Rolling 2015 Thread on 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/