Rolling 2015 Thread on Race

have at it

Yahoo News produces possibly the most vile comment thread in America. What the Yahoo News people present for the consideration of their discerning readership has become more and more interesting. I don't know if they do this because they have a conscience, or if they know it will result in their creepy commenting readership blowing a spleen and filling the screens, or both. Anyway, far more thoughtfully provocative than the average clickbait:

http://news.yahoo.com/terror-attack-america-week-why-wasnt-news-193453101.html

Those people commenting are apologists for terror, straight up. Personally I don't understand why those comments aren't deleted; Yahoo is a business, what is business-friendly about a bunch of racists making excuses for a bombing?

Beats me, but apparently people don't blame the company. It's far beyond not-deleting-hateful-comments level. I've seen stories where sensible comments were "voted down" by overwhelming reader response (say in the Trayvon shooting stories), meaning I had to click on those comments just to read them!

An online article recently reviewed Italian pizza places in my town (Århus). In Denmark a lot of pizzerias are run by immigrants from Turkey and Iran, and they've developed a style of pizza that's very popular and at the same time quite different from traditional Italian pizza - a story similar to that of American pizza, I imagine.

Anyway, the article inspired a racist comment on how "arabs have destroyed pizza", which made me consider racist/classist aspects in claims about "original"/"pure"/"golden age" etc. pizza.

I wrote a friend about it but he dismissed the point since "Italian" pizza is just better. I tried to come up with a lot of examples of a dominant cultural class (in Denmark at least, the preference for "real" Italian pizza is very much a trait of the cultural upper class) interpreting expressions of marginalized classes (in this case Turkish pizza) as failed simulations - but couldn't think of any. Can anyone help me out? I know it's a fairly common thing, typical of racism, orientalism, classism, sexism etc. would just like some examples since I seem to have forgotten them.

Makes me think of the preference for 'authentic' ethnic food by YELPers

It's fairly common with food. More broadly, the 'nautical' / 'polo' themes of African-American style, Russian 'luxe' style or 'Essex' style in the UK are frequently seen as failed simulations of the upper-classes, i guess.

oopsy daisy

http://jezebel.com/benedict-cumberbatch-im-an-idiot-for-referring-to-colo-1682006130

My grandma was still saying "colored" in New Jersey in the '70s, but y'know, she was born in 1901.

It's not uncommon w/ British people from a certain class background ime. The vocabulary of contemporary racial discourse doesn't reach everyone.

Isn't POC still used a lot? I seen it in some thinkpieces about race recently and didn't realise at first that it meant people of color.

PoC is the default term and is different from 'colored people'

It's fairly common with food. More broadly, the 'nautical' / 'polo' themes of African-American style, Russian 'luxe' style or 'Essex' style in the UK are frequently seen as failed simulations of the upper-classes, i guess.

― Wristy Hurlington (ShariVari), Thursday, 22 January 2015 13:07 (6 days ago)

my €2000 diamante encrusted denis simachev velour tracksuit is more of a tribute to theydon bois normcore than anything else

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored

In 1995 the multi platinum trio dc Talk redefined the word with the hit single Colored People from the double platinum album Jesus Freak (album). Lyrically the song is about how we are all colored people. Red, yellow, black or white.

what no purple people

omfg

I just what the hell where do you even begin with that

We're talking about suuuper sanitized, whiten-ized Christian "rap" here so...where do you begin with any of it, really.

hmm they're on Spotify and IIRC I've never knowingly heard them

... do I dare? Is this the hill upon which I liveblog my demise?

oh my god djp, you have to watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6YnCKsYXEM

In 2002, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music called DC Talk "the most popular overtly Christian act of all time."[1]

I...may have been to a live performance. Perhaps they opened for Amy Grant? That seems like it might have happened at some point in the early '90s.

surprised you've never heard of them, they've been around forever, were reviewed in SPIN in the 90s iirc etc

xp I saw them open for Michael W. Smith in like 1991 or thereabouts.

btw quality link crut

An online article recently reviewed Italian pizza places in my town (Århus). In Denmark a lot of pizzerias are run by immigrants from Turkey and Iran, and they've developed a style of pizza that's very popular and at the same time quite different from traditional Italian pizza - a story similar to that of American pizza, I imagine.

Anyway, the article inspired a racist comment on how "arabs have destroyed pizza", which made me consider racist/classist aspects in claims about "original"/"pure"/"golden age" etc. pizza.

I wrote a friend about it but he dismissed the point since "Italian" pizza is just better. I tried to come up with a lot of examples of a dominant cultural class (in Denmark at least, the preference for "real" Italian pizza is very much a trait of the cultural upper class) interpreting expressions of marginalized classes (in this case Turkish pizza) as failed simulations - but couldn't think of any. Can anyone help me out? I know it's a fairly common thing, typical of racism, orientalism, classism, sexism etc. would just like some examples since I seem to have forgotten them.

― niels, Thursday, January 22, 2015 7:47 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, there is something to be said for a food having a long tradition behind it, I don't see it so much about "authenticity" as about a craft well-honed over generations. That said, no reason Turkish people can't come up with their own delicious and fantastic variation on pizza, and the world has enough room for both.

FWIW all the pizza places in my college town were run by Lebanese people for some reason, and they were almost all terrible. I mean, ultimately the primary reason they were terrible is that the business model was "sell cheap pizza made with crap ingredients to drunk college students." But IME even the cheap Italian-run pizza places in the state were usually better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3_MfDYVKlg

Take a pinch of white man
Wrap him up in black skin
Add a touch of blue blood
And a little bitty bit of red Indian boy
Oh like a Curly Latin kinkies
Oh Lordy, Lordy, mixed with yellow Chinkees, yeah
You know you lump it all together
And you got a recipe for a get along scene
Oh what a beautiful dream
If it could only come true, you know, you know

What we need is a great big melting pot
Big enough enough enough to take
The world and all its got And keep it stirring for a hundred years or more
And turn out coffee coloured people by the score

1970, #3 UK hit, big with the kids

I have heard of them and have always run screaming the other direction when they've come up

Listening now, they are way more pleasant to listen to than I could have possibly imagined; like this is much easier to deal with than 80% of current pop/indie that I've tried to listen to

Of course as I was typing that the cod-reggae section of "In The Light" started and I want to peel the skin off of my face but I kinda was into "Jesus Freak"

They're ringing memory bells for me from my pre-teen/teenage days - I wonder in what context I would have been familiar with them from back then

Oh no no no "Jesus Freak" is like an actual song. You have to think more like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIFW5g7CTWg

holy shit, the video crut posted upthread is AMAZING

this is like an extended fever dream

"If we been to your city..."
"...we've probably been to your mall!"
"that's all we do is go to malls, man."

Rolling 2015 Thread on DC Talk

rap is a thing

i had to stop watching that dc talk video around about where they go to all the malls, but yeah, a thing

did you miss the homoerotic wall smashing

yeah, but i'll return once refortified

it was god making him chocolate down deep inside that did me in

^^^

I came back and finished strong though.

The turn this thread took makes me want to go to my attic and dig out all my old CCM tapes, listen to them and see which ones were actually worthwhile music.

One of my good friends in high school worked at some chain Christian book/clothing/record store (blanking on the name, but basically a Christian Borders with more tchotchkes), so I was exposed to a lot of this stuff. DC Talk instantly made me flash back to flipping through the racks and reading song titles for the CCM takes on hardcore rap, among others. This was also the type of place that sold those Jesus-themed t-shirts that were plays on famous brands or logos.

things like this:
http://ww4.hdnux.com/photos/02/45/45/678219/3/628x471.jpg

Thanks a latte Jesus!

http://www.metalmusicarchives.com/images/covers/stryper-in-god-we-trust-20120505154243.jpg

When I was in fifth grade I bought my cassette of In God We Trust at a civil war battleground gift shop along with a confederate flag keychain.

a studio I was working in used to have piles of issues of this and it was some of the funniest shit ever. they try *very* hard to trick you into not noticing they're a CCM publication

made it! pity me.

Uh dc talk is now favoriting my tweets :(

oh dude. genuine lols over here.

expose your shameful lack of basic knowledge herein

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/world/do-you-know-africa/

"Decent.
Final score: 59% correct."

i was always only 1 country off, i swear

http://i.imgur.com/Gw1cOBb.jpg

Hey kids, your favorite black barista here. So I am the only person of color employed at my specific shop (I live in suburbia and it’s a living hell), and today we had this as our trivia question (answer is B). I didn’t pick it, although almost every white person who came in assumed I did. I thought I’d share some of the gems I heard because of it: http://facingthewaves.tumblr.com/post/109928643648/hey-kids-your-favorite-black-barista-here-so-i

damn! what a nightmare.

Way to go, MN

jesus

Black Guy: *gives me the “can u believe this fucking cracker” look*
Me: *gives him the “I know brotha just pray to the lord for strength” look*

needs emojis

Tomorrow he should put up a trivia question about Jimmy Buffet or something and then have black friends come in and complain about it

I hope she doesn't lose her job over this post, because it seems like it might be sort of easy to narrow down where she works (especially with the photo attached).

Maybe she's got a cool boss.

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/1.640997

Crazy

fuck

worst "guess who's coming to dinner" concept yet obv

that is insane

when people who mean well say and do stupid shit

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/11/entertainment/feat-joni-mitchell-black-man/index.html

Jesus, Joni.

right here, right now
there is no other place I'd rather be
right here, right now
putting on blackface to mess with a photographer

so that's what "Both Sides Now" is about.

yep that's our Joni. in the context of the full album packaging, I always got a sense of a provocation of her folk purist audience that was savaging her for the jazz direction on the last few records. maybe I shouldn't find this amazing:

http://cdn.discogs.com/HOgXrRIhobcxE0DHdmBMatqHRJY=/fit-in/600x592/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(96)/discogs-images/R-625916-1303273301.jpeg.jpg

she got shit for the blackface thing at the time iirc

there is something v classically stereotypical white 60s liberal about her whole black male fetishization thing there

always wondered about this line: "I had me a man in summertime. He had summer-colored skin"

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2015/02/12/385777366/a-black-mississippi-judges-breathtaking-speech-to-three-white-murderers

"There is a reason that I require all new agents and analysts to study the FBI’s interaction with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and to visit his memorial in Washington as part of their training. And there is a reason I keep on my desk a copy of Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s approval of J. Edgar Hoover’s request to wiretap Dr. King. It is a single page. The entire application is five sentences long, it is without fact or substance, and is predicated on the naked assertion that there is “communist influence in the racial situation.” The reason I do those things is to ensure that we remember our mistakes and that we learn from them."

