rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2020/may/11/you-should-ask-china-trump-terminates-press-conference-after-clash-with-reporter-video

Donald Trump's press conference on coronavirus testing ended abruptly after a terse exchange with two female reporters. Asked by CBS's Weijia Jiang about his focus on international comparisons rather than US deaths, Trump snapped: 'Don’t ask me, ask China that question'. After being asked by Jiang, who is Asian-American, why he had directed the remark at her, Trump cut off the CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins as she asked a question and walked away from the podium

How can any of us truly know if the president has racism in his heart?

did we not update this last month when he accused Yamiche Alcindor of being "threatening"? because he was certainly racist then, as he is all the time, and I haven't even gotten into this new thing yet.

I watch the PBS NewsHour every night, and because it's the most boring, most level-headed news show on TV I rarely ever experience any sort of human emotion while watching it. But the night after that press briefing in the rose garden when he called Yamiche "threatening," when Judy Woodruff told her on-air that she's an excellent journalist and they're all really proud of her, and Yamiche took the compliment like a pro and was all "wow, thank you" and then kept going with her report and not showing signs of being choked up about it until about twenty seconds later when she pretty obviously started processing Judy's pretty sweet public acknowledgement of her professionalism and drive while being insulted by the fucking President, that a did a little thing to me. she's always kinda nervous and awkward in the way that any determined young reporter would/should be and I couldn't fucking believe it when Don went full-on asshole to her.

Yeah, he has racism in his heart. I can honestly say I have no doubt about it whatsoever.

Christ what a racist asshole

he has racism in his heart and in his asshole

But has he tested positive for racism? A lot of armchair doctors around here.

thread of what is racism and is donald trump a racist

Hmm. Wonder if we can work this one out before we hit 10,000 posts.

be nice. didn't they tell you do that at the last newspaper you worked at that you don't work at any more probably because they fired you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q7vxFSnILY

https://www.twincities.com/2020/06/18/citing-concern-for-indigenous-people-duluth-moving-to-drop-chief-from-city-job-titles/

When asked to explain the misgivings people have regarding the use of the term “chief,” Larson responded: “It is language that is offensive to people who are indigenous and actually offensive to a lot of people, especially when there is other language available.”

That’s, uh, well, I guess you have to start somewhere.

Similarly, we are removing potentially problematic words from our work (software development). So out go whitelist and blacklist.

But i wonder about 'master' when talking about source control. Is that from master/slave or from master as in the master copy of something and is that second related to the first or does it have a different etymology?

(we're changing it anyway, it's easy enough in github)

theres lots of problematic shit in computer/electronic lingo. master/slave, male/female to describe inserts/outlets

Answering my own question with a single Google search: https://www.etymonline.com/word/master

Same root, Latin magister meaning more than.

This'll be filler time material for Hannity or Carson, I'm sure.

Someone also linked to a Google pdf suggesting dropping phrases like 'sanity check'. I'd just be happy if the one guy in our team would stop calling things retarded.

when i did tech support i was instructed to call master/slave drives "primary drives" and "secondary drives"

https://i.imgur.com/K2uFc7Z.jpg

Customer access will function identically as before the changes, but look for the term "Journalytics" in place of "whitelist" and "Predatory Reports" in place of "blacklist."

journawhatics??

many bellyfeels itt

https://soundcloud.com/user-928786241/roddy-ricch-the-box-indian-version

A photo-realistic tattoo of a bowl of ramen and a bottle of Sapporo on a white guy—is this racist? My wife says yes, and I disagreed until I realized that my deep love of good ramen might be affecting my judgement

I think getting tattoos of things you love shouldn’t be racist even when appropriation is involved? I’m probably missing something too.

What if you really love soccer and bottle openers

lol

I mean, I've seen so many bad tattoos of Eminem on white shins, I'd really hate to see some of the Tupac ones.

OK, this one's pretty good.
https://i.imgur.com/9J1xtoC.jpg

Not sure if this is really Tupac, but survives the "ITR?" test.
https://i.imgur.com/0bHW56v.jpg

All right. Just gonna stop here before I go any deeper.
https://i.imgur.com/JJKd90Q.jpg

first tupac tat kinda looks like a lady til you get to the mustache.

https://bklyner.com/students-at-brooklyn-middle-school-sent-home-with-insensitive-problem

That's not only gross and insensitive but completely misunderstands what the 3/5 compromise was

or at least it's worded in a way that could leave you with the impression that black people got *some* representation through it, when in fact all it did was give southern whites disproportionate power, arguably worse for black people than if they had not been "counted" at all.

