Rolling Race 2021

I think code-switching is an extremely valuable skill to have and also something virtually everybody does. Thanks to racism, it’s marginalized when non-white people do it.

something virtually everybody does

Seriously. The idea that it's something only black people do is absurd. Anyone who's ever consciously stopped themselves from saying "fuck" in front of their boss, raise your hand.

Totally. Everyone does it! And also, AVE is a language with internal rules and consistency and it follows forms that other languages also have! That's really exciting info, right in the teeth of ppl who say it's bad or wrong SAE.

I read a fascinating essay on the grammatical and syntactical structures, covering some of the same ground as that video and more besides, not long ago; can't remember where, or I'd post a link.

codeswitching is something i've always linked to intersectionality in something that everybody does. & for interrelated reasons.
Nobody is monolithic, let alone artifical groups of people. YOu have people you have to be more formal with and people you can be far less formal with to look at this in its simplest form.
You also have people you have shared more past experience with so you can feel likeyou can let your hair down and mask slip with. Or don't need to try to conform to a supposedly given norm with. & others you feel far more vulnerable with and therefore want to be much more guarded around.
I thought that was human nature.
There just seems to be more pressure on black people and other minorities to be more guarded. I think there's less understood forgiveness or something. Wonder if there will be a point when that is not going to apply. Would make society a better place if there was l;ess of taht tension. & less hoops to jump through.

OTMing the last DJP/unperson/in orbit. Plus, a lot of the people who bitch about AAE use lots of it on a regular basis, whether they're conscious of it or not.

I teach classes at work and I do not care how people speak in my class if it makes them comfortable - it makes for a more comfortable training environment. I tend to use very relaxed speech too.

I always find it ironic that the people who bitch the most about AAE and/or "broken" English (hate that term) are usually poor speakers themselves.

Here's a friend of mine who has made a career out of studying the linguistics of AAVE with a 30-minute video she recorded for DuoLingo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5xzlGHqv7w

omg opening tab for later!

I read a review of a book looking into the way languages are spoken within a family if more than one language is spoken i the home. Which was talking about different family members speaking different languages with different other family members. Like the relationship between family members including which language they felt comfortable speaking to each other. Father to daughter being different to mother to son and possibly different again with the interaction between the different configurations of that grouping.
Would like to know more about that. Presumably differs with each family and will have some historic reasoning behind it within the family.

I can remember hearing my dad talk 3 different languages within the space of a sentence. So wish i had that fluency. He had a tribal language, a lingua franca for the country or presumably group of countries and teh colonial language he grew up being taught. I think Luo the tribal language must sound different enough to Swahili which is very arabic influenced. & the other language was English. THink he may have had fluent French on top of that, wouldn't be surprised if that didn't stretch to at least a smattering of Spanish too.

that pbs video was good indeed, thanks

Nobody talking about the discovery of Indigenous children's remains in residential schools in Canada? Hope this does remain a conscious thing for people. I was mainly aware of Canadians as having a stereotype of being squeaky clean nice progressives until last year.
Then was hearing a lot about racism there from people on webinars who were based there both indigenous and black populations had long standing history of it.
That the |Green book needed to include entries on parts of Canada and there had been a lot of violence against indigenous. as well as attempts to have indigenous children fostered out to white families so they lost contact with their traditions etc which was an intentional policy in the 1960s

Residential schools in AK were the same; most rural villages are still suffering badly from the legacy of trauma and abuse and having whole generations deliberately cut off from their native language and cultural traditions.

Stevolende, there's some talk on the Canadian politics thread.

Genocide was enshrined into the very purpose of the Residential Schools of Canada pic.twitter.com/H9qdEzErUq

— The Serfs (@theserfstv) June 24, 2021

To make the connection even clearer, the line famously used by the founder of one of the first residential schools was "Kill the Indian and save the man."

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/08/entertainment/blackfishing-explainer-trnd/index.html

I'm mostly posting this because of how hard the picture of Iggy Thee Stallion made me laugh

yikes

Is this a New Jersey

I keep thinking about how Usher gave us Justin Bieber and T.I. gave us Iggy Azalea and it makes me shake my fist southward and shout "ATLANTA YOU WRONG FOR THIS"

Who Could Have Predicted: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/07/11/nation/tennessee-teacher-taught-ta-nehisi-coates-essay-poem-about-white-privilege-he-was-fired-it/

Besides “everyone”, I assume?