FBI director James Comey, Feb 12

http://m.fbi.gov/#http://www.fbi.gov/news/speeches/hard-truths-law-enforcement-and-race

He also said this tho:

"But racial bias isn’t epidemic in law enforcement any more than it is epidemic in academia or the arts. In fact, I believe law enforcement overwhelmingly attracts people who want to do good for a living—people who risk their lives because they want to help other people."

i had forgotten comey was made FBI head...

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=872405196154881

O_o way to promote your product. As usual the doubling down under criticism is the most depressing

"If you feel your rights are being violated, please contact the civil rights department with your concerns."

Remembering is all well and good, but it isn't justice.

Here's today's outrage fodder: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/02/local-fox-anchor-complains-about-lady-gagas-jigaboo-music-during-oscars-coverage/#.VOtPuYtJYFU.twitter

holy fucking shit.

kind of lol:

“I apologize if I offended you, I had no idea it was a word or what it meant. Thank you for watching,” Capel wrote.

She used a word that she didn't know was a word.

This is pretty amazing imo, from Mad Magazine apparently:

https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/11021163_10205060942977473_2370560220583807156_n.jpg?oh=66fa9cece7ac7be4a6e9a6e6fd70816b&oe=559516C4

whoa

they're still capable of great stuff over there

what's that a reference to, again?

Rockwell's "The Runaway":

http://images.art.com/images/products/regular/13214000/13214046.jpg

thanks! i knew it somewhere in the back of my mind...

was also trying to figure out if the clerk had that goofy expression in the original lol

http://www.salon.com/2015/03/08/why_black_conservatives_unsettle_fox_vs_msnbc_political_correctness_and_our_polarized_racial_conversation/

To be kind, I will agree with the author on 2 broad points:

Discussion of race in the US is polarized.

Political ideology often becomes personal identity.

Beyond those points anyone can agree with - his vision of America he speaks of is vastly more complicated than simply "stop discriminating but leave minorities alone."

How can we achieve one while doing nothing on the other?

That's always the question, and the usual conservative dream of what they label self-determination, or agency, or free-as-a-bird-freedom - it doesn't work because it's a fantasy. People don't achieve anything without plenty of help. That's people. Not labels, groups, ideologies.

How can helping people not have helped people? Conservatives always want non-complication. Black conservatives want that too, but they also seem to want to reassure white conservatives, let me simplify this for you: in our fairy tale all minorities will succeed solely from the sweat of their brows. Like us. Right. Sure. Why of course.

Myths are still the biggest sellers.

I thought this was an odd way to describe a band in 2015:

http://atrium.lincolncenter.org/2015/fleetwood-black.html

“A multiracial jam army that freestyles with cool telekinesis between the lustrous menace of Miles Davis’s On The Corner, the slash-and-om of 1970s King Crimson, and Jimi Hendrix’s moonwalk across side three of Electric Ladyland.”
—David Fricke, Rolling Stone

http://www.fox8live.com/story/28612983/ponchatoula-strawberry-festival-will-not-sell-controversial-poster-at-festival

Jesus fucking Christ. Especially at the last woman whose only fear is that them protesters might get violent, you know how they do.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2015/04/07/397882581/remembering-phyllis-klotman-founder-of-an-amazing-collection-of-black-cinema?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=race

Bye!

http://stlouis.suntimes.com/stl-news/stl-politics/7/139/118850/police-resign-missouri-elects-black-mayor/

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing-black-men.html

http://gawker.com/an-open-letter-to-my-white-grandfather-1701035760

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/grim-racist-methods-of-one-brooklyn-landlord.html

what a delightful person

http://gawker.com/no-indian-friends-1700471892

Good piece. It has been positive to see Twitter develop as a place for young Indian-Americans, partic Indian-American girls, to discover / embrace / talk about their heritage over the last few years in a way that might have been more difficult before.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/05/19/writing-group-kicks-poet-committee-because-her-tweets-gone-wind

well this seems… recondite

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs normally comes to the defense of controversial writers. On Monday, however, the group announced it has kicked Vanessa Place, a prominent and sometimes controversial poet, off the planning committee for the association's 2016 meeting.

The association, which represents more than 500 campus-based writing programs, as well as thousands of writers, acted after many members pushed for Place's removal. They object to her Twitter account (below right), on which she is posting, line by line, the text of the novel Gone With the Wind. The Twitter feed also features a photograph of Hattie McDaniel as the profile picture. McDaniel was the actress who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Mammy in the film version of the novel.

Place is a poet, artist and criminal lawyer who has won critical praise for her work, much of which defies conventions. Some see her Twitter account as a form of art; many who wanted her off the committee of AWP (as the group is known) called her project racist, whatever its intentions.

I think people have become really, really stupid

like, this is kind of a dumb project, but it also seems to be really obvious what the intent is even before her explanation? mostly I just want to give everyone involved a dunce cap

What is happening with the main cover art on that Twitter profile?

Context is everything, but yeah, I'd have some questions too.

yeah, the project seems kind of silly, kind of an attempt to get the Margaret Mitchell estate to sue her. She published a book that was just the references to black people in GWTW, and then a second book that was the complete text of GWTW

so is she the poetry cocorosie or something

omg

A little more info about the Waco bike gang riot: https://twitter.com/kwtx/status/601059418122260481

Saw that GWTW thing and am wondering HOW SOMEONE COULD NOT GET IT!!!

http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/05/on-being-hated-conceptualism-the-mongrel-coalition-the-house-that-built-me/

appreciated reading this by Trisha Low. hinges on a very personal meditation on family but then touches on an equally personal meditation on the Vanessa Place / Kenneth Goldsmith art pieces.

there were things i liked about it, definitely things that i could relate to in terms of "chosen family" and artistic subcultures, but i had to start skimming because she kept repeating herself and i got bored.

it's pretty long! I like the parts on Place and Goldsmith. cultural appropriation issues are a thing.

this Place piece is a lot more interesting than the whole Goldsmith piece:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/vanessa-place/artists-statement-gone-with-the-wind-vanessaplace/10152841235969212?pnref=story
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-a-twitter-art-racism-20150519-story.html

I like her statement. On Twitter, you can not target your audience. white progressives targeting the relatives/friends who need to hear certain disturbing messages are now all effectively in the same room as the people who most certainly do not need to hear those things even one more time. it reminds me of the pushback against #crimingwhilewhite; something that I do think started as a movement attempting to show support by pointing out white privilege to sheltered relatives started to come across as a massive humblebrag / hijacking of the national conversation on race away from black voices (I appreciated reading this article but my takeaway at the time was that I hope we figure out what the hell Twitter is doing to our nervous systems within the next ten years)

Can't believe she's been kicked off the panel but if she's serious about personally embodying the problem, then there is a way in which she should be encouraged by this response

it is interesting thinking about using twitter for art vs. the sfmoma's open space blog

Thinking about it more made me realize that I have a lot of baggage about my former workplace, and how "high art" (which includes the poetry community she is a part of, members of which regularly write for the sfmoma openspace blog) has all these class-based (undoubtedly race-based as well, but I can't speak to that) barriers to entry. So when I mentioned a few posts back about artistic subcultures, now I think about how there's a real difference between mine and hers, which is almost entirely comprised of the privileged. So here she is, whining about things in an affluent, over-educated 26 year old way to people like her. Contrast this with the writers doing their projects on twitter or #crimingwhilewhite. Would the response be different if their venue was an institution like the SFMoMA?

Oh, and I just remembered, last weekend I was in L.A. and was at dinner with a woman who was part of that poetry community. And when she mentioned that she had grown up near the Oakland/Berkeley border, I asked, "Oh did you go to Chabot Elementary?" I asked this because the weekend before I was hanging out with a friend who teaches autistic kids in the Oakland public schools, and she had told me about her first job in Oakland, at Chabot Elementary, where the parents were really snobby and actively resented the presence of the autistic kids, who were mostly non-white from poorer parts of the city. And indeed this woman had gone to said school.

And that isn't to say there was anything snobby or wrong or bad about this L.A. poet, just that it was another piece of evidence that so many members of these progressive artistic communities come from privileged class backgrounds.

It can be depressing, but I find the only way I can co-exist with it is to recognize that it isn't that one has race or class privilege, but what one does with the fact that they're a beneficiary of discriminatory history: do they try to address that inequality? Do they share their skills with young people who are not of their background? Are they trying to learn about people different from themselves? Far worse to not be able to admit you HAVE a bias.

Let's face the facts, the RW probably doesn't care about poetry, so it skews "progressive". The amount of race and class ignorance I've seen in music is a lot worse, there's an attitude of, "I am so wonderfully, enchantingly musical and sensitive that I don't have to consider perspectives that aren't white."

A defense of Vanessa from another poet in the "scene"

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2015/05/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_22.html

lol I couldn't make it past the first sentence

in what universe is the right to free speech THE fundamental right upon which all others depend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvZbq7AzQ3g

same universe, just the part of it that's never touched directly by violence

haha yes

http://labourlist.org/2015/05/labours-lead-among-bame-people-has-narrowed-poll-finds/

http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2012/04/ethnic-minority-voters-and-the-conservative-party-2/

Does anyone know if Border Force UK is required to record the ethnicity of individuals they choose to search upon entry into the country?

Xp, the targeting of Hindu voters via the National Council of Hindu Temples was probably the single most disreputable thing any major party did this election.

I believe they do record data on people searched.

On a related note, the holding pen at Gatwick for people who need to be interrogated by immigration officers isn't something i've seen before. There's a fenced-off seating area right in front of the border checkpoint that everyone queuing has to file past. When i was there earlier this month, they were effectively questioning people in public - loud enough for everyone to hear. Even if they weren't, having an open area for people to gawk at seems deliberately shaming.

