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.

oh my fucking god

yeah dude it's a fucking oil fire out there. some top shelf clowning happening though.

as an aside, i'm a little surprised attitudes toward brady and rodgers are so similar and even. i had an inkling that brady had turned into a lil bit of a tcot hero but i guess not.

woooooooow

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

I hated myself so much for laughing at that

lol dude writes for a website called horseracingnation.com but I misread it as horseracigenation.com and I was like what in the fuck

http://www.horseracingnation.com/blogs/zatt/American_Pharoah_Denied_Sportsman_of_the_Year_123#

Sports Illustrated, your agenda is showing.

#actuallyitsaboutethicsinhorsejournalism

#notallhorses

how shocking that a poll that ended the day before a publication's street date had no impact on the publication's choice for a title

#horsesarepeopletoo

If the readers' poll were the basis for choosing the cover, they'd caption the poll accordingly. I feel the same way about people annoyingly saying Sanders should have been Time's POY, fwiw, except that I'm voting for Sanders, and also he is not a horse running for president.

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

I would want to vote for that, though. #BoJackforPrez

If the readers' poll were the basis for choosing the cover, they'd caption the poll accordingly. I feel the same way about people annoyingly saying Sanders should have been Time's POY, fwiw, except that I'm voting for Sanders, and also he is not a horse running for president.

have we proven this

he's a lizard obv

one of the best things louis has ever done
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK8Y2nO_8TM

gg, Citidel dummies: http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20151210/PC16/151219964

I mean, yes I believe they were "dressed as ghosts" but I also believe they knew what their ghost costumes looked like and 5 seconds of looking in a mirror and self-reflection should have led them to the conclusion that they were making a terrible decision.

RIP American history classes, you were useful 25 years ago

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/16/where-did-all-the-money-shaun-king-raised-for-black-lives-go.html

shaun king feeling the heat again

Yeah, that was a tough thing to scroll through in my timeline last weekend. Does anyone know more about what is up and down there, why Justice Together failed and all that?

Also, trying to find information on these kind of things on twitter makes it so much easier to understand the need for block-buttons and anti-harassment laws. Whoo boy, is there a lot of haters out there.

https://medium.com/@anildash/i-m-the-most-magnanimous-motherfucker-you-know-940190413df0#.nkz9fyigb

oh man, this essay is the #1 reason my job doesn't require frequent travel

i am way too fragile for this nonsense, i would definitely lose my shit around the third time somebody tried to "helpfully" point out my suspicious electronics

not sure if I posted it elsewhere, but I was coincidentally on a flight with an ex-coworker (he was a contractor doing software development) and his family. they were seated near the front, and for some reason the flight attendants were hassling them for an extended period of time, to the extent where they were told they might have to disembark and take a later flight in the interest of security. the group was him, his wife, her parents, and their baby daughter

finally they were allowed to sit and the flight took off. i talked to him when we landed, and it turns out someone "smelled something odd" in that area of the plane. after ten or fifteen minutes of bothering his family, the flight crew finally figured out it was the chemicals in the front toilet, which was two rows in front of their seats.

he and his family are from India

if you smell something say something racist

yeah I mean this is part and parcel of living in the US; it is not necessarily constant but it IS omnipresent

the vast majority of the people who pooh-pooh the concept of "safe spaces" have never lived under explicit 24/7 scrutiny and, when they do become aware of it in their lives, they are invariably the first to whine about governmental overreach eroding their privacy

My only TSA experience was oddly apologetic. Yes, they pulled me out of a line and gave me a 45 minute interrogation but they strenuously clarified that they respected my values and culture (I have none of one and very little of the other) while doing so, though I'm sure that's not the case with everyone. To have it done by every idiot on the plane must be horrific. I haven't been back to the U.S. since 08 or 09 and would imagine it's much worse now than it was then.