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/who-actually-gets-to-create-black-pop-culture

that piece is staggering imo

map do you like this is revolution podcast

i will check it out!

i think it is the episode from a couple days ago that talks about the cosby show, look on youtube. was listening to it this weekend and didn't finish because their episodes are lonnggggg but i think you would like it.

super interesting, thanks for that map

(I am bad at podcast listening but will have a look at that one)

There's a ton of Black pop culture made by people from poor backgrounds. Entire bookstore sections' worth of romance and crime novels written by and for poor Black people. But Bertrand Cooper doesn't read them, nor do the white people he's lecturing in his piece. So that just gets completely overlooked.

The piece might benefit from more clearly establishing that he's talking about the kinds of esteemed cultural products (HBO series, elite magazine gigs, Oscar winners, etc.) that cross over to widespread success and are therefore taken as a sign of a culture industry successfully "diversifying." I'm not convinced ignoring historically disregarded/disparaged art like romance novels means he's overlooking something crucial here

Then the piece is just another part of the circle-jerking elite cultural ecosystem it purports to criticize. He’s basically a Black J.D. Vance, the way he talks about his upbringing in a way perfectly calibrated to thrill and terrify the Helen Lovejoys in the audience.

cool

Entire bookstore sections' worth of romance and crime novels written by and for poor Black people.

wrt crime novels there's a history of these authors dying poor and getting screwed by their white-owned publishers as well

also correct me if i'm wrong but black crime fiction, afaik, only truly shaped pop culture as we know it through its repeated reference in rap music (which, black music is deliberately excluded from this essay for probably obvious reasons)

Thought this might be interesting but gave up on it after a while cos I just found it annoying

Jul

26
'More Than One Way to Burn a Book'
by Free Speech Champions
107 followers
Free
Actions and Detail Panel

Event Information
A live, online, interactive event with Lionel Shriver, Tomiwa Owolade and Inaya Folarin Iman on contemporary censoriousness in literature.
About this event

‘More than one way to burn a book’: literary censorship in the 21st century

Online Drop-In Event: Monday 26th July 7-8.30pm (BST)

Speakers: Lionel Shriver and Tomiwa Owolade

Host: Inaya Folarin Iman

News this month that a school in Edinburgh is to cease teaching Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, on the grounds of its ‘white saviour narrative’, should make us ask, was Ray Bradbury right when he said, five decades ago, that “there is more than one way to burn a book, and the world is full of people running about with lit matches”?

While we may have moved on from the prudish attitudes towards sexuality and profanity which saw works like Lady Chatterley's Lover banned, it is worth pondering whether the old matches have been fully extinguished. Perhaps more overt, state censorship carried out by authoritarian regimes, such as Turkey, Hungary and Thailand, blinds us to the subtler ways in which censoriousness operates in publishing in the Anglosphere. This can manifest itself through accusations of cultural appropriation and stereotyping in the creation of characters on the page, or demands for ‘cancellation’ due to personal misdemeanours in the author’s own life.

We are delighted to be joined by two eminent speakers, the novelist and columnist Lionel Shriver and the writer and critic Tomiwa Owolade, to explore the differing threats from de jure, or legally imposed, censorship, and de facto censorship, perpetrated by individuals and private companies. We will consider whether our current cultural clashes shackle or stimulate the literary imagination and ask, is one person’s ‘censorship’ another person’s ‘sensitivity’?

Lionel Shriver: A prolific journalist with a fortnightly column in The Spectator, Lionel Shriver has written widely for the New York Times, the Guardian, the London Times, Prospect, the Financial Times, Harper’s Magazine, and many other publications. She has published the bestselling works of fiction The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, Big Brother, So Much for That, The Post-Birthday World, and the Orange-Prize winner We Need to Talk About Kevin (a 2011 feature film starring Tilda Swinton). Her most recent novel is Should We Stay or Should We Go (2021). Her work has been translated into over 30 languages.

Tomiwa Owolade: Tomiwa is a writer and critic who lives in London. His work has appeared in the Times, Spectator, Evening Standard, Unherd, Quillette and Literary Review, among other publications. He holds degrees in English Literature from Queen Mary, University of London and University College London, and has written extensively on books, politics and racial identity.