I'd like to see Border Force UK's stats then if they are recording them. I work in the dept. lounge at gatwick and when leaving work have to exit via the customs arrivals hall, anecdotal I know, but the ratio of white people stopped to black is probably 1 to 50.

It might depend on what provision they are stopping them under but if it's done under Section 7 (related to terrorism) there were stats suggesting that minorities were up to 130 times more likely than white people to be searched. It's hugely abused though so pretty much any search can be listed as anti-terrorist.

They were also famously stopping non-white people at tube stations even if they were British.

more high-stakes artworld kerfuffling!

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/06/kenneth-goldsmith-says-he-is-an-outlaw/

In March 2015, just a little over a week after the U. S. Department of Justice cleared Officer Wilson of all charges of Brown’s death (therefore approving before the world of putting six bullets into an unarmed young black man), poet Kenneth Goldsmith participated in the Interrupt Conference at Brown University where he read a document which he calls “The Body of Michael Brown.” Goldsmith says of his conceptual poetry practice of taking preexisting texts and remixing them, “I always massage dry texts to transform them into literature….” In the case of “The Body of Michael Brown” he slashed and cut into county autopsy reports, essentially the language representing the bone and flesh of the slain young black man. Goldsmith’s rearrangement of his chopped and hacked pieces of Michael Brown’s body ends with the young man’s genitals.

The outrage from poets could be heard everywhere in the United States. As a result Goldsmith asked Brown University to withhold the video of his performance because, as he wrote on Facebook, “There has been too much pain for many people around this and I do not wish to cause any more.” When I worked with Kenny at MoMA in 2013 he appeared apolitical at best, but now he was in a position to be humbled and seemed sincerely sorry for causing pain. Then he regained his strength on Twitter, hash-tagging Michael Brown’s name and saying that “the left is the new right.” Hash-tagging “pen,” hash-tagging “freespeech,” spinning himself into the victim like a Bush administration Neocon deflecting attention from his actions and branding all who opposed his racist “art” enemy combatant censors.

Kit Schluter, you are my hero

omg

It's worth comparing word counts, that article and the solicited responses vs. the unlinked single tweet (still up) and the single word "outlaw" in a very brief, undated interview.

keep it real, son of Tom Hanks!

http://blog.sfgate.com/dailydish/2015/06/03/tom-hanks-rapper-son-defends-his-use-of-racial-slur/

there's like 15 diff threads to post this on but holy shit (and lol) http://dopenmind.tumblr.com/post/107166111639/reblogging-this-once-more-because-my-mom-and-i

I went on a school field trip to a cotton farm when I was 10, they didn't make us pick it, though.

are you white, y or n?

my wife was supposed to go on a cotton-picking field trip when she was young; her dad cut that one off immediately

when i was in 1st grade, my 1st grade class all came over to my house and we picked potatoes. We got to keep the potatoes.

were any of them irish?

probably a few, but they were like 3rd or 4th generation

In retrospect, I am glad that it was just digging potatoes, as opposed to having the 40-50% of my Latino classmates pick berries and fruit :/

probably a few, but they were like 3rd or 4th generation

― Mistah FAAB (sarahell),

this makes a difference does it

jk let's not even start

I never went on a field trip where the children were forced into manual labor.

we were taken down into a mine but I didn't get to use a pickaxe

I take it the bog is not a thing anywhere but here huh

we grew potatoes outside of our school

when i was in primary school we had a field trip to a local nightclub during the daytime and each of us ended up leaving with a promotional tia maria badge

never managed to work out the rationale behind that one tbh

http://fusion.net/story/145089/on-passing-wishing-for-darker-skin-and-finding-your-people-a-conversation-between-two-mulattos/

good talk w/ mat johnson

Hasn't been said yet, but one of the 15 sides of 龜's video that he alluded to was the white boy frat audience dying in laughter at dude's cotton story.

I mean, it's a funny story and everyone's just hanging out with their bro's. That said, it made me think of that one white guy out there, the Steve Bartman of cable comedy, who laughed a bit too loudly at one of Dave Chappelle's bits and became the straw that broke the show's back.

I've thought about the immediate after-effects of that guy a lot. "Listen, you've got to hear this. Chappelle was doing this race bit and Preston would not shut the fuck up. Now they say Chappelle's quit the show and has gone to Africa." -- "Wait, what? Preston, Rob Fortson's nephew? What do you mean Chappelle 'quit the show'?"

A Post-it Note with the words “Have a nice day” and a smiley face was left on a pipe that officials say Richard Matt and David Sweat cut open when they fled the Clinton Correctional Facility

A post-it note with a smiley face and the words "have a nice day" was left on a pipe the inmates cut open, according to Cuomo.

Before exiting the prison, the men left a yellow sticky note on a pipe, according to news reports. “Have a Nice Day!” it said.

Cuomo spokesman Gareth Rhodes tweeted a photo of a note the men left behind. "Have a nice day," it read.

http://i.imgur.com/XHnYZhx.jpg

That is exactly what I think of when I picture in my mind "a smiley face."

Officials want to know how the prisoners got power tools. I want to know how they printed something off of a computer on to a post-it note.

NYT comes he closest to an accurate description:

On the note, a caricature of a man wearing a conical hat appears above the words: “Have a nice day!”

Been following McKinney on Twitter and making the rounds now is a screencap of what the portly white guy in the video allegedly said on a TEA PARTY page on Facebook:

https://twitter.com/dawnneufeld/status/608256020914143233

He said, "you apes kill, plunder, etc.". "Quit being butthurt about being black." Etc.

I hope someone in the media gets to the bottom of this! Apparently he is the one who called the police?

Also on Twitter - the hate right are defending the police.

Nice going, tea party assholes. I hope we can finally catch you with your pants down!

https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Rachel%20Dolezal%22&src=tren&trend_id=TREND_CONTEXT%3A609132153612423168

like

man

http://www.inlander.com/Bloglander/archives/2015/06/11/media-firestorm-swirls-around-rachel-dolezal-the-local-naacp-president

yeah man what do you even do with that

lunacy

Twitter has been amazing tonight

really glad black lois re-emerged as a meme about this.

https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/609194364124954624

who is gonna play her in the movie???

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/12/spokane-naacp-president-rachel-dolezal-may-be-white/

http://www.inlander.com/imager/progress-report/b/original/2438251/ce71/Dolezal.jpg

http://spokanefavs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/naacp_11-660x330.jpg

the gun is a nice touch...

http://media.spokesman.com/photos/2015/03/03/SRX_DOLEZAL3.jpg

http://static.rogerebert.com/uploads/review/primary_image/reviews/a-mighty-heart-2007/hero_EB20070621REVIEWS70621002AR.jpg

I feel like this woman was birthed by a confused Tumblr

Kelly: I just want to say, I hope you know how good it is we have you here in Spokane to inspire us and be a voice for change. Do you think people who see your bravery and courage in the face of adversity will feel like they can speak up instead of being silenced?

Rachel: I know there are lives I’ve affected and transformed. Change and transformation, and affecting people’s lives — that’s my purpose. My calling, my destiny. To be in the center of that purpose is always fulfilling.

wow...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u-AKfb5MwQ

unless i'm missing something important, kind of think this story is... not very interesting or remarkable?

you can at least lol at it unlike a lot of the garden variety racism stuff that gets posted itt

seems about right as far as diversity in Spokane goes

Lawrence Dolezal said his daughter was involved in Voice of Calvary, a “racial reconciliation community development project where black and whites lived together,” while at Bellhaven University in Jackson, Miss.

“You speak and sound and act and take on the mannerisms of the culture you live in,” he said. When Rachel applied to Howard University to study art with a portfolio of “exclusively African American portraiture,” the university “took her for a black woman” and gave her a full scholarship.

uh

xxp idk, not really feeling it. And a lot of the internet lolz and the frequent tone 'isn't this just the kerrr-aaziest thing you ever did see?' smells off to me (not calling out anyone itt).

the lols itt have been bad yeah you gotta go to twitter

yeah i save that for the long winter evenings mebbe

the lols itt have been bad yeah

;_;

those pictures her parents gave the press are my favorite part of this story. rebecca of sunnybrook farm becomes black civil rights leader! come on, that's totally an interesting story. i'm thinking jennifer aniston for the movie now...

http://jezebel.com/i-have-questions-about-that-white-lady-who-maybe-preten-1710807777 <-- this whole thing OTM, esp:

This story has the distinct honor of being both incredibly offensive, yet not at all offensive, as well as hilarious.

plus, full scholarship to howard university! there are lots of choice nuggets here...

the jezebel thing is a hoot.

her IG name was 'afrocentricfemme' btw

http://i.imgur.com/Gi8g6Zc.jpg

I'm hating. Those look good and she didn't even put up a recipe.

https://twitter.com/TankTopPapi/status/609367876785541121

http://i.imgur.com/tAofxSi.jpg

that's a great poem

If we could harness the irony generated by this woman, we could solve our energy problems indefinitely

should i track this down and watch it this weekend y/n

http://i.imgur.com/qw1tA08.jpg

N

It's shit

ahahahahahahahahaha I was looking for the right Soul Man picture to post to Facebook before work distracted me

'cheerful, frat-house version of tootsie' jesus christ

i'm thinking jennifer aniston for the movie now...

thought for sure you were goin' Kudrow

http://www.slantmagazine.com/assets/film/marcix.jpg

she's REALLY bad at reading poetry. that should be noted as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2y2OGNyArg

kudrow a good pick as well!

1) Apologies in advance if I'm being a dick here.
2) Please call me out and tell me to fuck off if necessary.
3) This isn't really about Dolezal but her story got me thinking.*
-------------------------
How much of one's race is biological and how much is personal identity?
How much non white blood would one need to self identify as not white?
-------------------------
*lonely white guy thinking baout things

How much of one's race is biological and how much is personal identity?

race is determined by how society sees you first and foremost

How much non white blood would one need to self identify as not white?

there used to be this thing called the one drop rule

should i track this down and watch it this weekend y/n

it's an incredible artifact that should be watched imo but it is also a really shitty movie

whole lot of ppl out there connecting this story with caitlin jenner's coming out

"if bruce jenner can be accepted why can't she" etc etc

shoot those people into the sun

One drop rule not what I'm getting at here as that's about exclusion from whiteness. This story is of a white woman passing (sorry if that word is inappropriate in this context) as black - can/should she be excluded by a not one drop rule?

xp

i don't think you're framing that question right, or at least it's not helpful to think about it that way

Yeah I think I'll piss off before I dig myself a bottle opener shaped hole.

