Rolling 2015 Thread on Race

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