you on that. But since these cretins are already getting platformed, especially online and doubly so in the US thanks to its insane free speech laws, some amount of education is in order. I see the IQ argument bandied about all too often by just sayin' types, and it does help to have clear and irrefutable material to shut them down, even if it only sways some of the onlookers.

xp

They're being given jobs in the British goverment, I call that pretty mainstream.

These ideas have already been "platformed." They don't go away if you ignore them, they just fester in the minds of the New Republic-reading crossaint munchers who will deep down feel justified in the racist views that they know better than to share with anyone. And you don't have to set up an NPR-style debate between an anti-racist and a racist in order to refute them scientifically.

so pathetic and sad that new republic played a vital role in publicizing this stuff in the 90s (1994, Murray and the Bell Curve) AND 00s (pinker's article in 2006)

True, but facts didn’t work against Brexit, Trump, Modi or Bolsanaro, so why should they work here?

Depends what you mean by 'didn't work'. Facts sure as fuck didn't save us, no, but would dismissing them altogether have been a winning move? I seriously doubt it.

These ideas are old as colonialism. They just come with better infographics and a longer list of citations. And also, the whole dealio of IQ/IQ testing is racist, sexist, classist, and meritocratic at its essence, and it's been widely validated for a hundred years by the very people who benefit the most from a racist, sexist, classist, and meritocratic system. Read: white Western academics and internet autodidacts. Since the overall premise of intelligence is built on sand, it's only useful as 'science' to uphold conservative power structures. There's no point in engaging with them as valid argument.

The point is the people invested in making this a mainstream belief aren’t going to be arguing it on the facts; how could they? They’re not on their side. It’ll be another emotive argument and the facts will never be objective enough for any concession.

by foregrounding it, it puts focus on "innate intelligence" as a specific criterion of human value, whereas, I would like to assume, that as non-sociopaths, we value all humans equally because they are humans, regardless of whether they are born smart, born average, or have intellectual disabilities.

(not the most important point maybe in this discussion, but i suspect the current new republic has shed a LOT of that layer of readership -- it's a very different animal than the rag that marty peretz ran)

(also -- less important still obviously -- but "croissant munching"? come on dude)

who munches croissants ffs? It is not a particularly "munchable" food.

take it to my only good thread i guess: "croissant-munching, latte-sipping": instances of misconceived media-class self-loathing ITT

I definitely agree with you on the speciousness of innate intelligence, sarahell. And (only because it's part of substance of this argument) I might challenge you on the idea that some humans are born 'smart, average, or with learning disabilities,' because I'm not sure that there's even science to back up the idea of those characteristics as plottable on a continuum. I think we've all got some areas of smarts, some idiocies, and some learning disabilities –– whether recognized or not.

I might challenge you on the idea that some humans are born 'smart, average, or with learning disabilities,' because I'm not sure that there's even science to back up the idea of those characteristics as plottable on a continuum. I think we've all got some areas of smarts, some idiocies, and some learning disabilities –– whether recognized or not.

It would not be much of a challenge ... that aspect is also problematic!