Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
3/24/12
4/28/11
Donald Trump Delivers Pain And Rage (What A Racist Asshole!)
A perfect trouncing of Donald Trump's racism, with well-placed profanity. Thanks, Baratunde Thurston.
6/7/10
Roger Ebert On That Mural In Prescott, Arizona
How would I feel if I were a brown student at Miller Valley Elementary School in Prescott, Arizona? A mural was created to depict some of the actual students in the school.Go read the whole thing.
Let's say I was one of the lucky ones. The mural took shape, and as my face became recognizable, I took some kidding from my classmates and a smile from a pretty girl I liked.
My parents even came over one day to have a look and take some photos to e-mail to the family. The mural was shown on TV, and everybody could see that it was me.
Then a City Councilman named Steve Blair went on his local radio talk show and made some comments about the mural. I didn't hear him, but I can guess what he said. My dad says it's open season on brown people in this state. Anyway, for two months white people drove past in their cars and screamed angry words out the window before hurrying away. And the artists got back up on their scaffold and started making my face whiter.
4/23/10
Congratulations, Arizona!
The Governor of Arizona has signed the racist legislation. She is touting it right now!
Recruiting Those Who Have Killed
From Think Progress:
According to KOLD Channel 5 News in Arizona, local militiaman Bill Davis is recruiting “combat veterans, with kill records, to camp out and patrol” along the U.S.-Mexico border. “If it comes to when shots are fired in the general direction of these guys, they have my authorization to return fire, if they’re in defense of their life or their buddy next to them, return fire, stop it as fast as it starts, and they’re capable of it,” Davis told reporters. Despite a warning from Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada that the militia’s plan is “very dangerous” and “very risky,” Davis is pressing forward:
“If we think they’re carrying drugs, weapons, contraband, we’ll get out in front of ‘em and stop ‘em,” says Davis. “They won’t get past us. You can write into that what you want, short of shooting them.”
2/15/10
Charter Schools: The Racist Truth
Fred Klonsky:
...In an email report to his supporters Tilson praises the efforts of one of LA’s charter schools, Larchmont, and its founder Lindsay Sturman.
Says Tilson in his email:
Let’s be honest: we need a lot more well-off, well-educated white folks with a personal stake in both charter schools and education reform in general if we’re going to take reform to the next level, both politically and operationally.Paternalistic? Yep. Racist? To be sure. And really, what Tilson is saying is that what the world needs is more him.
Thanks. But no thanks.
12/20/09
Avatar: Racist?
A snippet from L,G and M:
But the racial essentialism of the film creates a whopper of an unintended thematic irony.* The planet and everything on it do not simply coexist in a harmonious balance of the New Age variety: they are hard-wired into a single neural network that makes the entire planet into a single entity and "the space people" less like a colonizing mercenary force than a disease. The humans are to be resisted not because they are economic imperialists (though they are) and not because they glory in militaristic combat (though they do) but because they are different. They do not belong to the planet and therefore there is no possibility for peaceful coexistence. The only way humans can be accepted is for them to forsake their humanity and become Na'vi. (Think literal assimilation.)Oy.
This is not a vision of a racially harmonious social politic: it is an inversion of the logic of passing that seems acceptable only because it imagines the experience of becoming a person of color as necessarily ennobling. The film argues that once a white person truly and deeply understands the non-white experience, he becomes an unstoppable combination of non-white primitivism and white rationalism which is exactly what happens. In order for the audience to support the transformation of Jake Sully into Braveheart Smurf, it must accept the essentialist assumptions that make such a combination possible ... and those assumptions are racist. In football terms, this is a variation of the black quarterback "problem."
11/22/09
The Bile Of East Texas, Past And Present
A sobering find and a warning: Obama is not JFK. Yet.
So as I thought about Congressman Gohmert, I decided that he is either a demagogue, a fool, or both. Of course, and to be clear, it would be indecent to ascribe to him the insanity of Congressman Baring's position. But here I suppose I am addressing the law of unintended consequences. If you with abandon promulgate such outlandish distortions of the truth, and feel it your duty to stoke the fires of our baser instincts to the point of hysteria over the utter destruction of the American system, do you bear responsibility when someone who ingests your bile responds violently?h/t Sully
As I thought about this, I came upon a coincidence...[the whole enchilada]
9/19/09
8/6/09
Facism: Jonah?
From futurist Sara Robinson comes this essay.
All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history's worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?Go read the whole piece. It's rather startling!
And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. "Wellll...we're on a bad road, and if we don't change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there's also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don't worry. As bad as this looks: no -- we are not there yet."
In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world's pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn't by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton's stages, we weren't there yet. There were certain signs -- one in particular -- we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren't seeing it.
And now we are...
8/4/09
I Am Not A Racist, I Am An American!
Some guy decided to follow me from one of those blog directory things that line the side of my blog and look like this: 
He claims he is not a racist, but rather, an American. His blog made me think about this picture:
When can we make it happen?
He claims he is not a racist, but rather, an American. His blog made me think about this picture:
When can we make it happen?
8/3/09
The New Obama Birth Certificate: Debunked Already?
Bloggers do important work.
Is This the Source of the Forged ‘Kenyan Birth Certificate?’
By David Weigel 8/3/09 7:34 PM
One of my friends in the small community of Obama “birther”-debunkers passes on quite the discovery: a 1964 “certified copy of registration of birth” from Australia, easily available on Bomford.net, a genealogy site. There are striking similarities between this document and the one Orly Taitz is passing off as a “Kenyan birth certificate” for Barack Obama.
- The design is identical, down to the seal at the top and the classifications (”Christian name,” etc) used for identifying the baby.
- The “registrar” on the Bomford document is G.F. Lavender. On the Taitz document, it’s E.F. Lavender.
- The “district registrar” on the Bomford document is J.H. Miller. On the Taitz document, it’s M.H. Miller.
- The number of the book is identical on both documents: Book 44B, Page 5733.
What’s more likely — that two Kenyan bureaucrats shared last names with two Australian bureaucrats, and that the numbers on both certificates were identical? Or that someone used this document, available online for anyone who wanted to look, to forge the Obama “certificate?”
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