Question written by a black woman btw

it was certainly worse than if they had not been counted. their oppressors were "representing" them.

but yeah, not a good math problem.

xp hmm -- maybe written with a sense of irony then?

it was certainly worse than if they had not been counted. their oppressors were "representing" them.

Exactly. But it's true that this whole thing is often presented as "the racists thought Black people were only worth 3/5 of a white person" when in fact it was the racists who were arguing for pardon-the-expression "equality" here; if each Black person "counts" for representation but isn't allowed to vote, that is a huge boon to the white people "representing" the people they're oppressing

The problem was created by a mentor teacher – not affiliated with Achievement First–who modified the original problem about groceries to teach about the history and inhumanity of the three-fifths compromise.

lmao liberals trying to indoctrinate our children and teach them america is racist, and aren't they the ones telling us we need to "amplify" black voices ? but of course as soon as a black woman tells an uncomfortable truth about a fundamental historical fact (liberals aren't actually interested in history, just anti-white propaganda), it becomes "insensitive" and right on cue, the typical snowflake outrage. really tells you who the real racists are here.

— tucker carlson, probably

There is literally nothing wrong with this math problem aside from casting it as a hypothetical.

if this was your first introduction to the 3/5 compromise, then I'd say it is not an ideal vehicle for informing people about that history, but otherwise yeah

the thing is that all math problems are hypothetical. and they are almost always presented as trivial scenarios, precisely because the goal is to isolate a specific mathematical operation without the influence of personal bias or ethics. we hope to teach children to wrap their heads around a given concept before they go on to apply them in e.g. physics, psychology, or moral philosophy.

i think it goes without saying that when we teach kids about the history of slavery in the united states, it absolutely matters how the facts are presented, i.e. what information is emphasized and the broader ethical context that educators use to frame the circumstances and of course to link ugly historical truths to the present. the reason people find this insensitive is that the language of middle school mathematics is inherently incapable of performing these tasks.

It's a controversial question, certainly. It's also very clear on expressing the mathematical principle meant to be exercised. I do think changing it out of the blue without any context or tie into subject matter from a concurrent history class is weird but I also think the teacher changed it to provoke this exact conversation about the Constitution and how racism was embedded within the founding documentation of this country. I don't think the teacher was trying to put students in their place or hinder their learning and I have zero problem with issues from one academic discipline informing presentation of another, regardless of the age of the student.

I think you can call this clumsy overreach but I don't think there's any reasonable metric by which you can call it racist; was she lying about what was in the Constitution or how slaves were accounted for in calculating population figures for representation.

i could see how one might make the argument: "middle school history curricula already teach this subject but have seemingly failed to highlight its deeply dehumanizing aspect in a way that transposing it into a math problem has done"

but i think that ultimately the three-fifths compromise is an example of racist violence, an explicit acknowledgement and codification of chattel slavery, and as such needs to be treated with more tact and more nuance than a math problem like this can provide, regardless of whatever beneficial conversations about racism in american history this outrage might have provoked.

I guess, personally, I find it an incredibly callous question. I don't generally advocate for trigger warnings, but in this case... 'surprise! we're talking about historical dehumanization in a one-off math problem you're doing for homework during Covid-summer!' would be mega-upsetting for most of my students, irrespective of backgrounds/experience/racial identity. And I don't think it would be a constructive kind of upsetting that would lead to empathy. I can definitely see an argument for using the problem in a well-managed classroom as part of a larger, mediated discussion on race and historical trauma... or as a connection to interdisciplinary themes, when in-person processing is available. But sending this into the question-mark of home for kids who are already struggling with enormous psychological stress of 2020 is dicey. It strikes me as likely to activate stereotype threat through stress arousal, and especially for children who are doing good-ol' adolescent soul-searching regarding their own cultural/racial identities. Not sure they're perfect parallels, but I think I'd respond to with similar frustration to math problems about (say) alcohol abuse, the Holocaust, wage gap or the impact of broken land treaties by the US government.

otm

^

I agree it's a callous question, intentionally so. I also agree that this would have made a lot more sense as part of an interdisciplinary package of materials rather than one teacher slinging truth bombs.

I don't think it's racist to point out how shitty this country is on race.