99% of authors in the history of publishing have gotten screwed by their publishers and/or died poor.

also correct me if i'm wrong but black crime fiction, afaik, only truly shaped pop culture as we know it through its repeated reference in rap music (which, black music is deliberately excluded from this essay for probably obvious reasons)

Well, who the "we" in the phrase "pop culture as we know it" is, is kind of the whole fucking point (and exactly what this writer is getting wrong). This is about who's reading what, and why. No, EL Griffin's Hood Love and Loyalty is never gonna be nominated for a National Book Award, but it's not because the author didn't go to the right college.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41E7JjKKjAL.jpg

99% of authors in the history of publishing have gotten screwed by their publishers and/or died poor.

oh man, didn't realize publishing was operating at such a loss

Thought this might be interesting but gave up on it after a while cos I just found it annoying

Interesting as what? As an example of hideous anti-woke right wing garbage?

oh man, didn't realize publishing was operating at such a loss

One Stephen King pays for a thousand writers whose books sink to the bottom of the ocean unread. Wait till you find out how many actual copies you need to sell to have a New York Times bestseller. (Triple digits will do it.)

sometimes i feel like On Here i've read a completely different article or post. or i read too fast, but i thought he was acknowledging the existence of content produced by people from poor backgrounds and pointing out how they don't get boosted because they are presumed to be unpalatable to white people, regardless of how popular they actually are, and the big media companies can still say they are doing diversity without offending anyone important.

actually delete the first sentence, i shouldn't apologize for how i read it

off topic but

John Oliver has a net worth of 30 million dollars. He could heal many wounds just with his own wealth, yet he chooses not to. It’s almost like he’s full of shit. https://t.co/QiRbLZedST

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) July 26, 2021

this guy has truly figured it out

Charles Murray, everybody!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E7QIxCNX0AQFpvV.png

excellent contributions itt keep it up

sometimes i feel like On Here i've read a completely different article or post. or i read too fast, but i thought he was acknowledging the existence of content produced by people from poor backgrounds and pointing out how they don't get boosted because they are presumed to be unpalatable to white people, regardless of how popular they actually are, and the big media companies can still say they are doing diversity without offending anyone important.

― criminally negligible (harbl), Monday, July 26, 2021 8:02 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

also, someone with basic reading comprehension skills would be able to tell that he is detailing his experience being the black-poorest with a double intent. yes it establishes his credentials, which is probably important considering the topic of the piece, but he also describes his experience in a way that strips it of the kind of romantic authenticity that others are capitalizing on. flattening that into the grotesquerie of "a Black JD Vance" is an impressive fart even for unperson.

i'm really curious / interested if any of the grant or application programs for minority creatives he describes will ever include a clearly defined "poor person" category.

anyway, by all means keep embedding charles murray tweets itt it is very interesting content

though what i would really be interested in is unperson telling us all why he hates poor people so much

unfortunately i was thinking about it some more while i was walking and the article would make no sense logically if the writer was unaware that there is content created by and for black people! like it kind of sounds like that's what he'd prefer to see more of.

anyway it's nice to see that expressed in the elite circle jerk culture ecosystem

ugh insert "poor" in that xpost

the article would make no sense logically if the writer was unaware that there is content created by and for (poor) black people! like it kind of sounds like that's what he'd prefer to see more of.

He came up with exactly one example — Moonlight, a movie with a budget of $1.5 million according to its director. If he really wanted to make the point that he wanted to see more content by poor Black creators, it would be a simple process of listing some books and saying "More like this, please." (Or allowing music to be part of the discussion.) But he's only concerned with what wins National Book Awards and what gets written up in the Atlantic.

The sentence "A decade of unprecedented interest in Black arts and letters has now passed—the greater portion of it bought with footage of people possessing Floyd’s particulars lying dead on the tar—and still you cannot walk into a bookstore to find a shelf named for Black authors raised in poverty." is absurd bullshit. First of all, the last time I went into a physical Barnes & Noble, there was no section for Black authors at all — their books were shelved alphabetically with everybody else's. But when there have been separate sections (and when I worked at Barnes & Noble 20+ years ago, there were), there's absolutely special consideration for "Black authors raised in poverty" — they call it "urban fiction," and it's books like the one I mentioned above, the kind of books this author has zero interest in promoting, by authors whose names he'll never bother to learn, because the readers of Current Affairs would never let such a thing stain their fingers, and he'd rather attack Colson Whitehead and Roxane Gay (whose name he misspells in the piece) for being rich. (I didn't know Gay came from money until reading this. It doesn't change my opinion of her work one way or the other. I used to know one of Whitehead's sisters, a little. She came to a reading I gave for my first book.)