Sorry.

like to get serious she was taking away social and career opportunities for black people http://www.ewu.edu/csbssw/programs/africana-studies-program/aep-faculty/rachel-dolezal

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CHTyO3XWEAIg90m.jpg

bingo card/drinking game:

https://twitter.com/AdamSerwer/status/609329390254718976

this is really something tho:

https://twitter.com/AdamSerwer/status/609222232171130880

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CHTyO3XWEAIg90m.jpg

― mookieproof, Friday, June 12, 2015 12:04 PM (3 minutes ago)

lmao

https://twitter.com/Jayveri/status/609378606993666048

damn, beat to the punch

do americans not realize how inadvertently amusing 'africana studies' is, even before they give tenure to german farmgirls

watch it

No no lets find out what he means

entire departments devoted solely to this song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyLQqHkf76Q

the whole thing is very confusing but if i understand correctly she claims she was abused by her parents and she had a number of [adopted/foster?] siblings that were black so i wouldn't be shocked if she identified w/ her siblings during a time of trauma who maybe suffered through the same abuse she did, including a [misconceived] association with their race (and maybe even as a survival mechanism - that she was also adopted/fostered). if so it would be sad but a little understandable. she clearly is a troubled woman either way.

i don't think it's that clear

that dress pic is priceless. it's like joanna newsom turning into coco rosie.

https://twitter.com/joshywinty/status/609179629992030208

maybe she's troubled? maybe she's a liar. could be both! are all serial liars "troubled"?

i feel this way whenever someone who claimed to be a vet gets outed as a fake. or when plagiarizers or other resume-padders get found out. so many systems and structures have an underlying basis in trust. liars can go pretty far! for a while.

i read that her adopted brother lived with her and she pretended that he was her son! i read a lot about this today.

No no lets find out what he means

― supreme problematics (D-40), Friday, 12 June 2015 17:15 (6 minutes ago)

that outside of america that phrase is more likely to remind people of something antithetical to what is intended and that the plains germans who left to the upper midwest would have been cape colonists a few generations earlier

this story is essentially unintelligible outside of american culture mores, so to answer onimo's unanswerable questions read more about america

i'm seeing some tweets about how she faked some abusive & threatening emails; does anyone have a link about that?

africana and afrikaner are two different words fyi

xp

ohhh the non-rhotic "afrikaner"

xp lol

wait why are are you guys talking about joanna newsom, what did she do now

still back on the picture mookie posted

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/12/413882989/race-of-spokanes-naacp-leader-becomes-subject-of-controversy

Dolezal has become a prominent civil rights leader in the area. She initially came under scrutiny by KXLY-TV after a postal inspector concluded that hate mail left in the local NAACP's P.O. Box was never processed by the postal system.

The postal inspector said that the hate mail had to have been placed in the box by someone with a key. Dolezal had a key, but she dismissed accusations that she had placed the mail in the box herself.

xxxxp

she also reported a swastika on a door to some building but the security camera outside the door had been suspiciously turned off before she discovered the swastika. and people were suspicious of her claim...

lotsa suspicion all around...

refer to 'likely to remind', refer to all my previous comments re shakey's capabilities

she also claimed that the kkk and the "aryan nations" were after her in idaho. that could be true though. there isn't a lot to do in idaho.

They don't take kindly to white folks round there.

http://www.krem.com/media/cinematic/video/71105320/rachel-dolezal-says-she-doesnt-acknowledge-her-biological-parents/

i feel this way whenever someone who claimed to be a vet gets outed as a fake. or when plagiarizers or other resume-padders get found out. so many systems and structures have an underlying basis in trust. liars can go pretty far! for a while.

― goole, Friday, 12 June 2015 17:27 (13 minutes ago)

there's quite a lot of these stories, imposters who are described as being so ridiculous, absurd, nobody could believe them etc: chesterton's essay on the 19th c 'captain of kopenick' is worth reading because it takes the focus away from the imposter (who might have many reasons) to something like structure (slightly old fashioned ideas about prussian militarism in that case)

this really is a confused Tumblr come to life

https://twitter.com/metroadlib/status/609292107086495745

Forget think pieces there are gonna be masters theses and whole studies

Possibly a movie

david fincher might be interested...hmmmm, i'll have to think about the best director for this...

Steve Miner obviously

if he did it in friday the 13th style i would be all for that.

least believable kimmy schmidt backstory yet

@NickPinkerton
Sorry to report that William Forsythe screaming "God, I wish I was black" in Schrader's Patty Hearst is nowhere to be found online.

http://i.imgur.com/Ii3knHM.png

also, onimo, maybe this will help answer some of yr questions: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/06/rachel_dolezal_claims_to_be_black_the_naacp_official_was_part_of_the_african.html

In her favor are key parts of her life. Dolezal has identified as black for almost 10 years. She’s been heavily involved in the local black community, and a leader on issues important to black people. She has no apparent black ancestry—a real difference from blacks who pass—but she’s adopted a kind of black culture almost wholesale. If Walter Francis White is black, and Mordecai Wyatt Johnson is black, then why can’t Rachel Dolezal be black, even if her connections were manufactured?

Then again, her story involves lies and misrepresentations. She passed off a darker-skinned stranger as her father, and an adopted sibling as her son. There’s a chance she faked a hate crime against her, and she falsely claimed she was born in a tepee with a family that hunted for its food. She says she’s black, but we don’t know if she’s always black. Is she black when she’s purchasing a home? Talking to the police? Or is she black only when vying for a role where lived experience would help her odds?

otm

not really on my money

why can’t Rachel Dolezal be black, even if her connections were manufactured?

The piece is predicated on the unqualified assertion that race is distinct from ethnicity and while this is in some ways arguable he does a pretty poor job unpacking the ways in which they often bleed into one another. As a result the thing reads as confused as Dolezal herself.

claimed she was born in a tepee with a family that hunted for its food.

it's pretty amazing how various and non-binary skin tone really is.

i have one black friend irl total (my excuse is that i'm a shut-in in a 90% white state) and he's always so adamant to me that race is a construct. my instinct at first was to insist that it's a real construct that affects him but at some point i realized i didn't need to do that, it probably does affect him, but if it doesn't actually affect his experience or worldview that much isn't that a good thing and isn't it better to talk about cats or the weird art he makes anyway?

tnc said something on twitter about how even if the racial hierarchy in the u.s. were exploded we'd find another structure just as 'rooted' in 'reality' and just as hierarchical to replace it, which seems to bear out in other parts of the world. way too many of our categorically perceiving and desiring asses out there for our own good or the good of anything else on the planet.

But it does seem like some societies are more oppressive than others? And it's possible to decrease oppression in the aggregate? I hope.

http://jezebel.com/rachel-dolezal-definitely-nailed-the-hair-ill-give-her-1710899988

she also claimed that the kkk and the "aryan nations" were after her in idaho. that could be true though. there isn't a lot to do in idaho.

Metro Spokane often counts Coeur d'Alene Idaho (30 miles east) and its suburbs, one of which is where the major Aryan Nations headquarters was until 2001.

A white supremacist who ran for sheriff is attempting to start up a new one a bit north of there, right near where Ruby Ridge happened, and the gun-nut separatist Citadel is a bit south. There was also a bombing attempt at the MLK parade in Spokane a couple years ago. So none of this is really that far-fetched, there are a lot of racist crazies still around this part of the county.

most of those guys pretending to be aryan imo

Lotta James Frey type defenses on the net.

but the pathological lying is the bit that's problematic in that she not only claims oppression by falsely opting into a culture that's not her own, but outright invented two specific scenarios where she was personally targeted. Even ignoring the damage a fabricated claim can do to the community, it suggests that she is receiving some sort of theatrical gratification out of this, which is pretty gross.

Especially since she can opt out of it any time she wants.

http://i.imgur.com/7oTIdey.png

Omfg

Quit while yr behind sweetie

http://alimichael.org/blog/rachel-dolezal-syndrome/

it's pretty clear that somebody has hijacked her twitter, I think

That account was started last week and has been RTing Milo Yiannopoulos and Andrew Auernheimer so I'd imagine there is a slight possibility it might not actually be her.

Another one claiming to be her real account was supposedly hacked.

https://twitter.com/Retro_Spectro_/status/610251428838420480

A week on, and I am really irritated at the way the media pays way more attention to Rachel Dolezal than they do to the McKinney story. Seems to me McKinney is more applicable to many of us. So many of us have come from suburban backgrounds where people want to keep the pools and parks white, I am wondering if white people just find this too painful to deal with so everyone dropped the story. Keeping black people out of the park is such a big issue in the history of race relations! As a country, we need to talk about it!

McKinney thing just not as weird. also didn't involve a murder, and the cop resigned

as an internet narrative goes, the story is complete

wait what was the murder aspect to the rachel dolezal story

it was murder trying to get her hair to look like that

haha

I didn't mean that there was a murder involved w Dolezal, just that the McKinney thing would've had longer legs if a murder had been involved (rather than general racist officer assholishness followed by immediate resignation)

holy shit

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/bizarre/rachel-dolezal-discrimination-lawsuit-786451

Rachel Dolezal, 37, who headed the NAACP’s Spokane, Washington chapter, sued Howard for discrimination in 2002, the year she graduated from the historically black college with a Master of Fine Arts degree.

According to a Court of Appeals opinion, Dolezal's lawsuit “claimed discrimination based on race, pregnancy, family responsibilities and gender.” She alleged that Smith and other school officials improperly blocked her appointment to a teaching assistant post, rejected her application for a post-graduate instructorship, and denied her scholarship aid while she was a student.

The court opinion also noted that Dolezal claimed that the university’s decision to remove some of her artworks from a February 2001 student exhibition was “motivated by a discriminatory purpose to favor African-American students over” her.

she sued Howard for 'reverse discrimination' basically in '02

aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

was about to post this jelani cobb piece

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/rachel-dolezal-black-like-her

but i just saw that and aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

this just keeps getting better

Is there a patron saint of chutzpah yet?