I go to a lot of strange places and, Israel aside, that level of scrutiny is never there - even in cities that have been subject to numerous terror attacks or are full of diehard racists.

a meaningful part of what makes the "it's okay to be A LITTLE racist at the airport" trend so uterly pernicious is that aw gawrsh shucks attitude that hey, it's not like I'M doing this racist thing, it's the system that forces me to do this, so sorry, gonna have to feel your cock with the back of my hand now, it's crazy i know but what're you gonna do

tbf he did write some pretty bad java code but if that's a terrorist activity then i'm guilty, too

xp: I can honestly say that I've never had another passenger feel my cock with the back of his hand in the security line and I am very sorry if that happened to you, forks

or maybe you missed the point of Dash's article

i got the point of the article. i was responding to sharivari's post directly above mine.

the vast majority of the people who pooh-pooh the concept of "safe spaces" have never lived under explicit 24/7 scrutiny and, when they do become aware of it in their lives, they are invariably the first to whine about governmental overreach eroding their privacy

a) booming post and b) which reminds me of Charles Pierce's line about Libertarians getting reliably incensed about the TSA because as overwhelmingly straight white dudes that's basically the only thing similar to oppression they actually experience.

I left off the the coda to that, which is that when a person of color tells them that what they're experiencing is a fraction of what they could be experiencing if they weren't white, it's about a 50% chance that the person of color will be dismissed as a whiner who likes to play the race card and why won't anyone take their white fragility seriously

The unwillingness of many white people to acknowledge white privilege never fails to astound me. Like, the simple act of acknowledging it isn't going to do you any actual harm, you know.

the word "privilege" connotes an unearned success. so you basically want people to admit they got something they didn't earn themselves. keep in mind this is America.

I always figure that's a major component of it, yeah. People have to first acknowledge that concepts like fairness and justice and words like 'earn' and 'deserve' are all pretty much bullshit before they're able to acknowledge their own position in the web of bullshit.

ppl need to stop thinking things can be earned

People will have to get to the point where they're like 'what even is a bootstrap and why did I ever think I could pull anything up by it' before any more meaningful change can occur.

people are vacuous selfish fools who will believe any fancy that will justify what happens to others. hooray?

the vast majority of the people who pooh-pooh the concept of "safe spaces" have never lived under explicit 24/7 scrutiny and, when they do become aware of it in their lives, they are invariably the first to whine about governmental overreach eroding their privacy

pretty much yeah

have heard the "well they're the ones trying to hijack the planes, not us" argument. to that I say, "okay, how would you feel if we had security checkpoints at schools that only white boys had to go through". I guess if you don't have a problem with that...

not sure how that even applies to the overzealous xenophobic airline passenger shit which isn't based on a no-flight list or even accurate ethnic identification, just a vague "don't trust ppl who don't look like me" impulse

as far as why Indian-looking folks ought to be "randomly" screened more often. which often gets justified as "I'm not being racist, I'm being realistic"

Confrontation over dreadlocks on college campus goes viral

http://www.wcvb.com/news/confrontation-over-dreadlocks-on-college-campus-goes-viral/38755010

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/25/rachel-dolezal-not-going-stoop-apologise-grovel

Today Dolezal is jobless, and feeding her family with food stamps. A friend helped her pay this month’s rent; next month she expects to be homeless. She has applied for more than 100 jobs, but no one will hire her, not even to stack supermarket shelves. She applied for a position at the university where she used to teach, and says she was interviewed by former colleagues who pretended to have no recollection of having met her. The only work she has been offered is reality TV, and porn. She has changed her name on all her legal documents, but is still recognised wherever she goes. People point at her and laugh.

lol ok cmon admit you thought it too

Was just coming here to post this.

Obviously, regardless of what I think of her, I don't wish homelessness/joblessness on her (assuming that she's being honest about these things). But it's still infuriating that she won't own up to any wrongdoing. Even friends of mine have been more apologetic, saying "was what she done that bad", and really, conflating identifying closely with another race with "appropriating a race through a creepy form of playacting for reasons of pure self-interest and career advancement" is nagl.

http://thegrapevine.theroot.com/rachel-dolezal-has-changed-her-name-1792867445

If only she had picked a name like “Susie Reynolds,” she probably could have found a job by now.

Rolling 2017 Thread on Race

rachel dolezal is so 2015 though

footnotes