So this was all a long attempt to go undercover and expose anti-white discrimination from within. Kind of like a James O'Keefe sleeper cell.

Yeah, when this first popped up, O'Keefe was the first person who came to mind.

no joke this was the ad that popped up when i clicked on the jelani cobb post:

http://i.imgur.com/mLmxKey.png

so no Dave Chappelle take?

WaPo quotes him

Okay, the painting thing is great.

discover member privileges

http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/06/rachel-dolezal-plagiarized-painting-the-slave-ship?utm_campaign=complexmag%2Bsocialflow%2B06%2B2015&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

wait did she paint "Sugar Shack" too lol

i wasn't so sure about this one - who wouldn't recognize it as a study of the turner? which is a thing. i see that the blog linked says 'studies', tho who knows, maybe that was added later.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/15/jenner-dolezal-one-trans-good-other-not-so-much

one of my leftist academic-political-activist friends posted this as an argument worthy of consideration and their other academic-activist friends are not having it - takes issue w/ the quick 'transgender is a thing, transracial is not' responses to dumb linkages of caitlyn jenner to dolezal

The transrace/transgender comparison makes clear the conceptual emptiness of the essentializing discourses, and the opportunist politics, that undergird identitarian ideologies. There is no coherent, principled defense of the stance that transgender identity is legitimate but transracial is not, at least not one that would satisfy basic rules of argument. The debate also throws into relief the reality that a notion of social justice that hinges on claims to entitlement based on extra-societal, ascriptive identities is neoliberalism’s critical self-consciousness. In insisting on the political priority of such fictive, naturalized populations identitarianism meshes well with neoliberal naturalization of the structures that reproduce inequality. In that sense it’s not just a pointed coincidence that Dolezal’s critics were appalled with the NAACP for standing behind her work. It may be that one of Rachel Dolezal’s most important contributions to the struggle for social justice may turn out to be having catalyzed, not intentionally to be sure, a discussion that may help us move beyond the identitarian dead end.

I think people were appalled at the NAACP (though were they, really? or is this a straw man) not because they insisted on the right of a person to work for the NAACP regardless of skin color, but because Dolezal was revealed to be a serial fabulist, including making up fake hate crimes against her person. that's not a person you want representing your organization.

speaking to the whole transrace/transgender discussion, i do think there's a sense that:

- dolezal was receiving some of the benefits of her new racial identity without having had to substantively experience the disadvantages

whereas

- jenner arguably--well, in his own narrative--experienced an ongoing crisis of identity and all the negative repercussions of that, over many decades, and his new identity represents a (partial) liberation from those difficulties

so there's a probably a sense that jenner's suffering entitles him to the bold step of assuming a new gender identity, while dolezal's identity change reeks of opportunism.

i don't know how this sort of folk wisdom--a kind of affective justice--would translate into legal terms. probably not very well.

adolph reed is always worth reading i think

xp yes i think basically there is a logic of confession imposed on identity-claiming, at least with respect to gender (a similar one for other kinds of identity, but it is highly polarized in terms of inner/outer distinctions in the case of gender and sexuality: 'the real me', 'a feeling i've always had deep inside', deep or genuine desires at odds with external appearances or roles), and jenner can readily be deemed to have paid the cost/price for his new identity.

whereas dolezal evidently was trying to avoid paying the price.

it's conceivable that she or someone like her could try to get 'coming out as transracial' to become a thing, i.e., she could start trying to pay the cost in terms of which her identity claims would be generally socially validated. but i'm uncertain about just how much claiming racial identity admits of the same sort of inner/outer logic that seems to make gender identity quite amenable to this kind of confessional logic.

(sorry, didn't mean to say 'his' there for any particular reason, just had the pre-transition identity in mind at that moment)

i think reed is sort of spot on in suggesting that in this actual country, given the way most people understand it works, the idea that passing as black could actually be a "win" in terms of advantage is at least, on first glance, sort of absurd.

come to think of it, i wonder if maybe (some) claims to racial or ethnic identity don't have sort of a semi-confessional logic to them, it's just not structured the same. if you have a jewish background that people don't know about because you don't 'code' as jewish, you can claim it, and you do so by publicizing things about yourself that may not have been apparent to others, but conceptually, they're more things in your past, than they are things inside you. so that kind of claim isn't assessed by others in terms of confession-related costs (the toll of keeping a secret, of not being recognized, the courage of going public, the kinds of integrity displayable), so much as it is in terms of, i wanna say, like a wealth-of-heritage calculation.

i'm skeptical that the reactions to dolezal can really be pried from--or parsed outside of-- the particular individual circumstances of her "case"; we might react very differently to a different instance of someone "passing" as black if his or her motivations weren't so transparently self-serving.

and while i admire adolph reed and agree w/ sterling that he is always worth reading, i think he gets the optics of this particular case too far wrong for his contribution to really count as perceptive. (i.e. he implies that dozelal really /thinks/ she was black, which given the relevations about her lawsuit against howard etc., can't be meaningfully true.)

this part from reed rings rather true:

The issue of the line that Dolezal, who has now resigned her NAACP position, crossed that made her alleged self-representation unacceptable is interesting in this regard only because it highlights contradictions at the core of racial essentialism. In addition to the problems of articulating what confers racial authenticity, if what we have read about her approach to expressing black racial identity is accurate, she seems to have embraced an essentialist version of being black no less than do her outraged critics.

Dolezal is trans-racial the same way Tootsie is trans-gender. Right?

there's a whole further-afield thing about identifying as Japanese, as an old woman, etc, that you find on lol Tumblr

probably always been the case that some people feel like they relate better to communities other than the ones they come from, but that last step of "no, it's not just that I prefer the company of old people, I'm old" is the point at which most people, me included, are gonna say "well no says here you're 22"

important article on "transracial"

http://mediadiversified.org/2015/06/15/transracial-doesnt-mean-what-rachel-dolezal-thinks-it-means/

(i, personally, would not use that word to describe this experience, though)

I am disturbed by the signifiers in her pictures. When she's in her blackface mode, she is very self-aware. She sticks her boobs out a lot, what is she saying here about black women. I understand you were unhappy being white, but that doesn't make you black. The pictures are creepy, disrespecting and violating to black women. Scary now that she gets an interview and still isn't sorry. So she's essentially a predator.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/rachel-dolezal-older-brother-accused-child-molestation-article-1.2257560

"well no says here you're 22"

No, no, no that's my assigned birthdate.

Dolezal isn't really helping matters any.

http://www.today.com/news/rachel-dolezal-speaks-today-show-matt-lauer-after-naacp-resignation-t26371

'identify as black'

SINCE THE AGE OF FIVE

funny how that reed thing looks nearly the same as the shit that ran yesterday on NRO

In insisting on the political priority of such fictive, naturalized populations identitarianism meshes well with neoliberal naturalization of the structures that reproduce inequality.

too bad, man, these are your troops! this is who you have with you. these are the cadres history has given you (or w/e) i guess i'd love to hear some clearer thinking from marxians about how they are going to lead these populations out of the identitarian dead end; something beyond being a huge bitch about "republican jenner."

In that sense it’s not just a pointed coincidence that Dolezal’s critics were appalled with the NAACP for standing behind her work.

can nobody read a press release? the NAACP chapter was, as blandly as possible, telling the world that they'd been humiliated and were going to deal with it off-camera.

'identify as black'

SINCE THE AGE OF FIVE

you know, when Johnny Otis used to say this at least it was because he knew it was funny

https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/45-darryl.jpg?w=650&h=462

"I really don't see why they're in such a rush to whitewash some of the work that I have done and who I am and how I have identified," Rachel Dolezal said of her parents.

can i just...

She's right though what's the rush? They really should take their time with it. Drop bombs every few weeks just as everybody is about to forget about it.

This seems like someone who doesn't want to accept that she's toast. Reality TV material.

http://cdn.hark.com/images/000/359/922/359922/original.jpg

How good are the odds that she gets a spot on The View by the end of the year?

http://thehardtimes.net/2015/06/16/rachel-dolezal-now-claiming-to-be-founding-member-of-bad-brains/

i think the best word for this saga--all of it--is "grotesque"

is she getting a lot of shit from the African-American community? kinda hard for me to tell

oh you have no idea

http://verysmartbrothas.com/nothing-wrong-with-making-jokes-about-ridiculous-ass-rachel-dolezal/

the whole thing has reminded me of a conceptual framework I used to find compelling, which is that you can think of ethnic definitions as being enforced from without, rather than from within, an ethnic group. For ex. if the white slaveowner said you were black, for all intents and purposes you were effectively black; or if the Nazi said you were a Jew, well then you were a Jew. Basically you get defined by the enemy, by the power structure. (Obviously this is not entirely accurate as there are various nuances and exceptions but still)

xp

and in Dolezal's case the power structure - ie, white people - are saying she is white.

parents are kinda the ultimate platonic power structure

http://www.ebay.com/itm/261928418053?afsrc=1&rmvSB=true

yeah parents provide a definitional framework, pass along social norms, provide historical and social context - they determine what the family is and what group(s) it belongs to.

of course there are other factors (particularly with blackness) cf Obama

xp

found this compelling, from a link in DJP's link: http://www.ebony.com/news-views/last-rachel-dolezal-thinkpiece-ever-065#axzz3dEyB7vP5

the whole thing has reminded me of a conceptual framework I used to find compelling, which is that you can think of ethnic definitions as being enforced from without, rather than from within, an ethnic group. For ex. if the white slaveowner said you were black, for all intents and purposes you were effectively black; or if the Nazi said you were a Jew, well then you were a Jew. Basically you get defined by the enemy, by the power structure. (Obviously this is not entirely accurate as there are various nuances and exceptions but still)

From Hans Fallada's prison diary, there's a quote from Goering "'I decide who is a Jew," that related to his appointing Jewish Erhard Milch as a general.

https://jewishphilosophyplace.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/being-black-being-jewish-julius-lester-rachel-dolezal/

woah, good read.

Tyler the creator makes a similar argument
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYIi-7hnwhA

It would be nice if identity works that way, but it doesn't - there is a social aspect to it, it involves how others see and treat you.

I've been thinking about the Dolezal situation, from my point of ignorance, and wondered what really defines personal identity when it comes to race. I think your formative years, whether it's your youth or the beginning of your time in a new social culture, define your self image in regards to your society. Within that period, there's another differentiator: how others view you, and your own self image. Some ethnic/racial signposts will brand you to others, but you can experience little branding in your community yet feel like an outsider based on your familial/cultural ties that other people might not realize.

I think the mystifying thing is that Rachel Dolezal had parents with what sounds like a fairly open attitude toward acceptance but she was from the rural northwest, didn't have black siblings until she was older, and somehow, to her view, became black after college? Being black, for better or worse, is a thing that's still wrapped up in historical and present day discrimination and it sounds, through weird police reports, like she tried to do little sacrificial rituals of falsified discrimination and racism to make herself more black.

I sometimes wonder what this kid who was the first chair violinist at the bougie suburban high school in my area is up to these days. The only assumption I can make, based on the little I knew about him, is he probably has a higher economic standing than me now, but he probably also gets pulled over by the cops for no particular reason where I don't, because the dude was black. Nobody's sitting around making those assumptions about Dolezal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to8UKH7NHnA

http://i.imgur.com/1k1iwmG.jpg

I've been thinking about the Dolezal situation, from my point of ignorance, and wondered what really defines personal identity when it comes to race. I think your formative years, whether it's your youth or the beginning of your time in a new social culture, define your self image in regards to your society.

I think about this quite often. I am mixed race, and this was pretty obvious to others when I was a kid - brown skin, afro hair etc. So that was my formative identity living in a village and surrounding area which was p much exclusively white (no other black or mixed kids at my primary school, 2 black kids at my secondary school out of 1,400 pupils)probably reinforced my otherness to me . But over time. well tbh I've gotten much paler, and as I started to lose my hair I decided to start shaving my head. So now and for the last few years I probably 'pass' for white to the vast majority of people I meet. So if society now sees me as white and interacts with me on this basis does this mean I am no longer mixed race in any meaningful sense?

one of my thoughts when i first read about this was that dolezal's supposed "confusion" about her racial identity kind of hijacked the genuine grief and confusion that those of "mixed race" have to deal with. maybe she comes by a little of that honestly, but not much of it IMO.

I'm sure this whole public ridicule and shaming is intensely painful.

eh to hear her brother tell it, she made a decision to start deceiving people as a 30-something woman and asked other people to keep the ruse up:
http://dailycaller.com/2015/06/16/rachel-dolezals-brother-shes-white-and-pretending-to-be-black-video/

she sought out public life on false pretenses. even if you do feel sympathy people who get shamed on the internet for some stupid moment that became a meme, that is not what this is, at all.

i don't think grief is the right word you're looking for there amatuerist

i don't think anybody forced her to go on the today show

huh? you don't think people of mixed racial parentage often get grief in american society? (or maybe you were thinking of the other use of the word "grief"?) i know some folks who would beg to differ.

ah, "grief" as in "static/hassle"

that makes more sense

I was just imagining sobbing multiracial people and getting concerned

It's hard being multi-racial and beautiful, true

how big do you think her book deal is gonna be? gonna be a bidding war, i'll bet.

huh? you don't think people of mixed racial parentage often get grief in american society? (or maybe you were thinking of the other use of the word "grief"?) i know some folks who would beg to differ.

― he quipped with heat (amateurist), Wednesday, June 17, 2015 9:17 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbqh i think a lot of people don't, or at least don't get more than ppl who are not white but also not seen as multi-racial in some sense. and the idea that being multi-racial has its own set of difficult issues is i think sometimes overstated.

which is different from the whole range of issues surrounding shades of skin tone in a specifically black/white context.

she sought out public life on false pretenses

agree that this seems like the real heart of the problem w Dolezal. If she was just some weird woman who decided to go to extremes to become part of this particular ethnic group I doubt it would be such a big deal.

she was a public figure. on the local level anyway.

I think that's part of the point...? Like, if she was a random woman who kept showing up at the local African Dance class with blond Crystal Gale braids and a daishiki, she'd just be seen as eccentric; it's the going whole-hog and leading the NAACP while also being on the police oversight board and being a professor of Africana while having this entire backstory that seems to be made up of weird half-truths and the veracity of the racial attacks she said were directed towards her... It's the 1-2 combo of "super black" overcorrection with the apparent lying that makes her fascinating/hilarious.

yup

"Like, if she was a random woman who kept showing up at the local African Dance class with blond Crystal Gale braids and a daishiki, she'd just be seen as eccentric"

OMG! We Went To A Party!

Trust me, I'm not being a homophobe when I laugh like hell at politicians such as Larry Craig.

Speaking of Idaho.

+ the suing howard for discriminating against white ppl part

I think Melissa Harris-Perry actually said that suit was about gender discrimination, not racial discrimination? I heard that somewhere, don't remember where (and don't care enough to actually read the lawsuit documents)

one of her claims was this:

The court opinion also noted that Dolezal claimed that the university’s decision to remove some of her artworks from a February 2001 student exhibition was “motivated by a discriminatory purpose to favor African-American students over” her.

i think it was the whole kit and kaboodle... she alleged discriminating on the basis of race, sex, and the fact that she was pregnant/a single mom.

xpost

xpost, yes i think she alleged a number of discriminatory acts, on the basis of race but also other stuff

the "kitchen sink" approach to discrimination litigation

well this proves that whatever else she is, she is definitively American

kit, kaboodles, and kitchen sinks and everything.

yeah the interesting/hilarious thing is she's sort of by her very being relying on some notion of non-arbitrariness in the idea of "race" but then she does things that completely essentialize the idea, and she's living out these two incompatible notions that "i can choose my race" and "race is fundamental to this society" at once.

throw in the whole nine yards and you've got yourself a lawsuit

xpost

xpost, yes i think she alleged a number of discriminatory acts, on the basis of race but also other stuff

the "kitchen sink" approach to discrimination litigation

― he quipped with heat (amateurist), Wednesday, June 17, 2015 12:48 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

tbf this is how litigation works, you throw every conceivable and non-frivolous claim you have and see what sticks

kit, kaboodles, and kitchen sinks and everything.
― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 17 June 2015 17:51 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

she brought lots of 'k's

one of her claims was this:

The court opinion also noted that Dolezal claimed that the university’s decision to remove some of her artworks from a February 2001 student exhibition was “motivated by a discriminatory purpose to favor African-American students over” her.

― 龜, Wednesday, June 17, 2015 12:45 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Playing a really long game of "If you can't beat them, join them".

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/06/17/rachel_dolezal_was_raised_by_strict_fundamentalists_the_revelation_sheds.html

i mean duh, tell us something we don't know

off. i figured there was something like that in her background. i know of some families like that. in one case they adopted several "troubled" teens but would be very quick to boot them out if they made one transgression (including mixing with the opposite sex in evenings).

i mean, oof.

Pity, I liked 'Off'.

there's something really depressing about putative generosity that can be exhausted so easily.

it's that time when we are called upon to have that talk with each other that we never have. apparently.

"Or, at the very least, perhaps we can use Ms. Dolezal’s story, puzzling as it is, as an opportunity to have a candid, lively, long-delayed, public conversation about the knotty meanings of race and racial identity, and how it has confounded our nation’s best aspirations. Perhaps we may yet move beyond the imprisoning boxes we have made."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/opinion/rachel-dolezals-unintended-gift-to-america.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

which is just gonna make me think about Onion headlines forever:

http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/america-needs-to-have-a-superficial-conversation-a-11408

http://www.theonion.com/article/open-dialogue-two-americans-having-about-race-pret-33316

she gave us all a gift!

b/c god knows americans never talk about race

:)

iirc one segment talks about race while another talks about how much it hates talking about race.

^

http://www.ebony.com/news-views/last-rachel-dolezal-thinkpiece-ever-065#axzz3dMDXfWhS

http://news.yahoo.com/hollywood-moguls-arm-candy-du-jour-goodbye-asians-140116995.html

what

Serial yoga-teacher dating even has become a thing. Venice-based TV writer-producer Steven Pearl admits he started dating yoga teachers about two years ago. "The proliferation of yoga classes in L.A. means more teachers, and many are actresses, dancers — all working their minds and, of course, their bodies. Their look is very appealing: fitted clothes, fresh faces, utterly unpretentious, no makeup. They're more wholesome and approachable. Suddenly, my guy friends are all talking about dating yoga teachers. And most of the best studios are in neighborhoods with tons of entertainment people: West Hollywood, Venice, Brentwood."

Who epitomizes beta better than a yoga teacher?

i'm sure i already don't but what shows does steven pearl put out, i want to never see them

tbh I lost it at "old Chinese quantum physics"

worth quoting in full

Relationship expert Dr. Jeremy Nicholson sees the phenomenon in a more basic, evolutionary way: "Men are always interested in attractive, pleasant, feminine women for mates. What shifts are the groups of women allowed and encouraged to be attractive, pleasant and feminine. At certain points in the Hollywood culture, the women who embodied those characteristics to men were primarily Asian. In the current culture, yoga instructors now are a source of healthy, attractive, feminine women."

Alpha men teaming up with yoga teachers chimes with Eastern philosophy, offers Dr. Pat Allen, an L.A. relationship expert: "In old Chinese quantum physics, men had yang bodies: They build, they create. Women receive. Alpha men have a very tough time committing to alpha women. They'll have an alpha mistress but not an alpha wife. Alpha men do better with beta women: sensitive, empathetic and kind. Who epitomizes beta better than a yoga teacher?”

i'm gonna post this picture of Dr. Jeremy Nicholson i don't care how huge it is

http://attractiondoctor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/DrNicholson2.jpg

Man, they'll give a doctorate in relationships to just about anyone these days.

attractiondoctor.com

http://drpatallen.com/

omg these fucking charlatans ps is this woman dead, someone shake her

Uh.....this news is horrible. This redneck Charles Manson is way more of a terrorist threat to US safety than Isis.

nell irwin painter: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/what-is-whiteness.html?smid=tw-share

This is the first piece I've ever read that advocated for a white identity that didn't automatically make my skin crawl

you don't consider white Americans to identify particularly strongly with their ancestral racial/national identities? maybe my experiences are totally skewed (wouldn't be strange obv) by returning yanks but even so ime white Americans p much always identify as, under that umbrella, eg German, Irish, polish, w/e- often as a primary identity and not just as ancestry

In the 1970s, long after they had been accepted as “white,” Italians, Irish, Greeks, Jews and others proclaimed themselves “ethnic” Americans in order to forge a positive identity, at a time of “black is beautiful.” But this ethnic self-discovery did not alter the fact that whiteness continued to be defined, as before, primarily by what it isn’t: blackness. i think this is a bold but inaccurate claim.

kudos

i hate the alpha/beta shit to the point where when i read it i want to break things. it completely devalues the "beta" or "feminine" qualities -- i.e. "sensitive, empathetic, and kind" for dr pat allen, l.a. relationship expert -- in a condescending bullshit way, as if those qualities imply weakness instead of strength.

sorry i am kind of veering back to the earlier discussion. i just think it's worth noting how gross and dehumanizing that way of seeing the world is. it's misogynistic and also a recipe for self-loathing, as i am guessing people who spout that stuff worry a lot about whether or not they are an "alpha". the people who spout this stuff should hate themselves of course, but for different reasons.

you don't consider white Americans to identify particularly strongly with their ancestral racial/national identities? maybe my experiences are totally skewed (wouldn't be strange obv) by returning yanks but even so ime white Americans p much always identify as, under that umbrella, eg German, Irish, polish, w/e- often as a primary identity and not just as ancestry

― designated hitler (darraghmac), Sunday, June 21, 2015 6:56 PM (2 hours ago)

identity is one thing, perception by others is another

During normal everyday waking life, white Americans give little thought to their ancestral racial/national identities. However, put them in Europe and let them talk to Europeans and they are more than willing to identify themselves with some or other European ancestral national identity, unless their ancestry (as often happens) is so hopelessly mixed and effaced as to be unidentifiable.

'Celtic' in that piece seems exclusively to signify Irish Catholic.... which might well be accurate in context.

we could poll the white Americans of ILX to see how much ethnic affinity they feel to their ancestors

you don't consider white Americans to identify particularly strongly with their ancestral racial/national identities? maybe my experiences are totally skewed (wouldn't be strange obv) by returning yanks but even so ime white Americans p much always identify as, under that umbrella, eg German, Irish, polish, w/e- often as a primary identity and not just as ancestry

― designated hitler (darraghmac), Sunday, June 21, 2015 5:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It depends! I know lots of people who do identify that way, but it's not universal and, unless it's a link to a remembered relative of the last few generations, it's largely constructed.

I personally identify as generically white. I think a great-great-grandparent was an immigrant, but the rest of my family has been in the same general area for six or seven generations and I can't even trace the genealogy that easily past the midwest.

corn people

p much

My oldest US ancestors a) moved onto land cheated off Native Americans and/or cleared of Native Americans and b) owned slaves. The slave owners were also major Revolutionary War combatants who turned over a great deal of assets to fund said war. This did not include the slaves, who were left to other relations in their wills. I've thought about this A LOT and despite those ancestors fighting for union in the Civil War and accepting abolition (obvs), I am not interested in doing any sort of dance around the facts any longer.

#humblebrag

^white guy more interested in casting aspersions on me than doing any research on the possibility of equally compromised Yankee ancestors.

IOW, don't be a twat.

haha! sorry, suzy. i couldn't resist...

http://i.imgur.com/JbNOd45.png
me irl

i'm wite

Extremely

way wite

i found this old picture of my cousins. it tells the grisly tale...

https://scontent-lga1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xat1/v/t1.0-9/1557465_10152762807532137_914370834_n.jpg?oh=4671f1c015f322e6e78aa267d37eb0c5&oe=56231DD4

https://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lpk1kkbIhW1ql834lo1_500.jpg

http://gawker.com/man-suspected-of-attacking-asian-women-found-hanging-in-1713313490

this was just a sad story all around

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/us/politics/views-on-race-and-gop-ties-define-group-council-of-conservative-citizens.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Council of Conservative Citizens Promotes White Primacy, and G.O.P. Ties

By MICHAEL WINES and LIZETTE ALVAREZJUNE 22, 2015

Ok, maybe I'm the dumbass here, but "white primacy"?

Just did a Nexis search and got 20 results between 1980 and today.

they're probably SEO-optimizing and trying to avoid getting blocked from people's filters by not using the word "supremacy" in conjunction with "white"

oh nyt

seems like a case of not using the accepted terminology just to appear 'objective'

white primates

djp & goole prob right

but maybe they’re making ideological distinction between ’supremacy’ (belief in racial superiority over others) and ‘primacy’ (belief that one’s own race should be most important to one, in terms of pride, allegiance, whatever)

latter is more consistent with narrative of white men as victims

they changed it anyhow, front page says supremacist now

Any publicity is good publicity.

i.e. it may be a journalistically necessary shading to describe ccc platform (which is not explicitly about supremacy)?

xp oh then it's just nyt locutions

DYAC

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/23/black-churchesforgive-white-people-shame

excerpt from kiese laymon's new book

Oh man

I enjoyed scrolling through the comments in that NYT CCC article, but "Chris" wrote this:

The Left's media machine is forever trying to tie republicans to some disreputable group or another. I'm quite involved in conservative politics, and I've never even heard of this group. They sound like any number of fringe leftist militant marxist groups. There are far-out left and right groups, that most folks would know to avoid just out of simple decency. Sorry... not buying your tale of conspiracy here. More leftist noise.

I have my own first-hand sources - people in my family who were into conservative politics, then left...and they left because they could not attend a conservative event without encountering racists and racist groups. I find this hard to believe. These racist groups are very vocal in the Tea Party.

Then again, "Chris" could be one of a zillion white supremacists who are online and who pretend to be "conservative".
In any case, it is irresponsible to be active in politics and not know who these people are.

have mixed response to that. there’s some strand of validity to what he says (& his defensiveness is psychologically understandable, imo sincere)

tracing ‘affiliations’ (finding ‘associations’ or ‘links’) is important & relevant, but sheer fact of connection or overlap (without further analysis) is informative in limited sense only. tend to be uncomfortable with political over-extrapolation & overgeneralization (critics of israel are antisemites; muslims are terrorist sympathizers; progressives (let alone democrats) are communists; conservatives (let alone republicans) are racists)

yet in this case, confronting those associations may be necessary thing, e.g. jolting some conservatives’ consciences with respect to flag

What are the big fringe leftist militant marxist groups? Is he talking OWS or something?

don't know. maybe some of the groups affiliated with a.n.s.w.e.r.?

I don't think there are "big" "militant marxist" groups, I think that's an oxymoron/convenient lie that no one will call him out on.

Segregationists have not just been Dixiecrats, historically. It IS fair to take conservatives to task for racism. Many conservatives have also opposed desegregation measures. Far-right groups have leant their support to conservatives for decades. Conservatives have also been weak on the Confederate flag. Like I said, these groups solicit among conservatives. It's not some anomalous, rare thing. They have always had a home on the right.

Also anti-communism went hand in hand with opposing the Civil Rights Movement.

Also, the neo-Confederates on Twitter dug this one up - from Walter Williams in 1999:

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams111799.asp

I'm from Illinois, so I know you don't have to sympathize with the Confederacy to be a conservative. All the more reason the apologists have no excuse.

i imagine the same dude ("chris") was probably /furious/ about obama's association with jeremiah wright.

It must be ignorance, an ignorance I once shared. The NAACP crowd sees the Confederate battle flag as a flag of slavery. If that's so, the United States flag is even more so. Slavery thrived under the United States flag from 1776 to 1865, while under the Confederate flag a mere four years.

man, i wish there had been ruthless twitter shaming in 1999. this is just laughable.

huh I wonder what happened during those four yeasr

weirdly that puts me in mind of this awesome article about the connection between the CIA and the Iowa Writers' Project:

http://chronicle.com/article/How-Iowa-Flattened-Literature/144531/

Creative-writing pedagogues in the aftermath of World War II, without exception, read Partisan Review, The Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, and The Sewanee Review. They breathed the intellectual air of New Critics, on the one hand, and New York intellectuals on the other. These camps, formerly enemy camps—Southern reactionaries and Northern socialists at each other’s throats in the 1930s—had by the 50s merged into a liberal consensus that published highly intellectual, but at the time only newly "academic," essays in those four journals, all of which, like Iowa, were subsidized by the Rockefeller Foundation. John Crowe Ransom, who believed in growing cotton and declined to apologize for slavery, found common ground with Lionel Trilling, who believed in Trotsky—but how?

The consensus centered on a critique of instrumental reason as it came down to us from the Enlightenment—a reaction against the scientific rationality that led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bureaucratic efficiency that made the death camps in Poland possible, and the materialism behind the increasingly sinister Soviet regime.

Ransom and his fellow Southerners had developed their ideas in the 1920s as agrarian men of letters resentful of the specter of Northern industrialism. Meanwhile, Trilling and his fellow socialists were reeling from all that had discredited the Popular Front: the purge of the old Bolsheviks in the late 1930s, the Soviet conduct of the Spanish Civil War, the nonaggression pact that the Soviets signed with the Nazis in 1939, and so on. These were chastened radicals who believed in the avant-garde and saw in totalitarianism the consequences of pure ideas unchecked by the irrational prerogatives of culture.

So the prewar left merged with the prewar right. Both circles thought that the way to avoid the likes of Nazism or Stalinism in the United States was to venerate and fortify the particular, the individual, the situated, the embedded, the irreducible. The argument took its purest form in Hannah Arendt’s essays about the concentration camps in Partisan Review.

You probably can see where this is going: One can easily trace the genealogy from the critical writings of Trilling and Ransom at the beginning of the Cold War to creative-writing handbooks and methods then and since.

(sorry, hueg -- but it kind of mirrors the new deal-cold war democratic coalition)

Adding "encouraging introspective, individual-centered expression and making people emphasize their personal narrative" is another evil I am going to blame on U of I now

wow goole that essay is all kinds of amazing

*apologies for spoiling one of the best lines, but I O_O'd and @_@'d over
It [Iowa fiction] was like going to an arboretum with a child. You want exactly that from life, and also more.

ha, that was good but also kinda unintended lol; lots to unpack, take apart, & contest there

his own ‘genealogizing’ is as tendentious & reductive as 50s genealogizing he critiques & makes fun of

while agree some re provincialism of dominant mfa style, it’s very convenient to diagnose literary style not his own or not preferred by him as ideologically suspect

clearly he has his own ideological & personal axe to grind, issues as ‘ambitious & frustrated’ writer/academic

like, no one (not even frank conroy) is preventing you from writing great novel of ideas dude, go for it

btw cia also fostered & promoted abstract expressionism

strange cold-war bedfellows thing sorta goes to my general point upthread re argument via ‘affiliations’ (amateurist otm that rightwing frequently engages in this mode of arg too)

problem not just potential overgeneralization, but flattening & essentializing ideological constellations which (historicized) are to an extent contingent; correlation (though significant) does not = necessity

e.g. to say “anti-communism went hand in hand with opposing the Civil Rights Movement,” or (example from another thread) to equate “gun culture” (or pro-2nd amendment sentiment) with segregationism; those conflations are shorthand for longer political/genealogical args (which may or may not be valid), but those kinds of shorthand equations by themselves, i tend to find problematic

& on a pragmatic political level may be counterproductive (in terms of political persuasion, changing policy, e.g. wrt gun control, etc)

Frances Stonor Saunders' The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters is the book to read about the CIA, New Criticism, Robert Lowell, and how the Cold War made possible the flowering of AMerican arts and letters.

Yeah, I reviewed that book when it came out. It's insane.

That Chronicle author has, ah, some hangups: Raymond Carver, trained by writers steeped in anti-Communist formulations, probably didn’t realize that his short stories were doing ideological combat with a dead Soviet dictator.

(xps)The anti-communism/anti-civil-rights linkage is pretty straightforward though?? Like, we have plenty of documentation of southern whites who could *only* conceive of demonstrations as "communist agitation", because their worldview left no room for an independent/grassroots Black political movement.

xp ^lol, exactly

bernard, true; but you've spelled out the linkage in a concrete, specific, localized sense (i.e. unpacked the shorthand)

it may be 'straightforward' but it's qualified

Don't make things more complex than they are, just to make them more complex. If a connection is true, shorthand is obviously acceptable. Learn why the connection is true, don't take everything for granted, but you don't need to spell every little thing out, that just makes the discussion that much slower. And when we're talking race, where black people are killed due to racism pretty often, the discussion should not be slowed down for no reason at all.

Fundamentally, racism isn't a question of logic. It's a question of power.

That Chronicle author has, ah, some hangups: Raymond Carver, trained by writers steeped in anti-Communist formulations, probably didn’t realize that his short stories were doing ideological combat with a dead Soviet dictator.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, June 24, 2015 8:29 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

guys this is a wry joke at Engle's expense

"hangups" lol is this the 70s or something

you're right – let's have a rap session about it

http://blog.teeter-inversion.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Roger_50-Thumbs-Up.jpg

groovy

goole it’s wry, but author does mean to draw straight line from cia funding to carver’s style

frederik, wasn’t thinking of ilx so much as political argumentation in general. & imo sometimes slowing down & seeing things as more complex isn’t just matter of logic, but pragmatic politics (to have effect on minds & policies & relations of power). but i take your point

And I take your point too. It's def about pragmatism for me as well. And learning the historical connections behind the shorthands is always important, and telling them if people ask (though I guess every everyone who debates racism or anti-semitism or feminism knows the deal with correcting the same historical misconception for the 1000th time, and being ignored).

Fundamentally, racism isn't a question of logic. It's a question of power.

― Frederik B, Wednesday, June 24, 2015 8:58 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

word porn

sry i meant why do i hate that artist thing that people keep posting on my facebook so much? why am i such a jerk?

missed the thread till now and posted this elsewhere:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/06/misty-copeland-athlete/397364/

i would welcome some thoughts on if this is trolling, poor consideration or a reasonable point
― like a giraffe of nah (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, July 1, 2015 3:07 PM

not sure. is the point of the article that her career breakthrough goes hand in hand with her total commercialization?
― Nhex, Wednesday, July 1, 2015 3:41 PM

just that the first black prima ballerina at ABT is presented as an "athlete" not an artist; seems like charged language
― like a giraffe of nah (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, July 1, 2015 4:14 PM

Clickhole totally nailed it with this one. oh wait...

http://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000003773643/a-conversation-with-white-people-on-race.html?action=click>ype=vhs&version=vhs-heading&module=vhs®ion=title-area

i don't see how ballet can be considered a "sport" even if it involves something we might consider "athleticism"

There's no was a competitive element to it, but what if there was?

LOL, again:

There's no competitive element to it, but what if there was?

Bobby Jindal releasing a t-shirt to troll Hari Kondabolu wrt Twitter allegations of being a race traitor probably deserves a mention in this thread:

http://i.imgur.com/FjBLVKN.jpg?1

http://mic.com/articles/121382/bobby-jindal-hari-kondabolu-twitter-so-white

that J logo looks weird. like a hook or something. some sort of wall fastener...

looks like a water slide

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31wGVaDMC%2BL.jpg

haven’t followed or looked into jindal thing (beyond passing online refs), so hesitate to comment

but, of all things to criticize (or mock) jindal for…

dunno, generally speaking, more often than not, find political criticism based on ‘race traitor’ or ‘whitewashing’ theme… nagl

of course, conservative politician is likely to have certain views on certain issues related to race—
insofar as those views are objectionable, criticize those views;
but race-betrayal, race-denial angle seems like form of 'racial-identity policing' which bothers me

related trope bothers me in other areas than politics, cf criticism of mindy kaling’s show (which i haven’t seen) bc, apparently, it didn't thematize her race sufficiently

so maybe some counter-trolling is justified…? maybe i’m wrong

Jindal's official governor's portrait looks like it was literally whitewashed tho

http://images.dailykos.com/images/127268/large/jindalportrait.jpg?1423001935

xp, Yes, i think it's pretty unhelpful. Jindal is clearly a piece of work but there's plenty of room to call him out on his politics (including his political statements on race) without going down that road. For a start, positioning social conservatism and crass racial politics as "white" ignores how common those things are within sections of the Indian-American (and wider NRI) community.

The weird portrait's apparently not the official one.

xp ^def true, and works as joke
but extending that into serious criticism?
ah but then none of this is v serious, it's twittertown

agree, sharivari

xp, Yes, i think it's pretty unhelpful. Jindal is clearly a piece of work but there's plenty of room to call him out on his politics (including his political statements on race) without going down that road. For a start, positioning social conservatism and crass racial politics as "white" ignores how common those things are within sections of the Indian-American (and wider NRI) community.

The weird portrait's apparently not the official one.

― who epitomises beta better than (ShariVari), Wednesday, July 1, 2015 6:09 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah i feel like calling them 'white' and excluding them from the community masks the fact that those sentiments areprevalent in the community - i think it's better to try and wrestle and unearth them within the community rather than to just sweep it under the rug. same goes for conservative east asian americans imo

you think that Jindal portrait's bad, you should see the one they've got in the capitol of Huey Long.

http://i.imgur.com/kkyVPEu.jpg

what's happening to skinny elvis over there?

Not really a portrait, obv.

But it depicts Long's assassination. The other unfortunate fella is Carl Weiss, the assassin, getting mowed down by Long's bodyguards.

That illustration hangs in the capitol hallway where it all happened. You can even stick your finger into one of the bulletholes.

did they assassinate him with a poison that made his hand swell up and cause an aneurysm

wow what a weird painting
weiss as sorta hipster saint sebastian
and (uncropped below) scary eye-bulging statue looking on

http://hdtd.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/01/30/huey1_2.jpg

long doesn't seem in such bad shape there (aside from hand swelling), for a guy who's about to be dead.

Long's bodyguards returned fire, hitting Weiss 62 times

holy fuck

pplains, isn't one of the bullets still in the wall? could have sworn someone said that. the animatronic huey long at the desk that will perform speeches is still the best theme attraction in a government building I've seen.

looks like the famous painting of the zoot suit riots:

http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/columns/assets_c/2014/02/ZootSuitRiots-thumb-630x414-69618.jpg

wau @ Long portrait, that's incredible

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOHaJizzjdg
http://everysinglewordspoken.tumblr.com/

that movie focuses on like 3 people

https://medium.com/@johnmetta/i-racist-538512462265

great read

i w/o thinking really referred to myself as a racist in conversation w/another white person and it really derailed the conversation in an unpleasant way

thanks for the link, DJP -- amazing piece.

i dont agree with the entirety of this but this part shows, i think, how pervasively this framework infests everything:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/looking-white-in-the-face/

Postmodern theory tries to interrupt that expression at every stop, to put every word in scare quotes, to put our own presuppositions into question, to make us worry about the murderousness of “we,” and so to get in the habit of asking, “we, who?” I think that what modern philosophers call “pure” reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction.

White is not “neutral.” “Pure” reason is lily white, as if white is not a color or is closest to the purity of the sun, and everything else is “colored.” Purification is a name for terror and deportation, and “white” is a thick, dense, potent cultural signifier that is closely linked to rationalism and colonialism. What is not white is not rational. So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued — it affects what we mean by “reason” — and “we” white philosophers cannot ignore it.

"Historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained or dead black body to gaze upon" - claudia explains it all

Article upthread talks about how white people don't think about where they *choose* to live as a part of their racial privilege. Something that causes a lot if unspoken tension on Facebook, Twitter and other online social groups is the difference between people from overwhelmingly white towns and those with a more diverse population. I came from an integrating suburb, I am grateful that my parents didn't want their children to grow up in a segregated environment. They wouldn't associate with people who would abandon diverse areas, let alone people who would actively oppose integration. Those people have some serious thinking to do about how segregation has benefited them, spend less time schmoozing and promoting themselves and be more circumspect in their online behavior. The actions of those pro-segregation people were very hurtful to the rest of us and it's not my job to educate or entertain people who come from those backgrounds. I don't socialize with such people in my offline life, why would I do that online?

Rachel Dolezal's new line is "I wouldn’t say I’m African-American, but I would say I’m black"

ok

Oh, I figured she'd wised up and was trying to lay low until people forgot about her. Huh.

nope she's in Vanity Fair

vanity for sure. fair? well that's complicated